1) Bloody Yahoo! They bought Flickr. Everyone moaned. They told all the users they'd have to sign up using a Yahoo! ID. Everyone moaned louder. And now the deadline for signing up is nigh. It's next Tuesday. So I bit the bullet and switched over. And then they sent me this email.
Hi diamond geezer! This is just a little note to remind you that your diamond geezer Flickr account has been merged in to your Yahoo! account. You will need to sign in to Flickr via Yahoo! with your Yahoo! ID from now on. Thanks, and we hope you enjoy the sign-on-to-everything-in-one-place goodness! The Flickreenies
How bloody patronising is that? I've had to log in twice during the last 12 hours, whereas I only had to log in once during the previous 2 years. I feel unclean and exploited. My contempt for the Yahoo! brand has significantly increased. Bloody Yahoo!!
3) Bloody Thames Water. I have a water meter which they claim to know nothing about, so they need to send somebody round to check that it exists. I told them this 4 weeks ago. They sent a meter reader round earlier this week, while I was at work, without telling me. The meter reader poked a brief handwritten note through my letterbox asking me to ring up to make an appointment. I rang Thames Water to make an appointment, but they told me they couldn't do that. They could only pass on my telephone number to their metering department. And nobody from their metering department has yet rung me to arrange an appointment. My water bill is therefore four times greater than it needs to be. Bloody Thames Water!
4) Bloody Tesco. I went shopping at my local supermarket yesterday and walked out carrying four of their new biodegradable carrier bags. On the way home one of the bags' handles suddenly stretched and broke, spilling my shopping all across the floor. I had to struggle home using one bag fewer, and then discovered that my four pint carton of milk had sprung a leak leaving white puddles on my kitchen floor. Bloody saving the planet. Bloody Tesco!
5) Bloody Google. They're suddenly sending loads of visitors my way looking for pictures that aren't here. It's because I sometimes link to pictures on my blog. I don't hotlink the jpgs so that they steal bandwidth, I just link to them. But Google's incompetent search engine mistakenly believes that these images appear on my blog, and tags them completely wrong, and then redirects people here to view "the image in its original context". These people don't find what they're looking for, but Google insists on sending them to my page anyway. I don't want this endless stream of misdirected visitors, and they don't want to be here either. Surely it's not rocket science to write an Image Search algorithm that actually works. Bloody Google!
6) Bloody moaning bloggers. Bloody cynical pessimistic grumblers, always seeing the negative in everything. Why can't they just cheer up and write about the good things in life? Sigh.
