So What's This All About?
I have reached a time in my personal development when I am now rather less tolerant than I used to be of some of the stupid and annoying features of our society, and the stupid and annoying people in it.
Many situations and habits of the general public now irritate me to the point of distraction, and I have decided that it might be somewhat therapeutic (to me, anyhow) to vent my spleen and write down some of my opinions on these things, as and when they get to the point of warranting such a measure.
Caution Horses
I see this written on the back of lorries on occasions, and it has caused me to ponder what just kind of horse they might have in there. I know from personal experience that horses are naturally cautious and don't like to pass anything that worries them, such as a slightly swinging gate or a bit of black plastic in the hedge that's scrunched up in such a way that it appears to have eyes.
It would seem, however, that Caution Horses must be some specially-bred animal, chosen for their excessively cautious nature, presumably to assist humans in assessing risk or to act as an early-warning system for those of us less adept at spotting danger.
Of course, it is possible that they are simply telling us that a horse, any ordinary horse, may be in transit. In that case, why the warning? Is the darned thing likely to throw shoes at passing motorists, or sling dung at your windscreen?
I'm afraid I find such things a little idiotic, on a par with, "warning: child on board". Why on Earth do we need to be warned about that? Maybe the driver is likely to be driving erratically as he tries to find a video on his phone to help calm a screeching brat, or perhaps the kid is likely to throw used nappies at the car behind.
I don't have the answers, just the irritation.
LED Headlights
This rant could be subdivided into several others, but I'll stick all of the headlamp issues into one.
Headlights weren't always a problem; occasionally you'd encounter a lad who'd had a prang which had readjusted one headlamp to illuminate the treetops or the opposite lane, but at least there was a reason, and he'd eventually get it fixed.
These days it seems a lot of new cars leave the factory with the headlights already out of alignment, and for some unknown reason they are exempt from being tested for 3 years, so that's the way they stay, along with defective tyres and all the other issues that could occur in that 3 year period.
The biggest threat to nightime safety isn't just misaligned headlights, it's those idiotically bright blue-white LED piles of shyte shipped with the more modern vehicles. I thought it was fairly well known that blue light refracts at a sharper angle than lower frequencies and suffers more from backscatter, which is why older style fog lights used to be yellow: remove the blue, and you get less diffraction and backscatter, and the light is less dazzling to our eyes. This seems to have been forgotten in our modern, dumbed-down age. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Dawning of the age of homo idioticus more like.
Perhaps my eye lenses aren't as clear as an 8 year-old's, but they are medically OK; however, these brilliant blue-white lights leave me dazzled when driving at night, even if the driver does eventually remember to dip them. They don't have to be this way; it's a very simple matter to manufacture LEDs for cars in 'warm white' rather than 'arc welder blue', and design the optics properly for LED light sources.
And the number of idiots who insist on using their front fog lamps in good visibility is astounding: thanks for that, I now have to deal with 4 lights coming at me instead of 2, representing a level of inconsideration previously unknown to me, besides apparently being illegal. Then we have those BMW drivers who think it's cool to have headlights that wink blue when off-axis; I thought it was illegal to show a flashing blue light to the front of a vehicle, but they seem to be exempt.
Add to this the cyclists who believe it's a good idea to have a military searchlight fastened to their helmets, finely adjusted to shine right into your eyes. Don't these assholes realise the dangers inherent in having a blind driver approaching them?
I need to catch my breath a moment...
Finally, what administrative asshole thought it was a good idea to allow vans and SUVs to have their headlights mounted higher than normal? This means that when I'm being followed at night by a white van idiot or an SUV (both of which tend to want to sit in my boot) I can't see much because of the dazzling light from the rear, illuminating the interior of my car. All I can do is slow right down for safety reasons which seems to irritate them, which is an awful shame.
Naan Bread
Picture if you will, a dead hedgehog on a busy road. It's been there for two weeks and has been run over by nearly every lorry in the county. It's flat, around 6 inches across, has no innards left, no prickles or fur and is just a leathery, well-tanned skin which is creamy in colour with brown patches. Naan bread. I'm sure that's where it comes from.
What's the point of the stuff? It gets presented to me with curries but I have no idea what I'm expected to do with it; I assume it's food, but can't be sure. I dutifully attempt to chew the leathery substance while trying not to think of well-flattened roadkill.
Ultimately, the best I can do is to occasionally dip the strange material in the curry to disguise the non-existent taste in an effort to get it eaten, as I can't be seen to waste food, no matter in what form it presents itself.
Celebrities, Or Not As The Case May Be
This rant was congealed many years ago by hearing that a certain program was to be screened here in the UK yet again: "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!"
My wife, the bearer of this horror, then proceeded to assault my sensibilities by giving me a run down of the so-called 'celebrities' who were supposed to be appearing in that particular series, and sad to relate that yet again, I hadn't heard of anyone on that list.
What qualifications does someone need to become a celebrity? All too often these days we hear of someone being described as a celebrity when all they've done is appear on some shitty reality show for a few minutes or failed their driving test a dozen times.
Perhaps the problem isn't so much with the people who are unfortunate enough to be saddled with the 'celebrity' millstone, but rather those pathetic journalists and TV producers who are charged with trying to keep the attention of the reading and viewing public by forever inventing fresh streams of celebrities, or resurrecting long-forgotten personalities to fill the inevitable gaps.
Personally, I think the expression 'celebrity' should be ripped from the English language and buried at midnight in an unmarked grave, and only exhumed for people like Sir David Attenborough, who is the only person I can think of right now who is actually celebrated and worthy of the title, but I have a feeling that being the kind of person he is, he'd disagree.
Dog Poo Bags In Stupid Places
I don't have a dog, but I do walk dogs as a business. One forseen and acceptable by-product of walking dogs is that at some point they are going to poo in a location that requires you to pick it up. I expect it, go equipped for it and dispose of the bags of poo either in a poo bin or at home.
What the heck is going through the minds of people who insist on hanging bags of dog poo from a towing hitch or the rear wiper? I know: they are hoping it will fall off and they won't have to deal with it. Of course these people would deny that is the reason, citing the smell and the fact that they don't want that smell in the car, but anyone with above simian intellect knows different.
I'm afraid that if you have a dog, you need to get used to some smells; however, if your delicate little townie nostrils really can't tolerate the slight odour of some bagged poo, all you have to do is put the poo bags in an old bread bag and tie it, no more smell. It's so simple, it hurts.
Please don't hang bags of poo on the back of your car or SUV; having an SUV is bad enough, but hanging poo bags on your rear wiper makes you look like a prize-winning dick, plus it irritates the heck out of people like me.
Then there are those people who bag up the poo, but then leave the bag on the ground, on a fence or hanging in a bush. What kind of disrespectful sub-human individual does that? Far better to leave the poo and just kick it to the side of the path; at least then it'll rot away and we won't have even more plastic dumped in the countryside.
Brainless TV Programs
You must have seen them: those utterly stupid reality programs or those painfully unfunny comedies. Now, perhaps I am the only one who feels this way, and when sharing my views with others it certainly seems that way most of the time, but I really don't see how anyone could consider this to be entertainment.
Good examples from the first of those two categories have to be Big Brother and Love Island. Flippin' heck, talk about a cop-out for the producers! All they had to do was find a handful of jumped up dicks willing to make complete pillocks of themselves, bung them in an arena designed to ensure close contact and there you have it: a nice cheap TV show to entertain the sheep. Unfortunately, to me, all it demonstrates is just how far the human race has failed to evolve and if by any chance these programs have been intercepted by an alien intelligence, it may explain their absence.
Finally, I feel I must have a prod at 'Gogglebox'. What the heck is that all about? A fake cross-section of non-society on television, being filmed watching... television. Evidently heavily scripted and as false as heck, I had to work extremely hard not to slit my wrists. Not much more to say about this one, other than thank gawd for the remote control. I don't watch a lot of telly these days; I'm not normally allowed to, unless the wife's gone out.
The Timing Of The TV Watershed
A bit more serious, this one:
This rant concerns what we in the UK call the 'watershed'. This is a bloody silly name for 9:00pm, and has to do with the content of the programs shown on TV. It would seem that some board of idiots with an undeserved official capacity has determined that every child in every house everywhere within the UK will be in bed before 9:00pm and be unable to view a TV after that time.
It would therefore be quite OK to allow the screening of unnecessarily detailed scenes of violence, human copulation and the usual tirade of foul-mouthed dialogue typical of an inept script writer. Reflecting reality? There's enough of that in the real world, thankyou.
Although I'm sure that most responsible parents try to get their kids off to bed at a reasonable time, it is inevitable that there will be times, especially over the weekend or during the Summer, when that innocent seven year old daughter of yours will still be up and watching TV after this 9:00 watershed. I feel that swearing, bad violence and explicit sexual scenes are unnecessary in a well written program or film anyhow, but I certainly wouldn't want any of my kids seeing this kind of rubbish, would you?
One solution would be to make entertaining programs which didn't rely on unnecessary content, but I suppose the kind of real talent responsible for 'Dad's Army' and 'Porridge' has long been extinct.
Another answer would be to move the time of the watershed to 11:00pm, as this would mean the majority of youngsters would be tucked up and out of harmful TV's way. As for those that aren't, they probably experience adequate doses of 'reality' directly from the adults they live with anyway.
Shitty Music In Restaurants
Please explain to an idiot like me why people insist on playing crappy music through nasty sounding little speakers in restaurants. I find it invasive and an annoyance, and simply won't go back if that's what the management insist on doing, and in extreme cases have left without ordering anything; that's a customer lost for good. As is often said, if you have a good experience you may tell another person about it, but if the experience was bad, you'll tell ten.
People usually (as far as I'm aware) go to resaurants to eat and have a bit of a social chat with friends or family, but having to listen to Blur or the Lighthouse Family through a sound system similar in quality to a mobile phone is not conducive to a pleasant experience.
Wetherspoons pubs make a point of claiming that their establishments are 'music free'. I would assume that they're big enough and have been around long enough to know a thing or two, and understand how much piped music is disliked.
There was even a phone-in on the Jeremy Vine show about this exact topic, and the overwhelming opinion was that piped music was disliked; so why do these restaurants still do it? They have to pay for the music, pay for the equipment to reproduce it, and pay for a licence to play that music in public.
Cats And Their Excrement
Here's something that really gets my goat. I have no objection to people keeping pets as long as they are well cared for and indeed I have pets of my own, including a scabby cat. He knows he's a pain in the ass because I tell him so, especially when he sticks his anchors into my leg and begins to climb it in search of a morsel of cheese, which I feel obliged to supply, such is life with a cat.
Anyway, I digress: What I object to are pets that adversely affect other people. Some may include dogs in this category, but it's irresponsible owners who let agressive dogs run around out of control or refuse to clear up the inevitable deposits who are to blame in that instance.
No, it's cats I have a bit of an issue with. Irresponsible urbanites with little or nothing in the way of a garden buy, steal or otherwise procure these tapeworm ridden flea busses, and then in the majority of cases let them roam the neighbourhood to freely leave disease and parasite ridden excrement anywhere they care to; anywhere, that is, except their owners' property.
Modern cats seem to be particularly bad; at least when I was a lad the cats had the good manners to bury the stuff rather than leaving it on full display as many do now. My cat is a good boy and poos in his own garden and buries it, and anyway, I live in the countryside surrounded by fields, not in a city centre.
Starting Christmas Too Early
Oh dear. They do it every year, don't they?
"Do what?!" I hear you cry.
I'll tell you what, starting to advertise Christmas on the telly way before time, that's what.
I wouldn't mind if the adverts were simply for items suitable for Christmas presents and so-on, but do they really need to adorn the screen with tinsel and multiple Father Christmasses in sodding October?
The big problem for me is that by the time Christmas eve arrives I'm sick to death of the whole thing, and the day itself is a bit of an anticlimax compared to the massive publicity during the run up. Of course, it is all commercially driven which is another thing that annoys me tremendously because as far as I'm concerned, Christmas should be all about assembling the family and celebrating this most Christian of events together, with loads of nuts, drink, bellyache, snoring and everything else that makes Christmas day the occasion it is.
Perhaps there should be a firm restraint put on anything remotely Christmassy until at least December, and ideally it should only be allowed during the last week before the 25th, because at least that way, we can make the time a little special without all this commercial dilution we currently have to endure.
Unnecessary Salt In Food
This concerns a major health issue:
The ridiculous amounts of salt added to our food. Most of us are now aware that the human body doesn't need additional salt in our diet as we are able to obtain all we need through normal foods; indeed too much can have negative effects on our health, the best known problem being elevated blood pressure and all the nasties that go with the untreated condition.
Our bodies are able to recycle salt, and in recent years the armed forces have realised that they no longer need to distribute salt tablets to combat the previously assumed salt loss due to sweating, because quite simply it doesn't occur: when all excess salt has been lost, the sweat no longer contains any. Get yourself all sweaty and have a taste if you need proof.
Food manufacturers add salt to various foods as a taste enhancer, but the amounts added are really beyond a joke and in many cases the final product may well be even saltier than sea water. My real concerns are with bread, tinned beans and tinned spaghetti, because there is really no need to add the amounts they do. A tin of cheap beans may well contain over two grams of salt per tin; I would challenge anyone to swallow that amount of salt whilst keeping a straight face. Along with many other people I have a medical condition which dictates that I should keep my salt intake to a reasonable level and finding suitable foodstuffs can be very frustrating.
But here's the real niggle: It is possible, if you look hard enough, to buy baked beans with 'reduced salt', but guess what? They cost more! How the heck can anyone justify charging more for a product which actually involves fewer stages or ingredients in the production process? Isn't it high time the manufacturers were forced to stop this practice and offer food which might actually be considered safe?
SUVs: Stupidly Unnecessary Vehicles
Many of you might have experienced this: You are driving down a country lane when suddenly you are faced with an enormous four-wheel drive vehicle: an SUV. Now, common courtesy dictates who should reverse, but if it falls to the other driver to do so, all to often it is beyond their ability and if they do attempt it, they often end up in the ditch, glaring at you as if it's your fault.
Another scenario is where there is ample room to pass, and yet the idiot in his or her oversized car seems afraid to get close to the hedge for fear of scratching their pride and joy; the worst offenders in both cases seem to old farts in their Range Rovers.
Now come on!
If you are going to live in a rural area, at least learn to drive these bloody vehicles, or better still, buy an appropriately-sized car.
Then of course we have the environmental issue: fuel is getting ever more expensive as geological and political pressures affect supply, and yet these oversized vehicles seem to be on the increase and are consuming way over their fair share of a diminishing resource. The higher excise duty and hideous cost of their tyres and insurance does little to balance the scales.
I have a solution which will sort the good drivers from those who suffer from small dick syndrome: create some new vehicle classes and introduce an additional, more advanced driving test for anyone who wants to drive a vehicle either with a high power to weight ratio, or that occupies a cubic volume over a predetermined size.
It has long been accepted that lorry drivers have to prove their driving ability this way as have motorcyclists, and I strongly feel that these stupidly outsized vehicles should be subject to similar restrictions. That way, maybe one day I'll meet someone driving an SUV who can actually handle the machine and be able to reverse into that entrance eight feet behind them without wrecking the gate.
Squealing Women On TV Soaps
I used to live in what would best be described as a lively household as I had five children, and most of them would be at their most vocal from around the time I came home from work up until the younger ones had been safely deposited in bed. We regularly experienced the inevitable squabbles and shouting matches which would frequently test my patience to its limits. Sometimes I would lose ground and shout back.
As if plotting to add to my auditory torture, there seemed to be a constant stream of soaps on telly during this time, which including such gems of creative talent as 'Coronation Street', 'Emmerdale' and 'East Enders'. OK, I'm trying to be facetious here.
I understand these programs are supposed to represent real life, but is it really necessary to repeatedly show these stupid characters yelling and screaming at each other and dramatically smashing household objects in overblown demonstrations of fake rage? It must be bad for young kids to see adults behaving in such a way, and seeing it so regularly on TV can only result in these young people growing up believing that this kind of behaviour is not only normal, but socially acceptable.
For goodness' sake, can't we have drama without all the drama?
Phone Snatching: The Root Of The Problem
People having their mobile phones snatched seems to be an increasing problem, and many highly-paid heads have been put together in an attempt to find a solution, but evidently these heads don't live in the real world, and perhaps aren't as smart as their salaries might suggest.
I should say that without doubt the people doing the snatching represent the scum of humanity and when caught, should, for the duration of their sentences, be given 20 lashes of the birch once daily, and twice on Sundays. But in the final analisys, they are only opportunists taking advantage of a situation, a bit like a herring gull nicking an inadequately guarded pasty, and as such, perhaps shouldn't get all the blame.
As I see it (and I see it very clearly and regularly) the problem is caused by silly idiots who insist on walking down a busy high street holding their phone out in front of them, or hanging out of a back pocket; this used to be predominantly teenage girls, but it seems both sexes and all ages now do this; mobile phone addiction has become a social disease of pandemic proportions.
Given that some of these smartphones now cost an outlandish sum of money (despite having around a fiver's worth of components in them), why are people so careless with them? If I was to walk through a busy shopping centre holding a wad of £100 notes in an outstretched hand, I wouldn't be very surprised if someone eventually whipped it.
What the heck can be so important that these people feel compelled to hold their phones out in front of them? I've made a point of looking over peoples' shoulders to see what was so engaging, more often than not seeing a blank screen which confused me even more than their level of stupidity.
I did even consider embarking on a one-man crusade of snatching phones, only to give them straight back just to make the point, but I'm not sure the point would be taken and given the way our silly laws work, I decided against it.
Crap Music, Falling Singles Sales & Autotune
There has always been a fair bit of rubbish offered up in the name of pop music and this holds true no matter which decade you look at, but in recent years the sheer quantity of crap seems to have broken all bounds. The worst offenders are those who find a classic pop track, cut out a small interesting sounding portion and then loop it ad nauseam to create some pseudo-dance track or rap crap, and those wailing female "R&B" singers howling along to an electronically generated backing track.
I think part of the problem is the ease with which a nobody with just a mediocum of musical knowledge (and no technical know-how) can now make 'music' in their bedroom using equipment which simply wasn't available to the general public twenty years ago.
This brings us on to the issue of falling pop singles sales. Look at it this way: if you ran a factory and decided to manufacture a poor quality item, would you be surprised if it failed to sell well? Chances are you wouldn't. The same goes for falling music sales. If these talentless twits were removed from the scene and the A&R guys did their job and introduced real talent to the arena, the quality of the product would go up, followed by that inevitable rise in sales.
It's no good them harping on about loosing sales to illegal downloads and filesharing as this is a very poor excuse, and can be easily disproved by looking at some of the recent success stories which have managed to sell huge numbers of copies despite the freeloaders of cyberspace. Ever since the advent of the audio cassette, people have illegally copied songs for themselves or others, but because the musical standard used to be higher it didn't cause a noticeable problem. Offer a good product, and it'll sell. It's so simple it hurts.
A bit of software known as Autotune has a lot to answer for, as now, you only need to find someone who looks good, as the singing inability can be corrected using software. Michael Bublé allows the use of Autotune on his recordings which is odd, as he's an accomplished singer and doesn't need it, and the processing makes his voice sound slightly robotic to me; why does he do it?
I think the person responsible for assaulting the human race with Autotune should be castrated with a spoon, and an eagle instructed to lay open his wound afresh at each sunrise for the rest of his natural life.
Pile-Up At The Supermarket Checkout
If you're a bloke, you've probably experienced this one before:
It has become necessary, for whatever reason, for you to go and do the shopping on your own which you have dutifully done, and now find yourself at the checkout. You've managed to load everything onto the belt before the checkout assistant has finished going through the stack of declined cards offered by the previous customer and feel quite pleased with yourself for managing to keep ahead of things up to this point, as well you should; this is, after all, not an area males excel in.
Right, now it's your turn, but despite your solitary status, the checkout operative seems intent on whacking your stuff through as fast as is humanly possible, with blatant disregard for the condition of your eggs or that bottle of whiskey. There you are, frantically trying to open those unopenable carrier bags in a futile attempt to keep abreast of the barrage of groceries but you are ultimately fighting a losing battle, and the best you can do is try to dodge the tins of beans as they get hurled at you with the poundage of a 76mm cannon.
So why do they do it? I would fully expect that the performance of checkout staff is monitored in some manner, so that slow performers can be sent to Hell or given further training, but it seems no-one realises that no matter how fast they push the stuff through, you still have to pack it and get it off the counter before they can turn to the next customer, and given the way some of these idiots pile it up, it actually takes longer to accomplish as you try to sort through for appropriate items for a particular bag, quite apart from being plain bloody rude.
Surely, if the staff kept an eye on your progress and scanned items at an appropriate speed, keeping just a few items ahead of you, things would go a lot smoother, faster and with less stress.
Computer Animation Facial Expression Overload
I was sitting with some of my younger children watching a computer animated cartoon when I found myself becoming extremely annoyed with the grossly exaggerated facial expressions many of the characters were displaying.
The eyes and mouths would change shape to an extraordinary degree, and eyebrows would sweep over vast expanses of head as they spoke. If I let my attention become deflected even for a moment, I found myself subconsciously mirroring these silly expressions, which I found a little embarrassing even if no-one else noticed, which I hoped was the case.
It worries me somewhat just what effect all this is going to have on our kids: are they, after years of immersal in this falsely overly-expressive world going to fail to notice real but subtle expressions on real peoples' faces? The two worst offenders from our own collection of animations had to be 'Finding Nemo' and 'A Shark's Tale'. The flexibility of the characters' faces in those two would put a champion gurner to shame.
Why can't the animators, who are quite obviously highly talented people, simply tone down the facial expressions a little to something closer to reality? Do they honestly believe they have to do this to capture the attention of the under-fives? If so, perhaps their time would be better spent making the content a little more engaging. I, for one, would then find these productions a little less irritating to watch.
Cyclists!
Let's get some facts in the bag before I begin:
I used to ride a push bike, and I've spent several years on motorcycles, small and large, driven lorries and tractors with trailers.
I now drive a car.
I have probably learnt little on my journey through life, but one thing I have learnt is that you are extremely vulnerable on a bike, and in the interests of keeping your spleen safely where it was designed to be, you need to be on a constant lookout for other traffic.
It worries me greatly when I see cyclists riding dangerously or inconsiderately on the roads, and I do wonder quite which plane of reality they reside upon. For example, I was recently in a line of traffic slowly passing a lycra-clad cyclist, when for some unfathomable reason he suddenly, and without the merest glance towards me, stuck his right arm out and headed for my front nearside wing.
Quick reactions on my part meant he stayed on his bike, but had that been another driver or even a lorry, the outcome could have been far worse. The stupid dickhead didn't once look over his shoulder, and seemed totally unaware of how close he came to going under a wheel as he blindly headed to the centre of the road.
Unfortunately, this low level of road sense is very common and it is seldom I see a cyclist who is actually looking around to see where the other traffic is and what it is doing. It seems they expect the other traffic to look out for them, which of course we do, but they have to take some responsibility for their survival.
Sensible cyclists seem to be few and far between, but stick out like a prick at a wedding on account of their continuous observation and their obvious awareness of, and interaction with, their surroundings.
And another thing!
Wearing black lycra at night is not an aid to being seen, quite apart from looking bloody stupid.
Gratuities Included In The Bill
I'm not a fan of expensive restaurants, something you may have gathered by now. Visiting one generally involves paying hideous amounts of money for a what is essentially a rabbit's portion of someone else's idea of pretty food, consisting of undercooked vegetables and raw meat, and sharing the space with a load of pretentious people pretending to enjoy what is essentially a stupidly overpriced snack.
That in itself is usually enough to prevent me from visiting these establishments, but unfortunately on odd occasions I've been forced to do so. When I finally get presented with the bill, I invariably see a gratuity charge added to it, often for a considerable sum; on one occasion, the gratuity charge was more than the cost of a meal for two including drinks at Wetherspoons! Something is seriously wrong here.
I may be old-fashioned in some respects, and this could be one of those instances: I believe a tip is in order only if the person you are tipping (and that does not include the entire bloody restaurant) has performed a duty over and above that which their job requires. That means, I don't tip anyone for bringing my food to me or smiling; I expect them to do that anyway. However, a staff member who comes out to help me bump-start my car may be slipped a fiver.
This idea of adding a gratuity to the bill is akin to emotional blackmail. I'd like to know how many people simply pay it without question to avoid the risk of making a scene or appearing cheap; I suspect it is the vast majority, but it doesn't include me as I'll refuse to pay it. Any restaurant that does that won't be visited again by me, and when I go, I usually bring a large number of family members, so they lose.
Adding a service charge is another dodgy practice committed by many so-called 'high end' restaurants. Under the Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, any intention to add a service charge to the bill should be made very clear before anything is ordered; if not, such charges cannot be enforced, and no amount of snide remarks on the part of staff should make you change your mind. In my case, if there's an intention to add a service charge, I'll simply take my posse elsewhere; I firmly believe that all costs should be included in the prices in the menu, not added later.
On a related note, I also dislike the faff of having to pay the bill at the end; I'd much rather pay for everything when it is ordered, as that way, there's less risk of me accidentally forgetting to pay, and being accosted by irate staff in the car park, which my daughters find particularly embarassing.
Phone-Ins & Crap Phone Audio
I enjoy listening to discussions on the radio where members of the public phone in to express their opinions and have a moan about the subject being discussed. My favourite at the moment is the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.
I expect reasonable sound quality on BBC radio, so it irritates me when I hear people speaking on their crappy little £1000 smartphones, and putting their phones "on speaker" which causes all kinds of audio artefacts which mess with the intelligibility of their voice.
The reason for this is that the software on the phone is trying desperately to eliminate acoustic feedback. Feedback is where the sound from the speaker gets picked up by the microphone, which comes out of the speaker, to be picked up by the microphone again and so-on creating a positive feedback loop. This is the same effect that causes a loud howl or whistle in a PA speaker if the microphone gets too close.
The phone's software is trying hard to defeat this feedback, and does so using some quite complicated algorithms, but in basic terms, it delays the audio a bit and notches out any frequencies which are on the verge of feeding back. What this does to the audio is to create strange-sounding phasing effects, odd little frequency suck-outs and a general loss of quality, and you also get that irritating "in a bathroom" sound so typical of someone using their phone "on speaker".
I'm surprised the BBC do nothing about this as sometimes it can be quite bad; I have emailed Jeremy's show asking them to insist that callers don't use phones on speaker, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
The solution is painfully simple: just insist that all callers use their phones like a bloody grown-up.