Are you old enough to remember telephone conversations like this:

“Hello, I’d like to do something”

“Yes, that’s no problem, sir, let me just do it for you. There. Anything else I can help you with?”

Today its all password-protected. PIN numbers. Security questions. More security questions. Data (fucking) protection. The curse on modern society. Which I can almost forgive when dealing with banks and sensitive matters, but when you go in with cash to pay the paper bill in the sweetshop and they ask for your mother’s uncle’s favourite football team after Acrington Stanley got relegated, you know the world is fucked up beyond all belief.

That actually didn’t happen. Hasn’t happened. Not yet; but its only a matter of time before they won’t sell you a skinny latte without a PIN number. Those fucking Eurocrats have so much to answer for. But they can’t answer it until they’ve passed ‘security’. It would be in breach of so many rules that Brussels would fall. If only.

The other day my darling elder daughter broke her phone. Again. Fortunately for me this is no longer my problem because I sold her last year. Well, she got married last year so is no longer my responsibility. Except where O2 are concerned. Because the original contract on her first, steam-driven, brick-sized phone was taken out in my name, 14 years ago. And even though it is actually mentioned in the ancient Hebrew texts, brought by Moses’ nephew from the banks of the Euphrates, that “…and thus upon marriage shallst all mobile phonage be transferred, according to G-d’s will, to the husband, as it is written, including all free minutes and texts…” even with that, its still ‘my’ phone. Even though she pays the bills and gets all the documents.

I won’t catalogue the entire sequence of events, which started with a visit by Natalie to her local O2 shop, followed by a call for me to visit mine, as its ‘all in my name and they can’t talk to her’, but don’t worry, everything’s on the system’, which it obviously wasn’t. We met up and went together, an hour later Natalie emerged, pale and defeated, telling me that although when I’d left 50 minutes before having provided the necessary iris scan, fingerprinting and DNA sample, they told me I’d done my bit. Several phone calls later, setting up new, ‘transfer passwords’ and other total corporate bollox from a company proving again and again that when it comes to incompetence, no-one does it better, the phone actually started working. The new one.

Well, that was easy. Only took two people 6 hours to sort out something that should have taken 10 minutes.

Even more frustrating was the football last night. Has there ever been a more boring, dull, drab, dire game played. Extra time was horrible. What? Another half hour of that shit!!!

Germany deserve to win the World Cup on the grounds that they actually try to win matches. Which is very different from trying not to lose them. There were no winners last night. Wish I’d gone to bed early.

Happy Thursday; you’ll be fine as long as you don’t try to do anything.

A xxxx