Noon of the Dead

Well, had other stuff to do today –such as the copy for the latest column bearing this name (yes, I still rant in print as well as cyberspace. I know, how quaint, how retro…). But I just have to pass on today’s encounter with the living dead in a supermarket.
There we were, one happy family, having successfully parked the jalopy in what’s left of the supermarket car park now that the powers that be have finally decided to fill the stonking great hole that appeared in the middle of it two years ago. In the process they’ve created a rubble pile three times the size of the hole, parked a digger which is fast disappearing into the ever-subsiding perimeter of the hole and managed to block off the recycling bins, but ho hum….whatever!
Next we successfully steered a trolley with duff wheels round shelves remarkable for the absence of anything vaguely fresh or edible, and even found a till with no queue staffed by a kid who actually seemed keen to serve us. As Her Indoors and Junior Management took up position ready to pack stuff as it was scanned, I placed the first item on the conveyor belt…..and then the nonsense started.
Some three-nippled, mouth-breathing old throwback in an IOM Steam Packet jumper (which is tantamount to an admission you only procreate with siblings and cousins) put one of those ‘next customer’ plastic things just behind my first item and then dumped a 24 pack of industrial effluent-based lager on the conveyor belt just behind that.
He seemed intellectually incapable of understanding that this, once placed on the conveyor belt, would not stand still and that the six free inches between my first item and it would not magically expand as I tried to unpack the rest of the contents of a large trolley into it.
Believe me, I tried to educate him. Politely, in words (short ones), and by pointing to my full trolley and indicating the vast difference in height, width and depth between the two spaces.
I even pointed out that there was a space at the end of the till which wasn’t part of the conveyor belt, where he could place his economy priced mouthwash without it moving. His answer was “Well, you could pack faster than that”, which suggested a worrying unfamiliarity with basic concepts of time and space…or anything else really.
Eventually I was reduced to moving his 24 pack back to the end of the conveyor after unloading every second or third item from our trolley, while he grumbled to a (presumably female) co-idiot with slightly less facial hair about the time it was taking me to empty my trolley so he could get served. The kid on the till was almost blue in the face in an effort not to laugh in case Barnacle Bill noticed and he got drawn into the action , while somehow I managed not to explode.
What more can I say? I bend over backwards to defend quaint Manx eccentrics against a harsh, unforgiving world, but there’s a limit.
Hopefully this Neanderthal was too old to catch any female relative over the age of, say, 12. He was also ugly as sin and unlikely to be economically active enough to pay for sex, so at least he can’t add to the sum of local stupidity.
However, simpletons like this are still a major factor in disasters like the election of Leonard Singer, the current Ramsey MHK who isn’t Allan Bell, and that has to be a cause for concern.

As ye give, so shall ye receive

Acolytes of the Zombie Carpenter have been dropping religious pamphlets through our letterbox again.
Not Ramsey ones, which I can at least excuse as they’re from cheery eternal optimists we sort of know just trying to be neighbourly and invite us to their shindigs. These chancers operate from Douglas – by the looks of it on a similar basis to those shysters who offer to buy your gold or tarmac your drive.
One leaflet asks: “Where will your soul be 150 years from now? Indeed, where will you be in Eternity?”
If these anonymous twerps want to ask pointless and stupid questions, I wish they’d at least make an effort to ask funny ones.
How about: ‘Where was the fairy from the bottom of your garden five minutes ago?’
Or why not: ‘How many unicorns does it take to change a light bulb?’
In another leaflet, they ask: “Can we be sure of forgiveness?”
Well, that’s an easy one.
No.
I don’t care if they’re deluded, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find they have learning difficulties. But that still isn’t an excuse for dropping litter through other people’s letter boxes, and as they were dumb enough to give a contact address I think they should pay for it by receiving it in return.
So, if anyone has any paper they cannot be bothered to take to the paper bank, why not drop it off at Switzerland Road Gospel Hall, off Queens Promenade, Douglas.

Book rage

We have a new term for a grumpy, unhelpful or anti-social person in this house. That term is ‘librarian’.
Now since childhood I’ve always liked librarians, and have good memories of childhood librarians and library use as well as inspiring teachers.
In fact, when I moved to a class-prejudiced grammar school where the teachers ignored sink-estate brats like me, I relied on the public library, not the school, for my education. This was helped by a ‘junior librarian’ scheme they had which allowed me, aged 12, to assist in the junior library and learn stuff like the subject classification numbers and how to find my own material.
More recently, I love how US public librarians became the unlikely last line of defence against Big Brother, refusing to provide the FBI or CIA with the lending records of all library members as demanded by that country’s Patriot Act.
My change of attitude springs from two astonishing incidents, one witnessed by me, one witnessed by both me and the wife, when our small daughter was reduced to tears by an angry librarian.
Like a good parent, I signed up my daughter as a local library member last year, and generally it is a positive thing. We have a nice little Saturday routine of changing both our books, and I was happy when one matronly librarian started greeting my daughter by her first name and inviting her to ‘help’ by stamping the books out.
Teachers at school remark she’s always been similarly helpful to them, tidying up after class and so on. She loves books, she loves learning, and she respects but is not afraid of the adults who supervise that, which is all good.
But there’s something weird about Manx librarians which I’ve noticed right from the early 1980’s when I moved here. While there are ‘old school’ examples like the one above, generally they behave more like checkout girls. In fact, staff in Tesco or both Ramsey supermarkets are a damn sight more helpful and friendly.
In the first ugly incident, a decidedly short tempered librarian snatched our books and stamped them without a word, as if anxious to just get us out the door. It was half-term, a weekday mid-morning and we were the only punters in the place. It startled my daughter but I put it down to the grump having a bad day – maybe bad news from home or whatever.
Yesterday my daughter’s ‘crime’ was to get six books instead of three, as over Christmas the library allowed lenders more books to compensate for holiday closures and, anyway, she reads a book a day. Instead of calmly explaining the holiday arrangement was over the librarian got snotty. It would have taken about 30 seconds for my girl to put the spare ones back herself, but Attila the Librarian wasn’t having that, and banged them onto a pile left by the previous punters – a confused pair of fossils who’d chosen the wrong books then wandered off.
Fecks sake!
Being a small town librarian is hardly a high pressure job. Remind some pensioners about the names of authors or books they’ve forgotten, order a few reference books on inter-library loan for the town geek……not quite like being screamed at by pushy supervisors and psychotic punters for seven hours solid in a call centre or a high street store in the Christmas rush. Not coal-mining, or Casualty in a city hospital on Saturday night with wall to wall drunks bleeding, effing, blinding and lashing out at everyone in sight and no beds to spare.
Is it worth the parochial repercussions of an official complaint? Not really.
But what kind of world is it when small kids are the victims of rabid book rage incidents in a sleepy small town library?