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Monday 22 June 2009

Caveat emptor - 2


Out of the blue this morning - a reply from computerwebstore.co.uk, which reads as follows:


Hello we have temporarily ran out of stock of this item they are due in shortly. Is it ok to ship

when they arrive?


Er - no. I think not. DVD recorders might have been replaced by something else by the time it arrives. I'm still waiting for that crystal set from Woolies.


Money back, please.


Incidentally, I see that analogue radio is to cease by 2012. That is interesting. We do have a DAB, and we get a wonderful signal in the bathroom if one of us stands bare-footed in a half-full washbasin and holds the set out of the window. Getting the rest of the hi-hi in there is going to make it a bit crowded, though.



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And on the lug'oles front - a complete brick wall at the "health" centre (though I suspect that a certain stroke consultant might have been a little, shall we say, peeved at having a patient referred to him who obviously just needed his ears syringed.)


So, having lost a month, I have started all over again, this time at the walk-in centre. Lug'oles get syringed at 1820 hours next Sunday (male triage nurse rather less than helpful. "Have you plepare with orive oir?" "Yes, but I can't use it - it sets like lock, sorry, rock, and makes me go stone deaf." "Make appointment. Plepare rug'ores with orive oir. Send in next Engrish idiot.")


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I feel like one of those women who become invisible the moment they go to the bar to order a drink ("what do you mean, pillock, one of? We all do.") And I realise that it's all to do with my age. Whatever Descartes might have said, he was a twit. I think, too, but I'm 65, so I'm invisible. I have ceased to exist. I am not. Je ne suis pas. The postperson brings me no letters. Nobody answers my e-mails, especially not online retailers. And when women get to be sixty, there's a double whammy, because they automatically become members of the Past-It Club, where they're doubly invisible, by virtue of their sex, and now their age.


The NHS, certainly round here, doesn't like old people. They're a drain on resources, they mumble, and sometimes they smell. The NHS exists for young, healthy people, who don't smoke, don't drink, and go everywhere on a bicycle. These young healthy people free up vast sums of money to fund advertising campaigns, inflated salaries for petty tyrants and bullies and bureaucrats, and large (and very unhealthy) motor-cars for NHS people, who don't of course have to queue up for two weeks for the privilege of parking at £20 a minute while they're in the middle of a heart attack, like old people.


Do you remember when those of us who travelled on trains used to be called "passengers", and then suddenly we became "customers"? The accountants had taken over. And inevitably they took over the NHS, too, and fired all the matrons and brought in Managers.


There's an old joke I was reminded of this week by a clergyman (and it was old when he first heard it. But thank you all the same, John).


A man is in hospital, doomed unless he can have a heart transplant. Then in rushes a jubilant surgeon, who says "George, you're in luck! Two have just come in - one from an Olympic gold-medal cyclist and the other from an accountant. Which would you like?"


"I'll have the accountant's", says George, without a moment's hesitation.


The surgeon is amazed. "You'd choose the accountant's over the gold-medal cyclist's? How come?"


"Easy", says George. "It won't have been used much."






1 comment:

  1. DAB in our house stands for Dead and Buried.

    ReplyDelete

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