Daves Christmas rant

[dave21478]

I havent had a moan for a while, so here it is whether you like it or not.

And its the Christmas edition because that all apparently starts in November these days.

Billboards. Part of France since forever. I like seeing the remains of the old hand-painted ones...mostly "Suze" round here. Sadly usually partly covered by some plastic crap giving directions to the nearest two McDonalds these days. Then there are the big poster boards....massive things on buildings or standing alone by the roadside, where every month or so some guy with a bucket of wallpaper paste and a very long broom - and quite a bit of skill, I would say - puts up the latest price of sausage in Intermarche.

I like these.

The moan? Within the last few months they are being replaced by actual televisions.

Seriously....In Castres, the main retail zone is maybe a couple of kilometers long and there are now six of these fuking things along it...monstrous screens the size of full billboards cycling through the same four or five adverts. They are obnoxiosly bright and very distracting to motorists. I havent seen one happen but cant help but notice the glass-and-plastic evidence of rear-enders along this perfectly straight bit of road.

On a planet of dwindling resources at a time when energy conservation is becomming gravely serious, what bellend thought that massive screens blasting jiggawatts worth of adverts into thin air night and day would be a good idea?

Oh and what happens to the guy with his long broom? These horrors can no doubt be updated in seconds to the latest sausage price remotely with a few clicks on a tablet computer.

Litter - towns are still very clean compared to UK, but I see a lot more rubbish in the countryside lately. ciggy packets on the road, coke cans on the verge and random bits of plastic bags or sheeting in the hedgerows.

....which I think is partly due to peoples crappy Me First And Screw Everybody Else attitude these days. Folk in their early thirties or younger have been brought up believing that they are unique and special snowflakes that are owed everything by the rest of the world and this can be seen in attitudes on the street, on the roads and everywhere else.

And the next person I see walking in a daze around the supermarket holding their phone horizontally just in front of their chin and having their conversation on loudspeaker so we can all hear how important/exciting they think they are will find it getting slapped out of their hand and stamped on.

Behind me on a sliproad joining the carriageway? that doesnt mean you get to cut into the lane as soon as you can and accelerate up beside me before I get on, leaving me nowhere to go. Not sure if self-entitled knobbers or just completely oblivious to the effects of their actions.

Despite being a fat, ugly, balding oaf (or maybe because of that) I have recently bought a silly 2 seater cabriolet with a loud exhaust. Since I live in a redneck, hillbilly farming area the reactions of passersby are funny. Most folk in the local village literally stop in their tracks and stare, jaws agape, as if I have just beamed down from the moon or something.....I would paint it pink if I thought I wouldnt get lynched.

RTL2 - get a bigger playlist. there is only so many times in a single day that a non-australian man can listen to Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil without getting unreasonably angry.

Sick of the price of living. Why does everything in the supermarket cost a fiver? Yeah, thats a broad generalisation, but I notice an awful lot of stuff is around that price point. A packet of ham....4.70-something....Not far off a euro a slice for Gods sakes. Its not super-gourmet stuff either, just the normal bright pink fake ham. Mince - SEVEN euros for 500grams. Decent eggs are almost 50c each and the price of fruit and veg makes me unreasonably angry. I wouldnt mind so much if there were decent stuff available, but its the same old sh1te, quite often pre-rotted for your convenience....just buy it and throw it straight in the bin, saving you loads of time.

Good luck finding an apple thats not Gala, Pink Lady or those yellow ones...

Still not getting on with tradesmen. Coming up to eleven years here....you would think I would have learned the lesson by now, but I guess some tiny optomistic sliver of me thinks "maybe this time it will go well".

Some guy to do a complex bit of iron-mongery. Quote accepted, OK given, delivery was supposed to be two months ago. Radio Silence.

Quote for a LOT of complex windows....Its taken me years...literally years to find anyone even willing to quote but its all gone silent again. I ended up getting Ze Germans onto the case and went into very detailed correspondence with one place who eventually sent their main guy down to have a look for himself. He was 101% sound, and after a look around said he wouldnt take the job on....not comfortably within their expertise....but he thanked me profusely for considering their company and so on. I expected and would have happily paid a bill for travelling expenses etc, but they wouldnt hear of it. Try that from a French place!

The local places I have tried have all gone silent.

If you dont want the job, just say so....Too big? too complicated? just dont want the hassles? I literally dont care, JUST SAY SO....dont drag out the charade of quotes etc for months on end, its wasting everyones time.

Speaking of tradies....bodgers. I was tasked with fitting out a wee loft space as an office, part of which required fitting a couple of sockets and a single light fixture. There were some Gaines with junction boxes running through the space that looked likely to tap into so I opened one up and found a 3X2.5mm cable going through a domino connector. Perfect. I wired in a wee radio and turned it up loud, went to the fusebox and started flipping breakers till the radio went off. Turned out that wire was for another room with only a couple of sockets, so perfectly ok to tap in and add a couple more in this office. I ran my cables and started making connections and got a decent jolt off the "isloated" wiring. It took a LOT of head scratching but it turns out that this single 3 core wire has the live running to the previously mentioned room sockets, the neutral does God-knows what but is on a completely seperate breaker in the fusebox and the earth is actually a switched line for a stairwell light from the push switch to the telerupteur in the fusebox.

Someone paid money to have this done. Lots of money.

Brexit - sick of it. Since brexit this....since brexit that.....IT HAS NOT HAPPENED YET so nobody can say brexit has had whatever effect they are finding facts to support their argument about. Its all just speculation and guessing. Every forum I use on every subject has some kind of thread about it and thay all degenerate into a massive sh1t-flinging contest by page two. Change the record, guys - this one is as bad as Beds Are Burning.

[Kong]

Great post.

[PeterG]

And Re..............lax

[Chancer]

Excellent, not a single one that I cannot identify 100% with.

 

Overpriced veg pre-rotted for your convenience! - love it! [:D]

 

And as for the Brexit, I'm definitely with you there, maybe its a coincidence that we are both coming up to 11 years, I have actually been asked my views on the subject by a couple of intelligent and interested French people, and believe me around here that is coming across both Elvis and Shergar [:P] Nice people that they were I bet they wished they had asked someone else who either gave a **** or would give a polite diplomatic response, they will think twice before asking anyone else.

 

A few years ago had you raised just one of those humourous rants you would have got an "that never happens here in rosetinteds****ydr***rland" response together with this emoticon [;-)]

 

My place had been abandoned by years, squatted by SDF's and druggies, the outside walls a public studio for taggers and flyposters, the final straw was finding one of the barstewards sticking up a CGT poster on my living room window, he left with the broomhandle protruding from his rectum, thereafter they sent out the thugs with the brushes and the were proper scary, they left my place alone but continued with the ERDF susbstation on my boundary and told me that i could not do a thing about it, and the size they were they had a good point, I removed 40 years of accumulated posters that were up to 5cm thick in places with a karcher getting some tingling HT shocks for my trouble and then did a complete ravalement of the whole building in sprayed crepi covering all the tags, I put it on extra thick and while it was still wet I went over it with a textured roller giving it some wicked spikes that would open up an artery if you brushed against it.

 

It was priceless to see the thugs trying and failing to put up the next batch of flyposters. 8 years have passed and nothing has stuck to it!

 

No doubt ERDF will now rent the space to them to put a mega LCD screen up [:(]

[alittlebitfrench]

No, no, no this can't be true.

I refuse to accept SW France is like that at all. I have read the magazines and watched place in the sun. Its litter free open countryside where everyone buys their shiny freshly picked fruit and veg from the local market.

Reference the bloke beating you onto the carriageway, well you lost didn't you and your upset about that. Give it another ten years and you will be doing the same as the bloke who did it to you. The key is to match the speed of the person trying to join so they have no choice but to brake. Then you just turn your head and have little wry smile. Or to really pîss them off you leave it until the last minute and offer let them in. They would rather die than to accept your offer.

[EuroTrash]

Come to Normandy, we had our apple festival last month and there were more different varieties of apples on display and on sale than you can shake a stick at.

But apart from that, and the fact that we haven't got into LCD screens instead of billboards yet, you'll find all the same issues.

My artisan problem is a front door not ironmongery. Apparently it's a non-standard size (I guess they hadn't thought of having standard sizes 400 years ago when the house was built). So they come, they measure up, promise a quote, then come back a few weeks later, measure up again, scratch their heads, suck their teeth and vanish, never to be seen again.

[alittlebitfrench]

ET, they are scratching their heads wondering why you haven't gone down to Brico depot like your fellow countrymen and bought yourself a cheap 'arrivage' PVC door and made it fit. Then of course paint it in lasure to protect it from the sun.

No British builders in Normandy then ? They will sort you out. They will probably do the same mind you except they would buy exactly the same PVC door in the UK because it is better quality when bought in pounds. They would then probably try to varnish it.

[EuroTrash]

I think even a Brittany Ferries builder might draw the line at top-and-tailing a PVC door to make it fit. Or then again...

[lindal1000]

Never seen LCD advertising here but have in Bordeaux. Change comes to everywhere..France is no exception.

Rotting fruit and vegetables definitely a problem in the supermarkets, but solved by going to Grand Frais .

Mobile phone thing drives me mad but no different to UK.

I don't agree entirely with the moan about young people. All the ones I know are quite motivated and hard working. They also complain about the attitude of some of their peers. I can remember the same when I was at school. Some kids worked hard..others took the p*ss

[Chancer]

[quote user="EuroTrash"]I think even a Brittany Ferries builder might draw the line at top-and-tailing a PVC door to make it fit. Or then again...[/quote]

 

When I bought my first house my father, a carpenter by trade, saw me trying to upgrade security on the garage, he said "only my son would try to mortice a lock keep into a concrete door frame!" I have already cut down a UPVC door here to re-use it in the laundry room.

 

I am currently musing over how to cut a lock mortice into a cast iron telephone box door for the entrance lobby, if my father is looking down from wherever he will be smiling!

[PaulT]

Dave don't just keep your rants to Xmas - wonderful read and so true.