Life's Little Questions

When Will I Learn That Some Places Will Never Be Entertaining?

I went to Mansfield (used to be the Heart of Sherwood Forest) today, on the 10.57am train, which gets me there at approximately 11.15am. I planned to spend the day out rather than staying in and watching 'girl films', as I did yesterday :). Also, I found £70 in my purse that I didn't know I had (needless to say, it's not there now.)

I went to pick up my watch from Argos first, which took longer than expected as when I was waiting for the machine to clal my Order Number, it just disappeared off the screen. Of course, according to the shop attendent I didn't /have/ a number. Sigh. Anyway, Bethia prevailed and got her watch, and fortunately this time it didn't break (yay!). I brought my 'new' phone to be fixed (the one that broke within the first month of me having it), and gave it to a man that said he'd fix it for me. "Come back in an hour," said he. An hour, right! I'm in town, an hour can't be too hard to spend!

Time spent looking at shoes: 10 minutes
Time spent looking at clothes: another 10 minutes

That gave me 40 minutes to kill. I decided to sit in Debenhams and have a cup of hot chocolate, after buying Private Eye (again) so that I could entertain myself whilst drinking. This brings me to another question I thought of during the course of the day;

Why do some people ignore the laws of people's personal space?

I went to the toilets, and as per usual I had to wait in the queue. An overly-friendly woman with a pushchair started talking to me. Toilet small-talk usually, it's annoying that there's a queue, they should build more, they don't accomodate for mothers etc etc, when she unexpectedly reached out and grabbed my scarf, tugged it and said "That's nice!". I, although startled, politely pretended that I wasn't about to choke and thanked her for her kindness, telling her that it was in a sale, too, and prayed that someone would finish in the goddamn toilet.

Why do illiterate people graffitti toilet doors?

This piece of graffitti unfortunately wasn't found in the toilets at Debenhams, but it followed on from my story quite well. Note that up here we still use the town a person comes from as a tool of identification; 'Jamie Jones of Mansfield', 'Mr Darcy of Pembrokeshire', etc. Well, I guess I should be thankful that I now know to avoid this Jamie Jones as he is a renouned 'pirvirt'.

What are the odds that I'd actually steal something from a shop?

Next I went back to the place where I left my phone, and apparently he was 'just putting it back together', and would take another half an hour. Great. I went wandering in random shops, looking at things I didn't even want. Apart from the moisturiser I bought (do you know how hard it is to find moisturiser that isn't anti-wrinkle, anti-ageing or about £5000?). I swear that in about 2/3s of the shops I went in a security guard watched me, even amounting to following me around the aisles in Boots on one occasion. I have never stolen anything. Is my problem that I just look like a thief? Jeez.

Why does everything break either just after the 28-day warranty or as soon as you buy it?

I dropped my phone, which is why it's broken, and didn't call T Mobile about it (because I would rather pay £25 to get it fixed than wait on hold for an hour before talking to incompetent sales staff). Apparently, the man that said he would fix it can't fix it and has to send it back to Nokia. This takes 3 weeks. Right.

It was the second time I bought my watch, as the first time I bought it it broke the first time I put it on. I got a refund, obviously, and decided to buy it again as I'm picky about which watches I actually like, and the Punky Fish stuff I've bought before has always been of good quality. I guess we'll see.

I'm getting rather annoyed of everything breaking, though.

I think that's all I have to say about my day so far. I'm tempted to rant about the train, but I might just leave it with:

Why do the ticket collectors on trains never come round when you have bought a return ticket, but always when you buy a single?
If we don't allow pets off leads on trains, why do we let noisy children run riot throughout the carriage?
Why do people (especially girls) think it's "cool" to let everyone know they get a new text message? If you're expecting a reply, turn your phone on silent, you morons, only you need to know when you recieve it.
Why does your pen always run out when you have nothing to do but doodle on a bit of paper?

Note to self: Never, EVER go to Mansfield again.

posted by eriu @ 2:44:00 PM