No Change
November 21, 2008
9:59 AM CST
In Comments yesterday, Reader Gray Fox moaned:
“26 years old and already a cranky old man...”
Welcome to my world. A couple of years ago, I happened to get in touch by email with my very first girlfriend (I was 16, she was errrr much younger), who still lives in South Africa. Rather than getting into the whole “where I’ve been and what’s happened to me” rigmarole (I mean, good grief: I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years), I simply sent her the link to this website.
She wrote back to tell me that even if my name hadn’t been displayed on the site, she’d have known, instantly, who was writing.
Yes, Gentle Readers: I have been an irritable curmudgeon / Old Fart since age 16.
Gah.
---------------------------------
Oh, and on the off-chance Angie reads this: I’m sorry I forgot to wish you happy birthday last month (October 19th).
RCOB Moment
November 21, 2008
6:05 AM CST
Actually, it’s not that often that I am driven to violent, incoherent rage. But someone please give me a reason why this traffic warden should not be beaten with nail-studded clubs:
Health workers were left stunned when an ambulance outside a hospital clinic was clamped while the driver helped a seriously ill patient inside.
Driver Joan George had left the ambulance from London’s Royal Free Hospital for just one minute to help the patient into the kidney dialysis clinic.
When she returned, the yellow clamp was already being locked to the wheel.
A warden refused to listen to her pleas last Thursday and said he would only remove the clamp if she handed over more than £200 as a fine.
And the beating should not end there:
A spokesman for private clamping company London Parking Control Limited said yesterday there would be no refund, insisting that there were clear signs warning drivers not to park at that spot. He said the ambulance counted as a ‘private vehicle’.
The spokesman said. “Private ambulances are not exempt from parking fines and the drivers often abuse the fact that the vehicle says ambulance.
‘Newspapers will always write negative things about clamping companies but imagine it was your bay at home and somebody parked in it. What would you do?’
I tell you what I’d do: if an ambulance had to park in my prize flowerbed because the EMTs were helping a dreadfully-sick patient, I’d make the guys a fucking pot of tea when they came back.
And if a traffic warden tried to boot the ambulance, I’d hold him off at gunpoint beat him to death with a chair stab him in the heart with a garden fork set fire to him with a blowtorch stop him from doing so.
And then I’d go and torch the company who employed him, for being an evil, self-righteous bunch of money-grubbing bastards.
You opinion may differ, of course, but I’m not interested in hearing about it.
The only happy ending to this story would have been if the booted ambulance could not pick up a gravely-injured child and rush her to hospital—and the child turned out to be the traffic warden’s.
Aaaaaargh.
