Annoyance Disposal Unit!

Here's another:

Food vending machines.

You know the type I mean - the ones with a kind of spiral thing holding the food.

Just about every one of these I've ever used always says "Use exact change only" - how often do you have the exact change? I always find I want something that costs 35p, then look in my wallet to discover I only have a £1 coin - or worse, a £2 coin.

So you think, "what the hell" - after all, you're hungry and just want food. The annoyance of paying over the odds for it is minor compared to the growling coming from the pit of your stomach.

So you insert the £1 coin and make the selection.

The spirally thing holding the food rotates precisely 1 quarter of a turn, and the food remains on the shelf.

The machine retains all of your money - and you're still hungry - but now you have no change!

So you try to find someone who can assist - but there's no-one within a 50-mile radius who can.

So you try to ring the number on the front of the machine and, if you actually get through the complicated menu system and don't get forced to listen to "My Heart Will Go On" for an hour on the call waiting system (don't get me started on call waiting systems...), you get told that an engineer can attend a week next Tuesday... maybe.

So you give the machine a sharp rap. Then another. Then you kick the damn t'ing a couple of times, grab both sides and shake it a bit, then stand in the dispenser tray, grab the back of the machine and rock it violently before the security or police take you away...

To cap it all, you missed your train.

Easy Livin wrote: James Lee wrote: Easy Livin wrote: 3 - People who think England, Britain and UK are interchangeable references to the same place. hmm- please explain? One of these things has to be like the other. James, Great Britain is made up of England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom (Full name "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland") is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. England has land borders with Wales and Scotland. It is governed by the UK government, it does not have its own parliament. The Queen is not the "Queen of England", she is the "Queen of the United Kingdom". I think one of the main contributors to the confusion is that UK bank notes are issued by (and say on them) The Bank of England, which is actually the reserve bank for the UK. All this of course not to be confused of course with the British Isles, which is a geographic (as opposed to political) reference to the islands which include mainland Great Britain, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey etc.! I know it's confusing, but it really does annoy Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people when others talk about England but mean the UK.  I believe Canadians have a similar avertion to being called American?

Please don't assume that we English are any less annoyed by this. What makes you think we're any more happy to be confused with you than you are to be confused with us? You bring up a very important point. England is the only country in the UK not to have it's own parliment. Scottish schools and education, for example, come entirely under the control of the Scottish parliament. No Englishman has a thing to say on any education policy north of the border, yet the budget cut or increase for some small primary school in Slough hang on the say-so of the MP for Kilmarnock. How fair is that? To be fair, some Scots in the UK parliament choose to abstain from voting on such issues, but the embarassing fact remains, politically, the English are the underdogs in the UK today.

Surely Scottish money is issued by the bank of Scotland?

1. People who say "London, England" or "Paris, France". Everybody knows where London and Paris are. An American once asked me where I come from, and as Birmingham was the closest well known city, I lied and said that.

"You  mean Birmingham, England", she insisted. The thing is, Birmingham, England, the 2nd largest city in Great Britain, being originally a sixth century Saxon settlement, and featured in the Doomsday book, 1086, (Bermingeham), has earned the right to be known by its name, without further qualification. Let Birmingham, Alabama include an address in its moniker, and Paris, Texas.

I don't want to offend anyone, it just irritates the hell out of me.

TO BE CONTINUED.........

Just to be annoyingly literal, anyone in the Western Hemisphere can be called American- between North America, South America and Latin America, it's pretty well sewn up. Any Canadians who dislike being called American, please tell me what continent you're on

I gotta say, emdiar, a little Birmingham clarification might still be called for- our little Alabama town unfortunately made it into the public consciousness starting September 15th, 1963. The UK city was definitely there first, but most Americans (especially African-Americans) will think of church bombings and MLK long before the Saxon connection.

......TO CONTINUE,

2. Baseball caps!! This vile ubiquitous article of youth fashion headwear has no place in GB, where no one plays the game, (the closest thing we have is "rounders", a game played exclusively by school girls!). Every street corner in Britain is populated with teenaged boys all sporting caps bearing the names of various baseball teams of which they have never heard. Last week I asked my nephew how many baseball stars he could name. Answer: None, though he admitted to having heard the name Babe Ruth somewhere, perhaps in a film? he wasn't sure! Didn't stop him walking around like Donald Duck all day though!

....TO BE CONTINUED.

...I could do without the word "dis" or "dissing"...it's cropping up more and more, and not just by typical underage rap-speakers. I think I heard it twice today, without any conscious irony, on national press coverage of a court trial! It's just a damn prefix! Put a word after it, find a reasonable synonym, or SHUT UP!

[pauses to gnaw through his own face off in frustration] 

...and don't even get me started with "bling-bling". Is the human race going to be talking more and more like toddlers for the rest of my life? The living will envy the deaf...

...or am i just an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud?

On the language front, though I don't want to waste one of my 5 goes on it, the flagrant splitting of infinitives, such as "To boldly go where no man...etc." It's just plain clumsy and wrong.

Sentences like the completely  illogical "I don't got none!" in place of "I don't have any", or "I haven't got any", or simply "I have none." all three of which suffice.

Velvetclown wrote: From the domination of England  Scotland is a country of it´s own

You are so missinformed Velvet, as to be laughable. You're just another one who's seen the (wildly historically inaccurate and Hollywoodized) film "Brave Heart" and think you know all about it.