Chocolate

A while ago I was at work and it was my birthday, My place of work buys cake for the lucky birthday person. I ordered a nice vegan chocolate cake as there is a few of my colleagues sre vegan. When it arrived my work colleagues irritatingly sang that stupid fucking song at me and then we ate. A comment was made that made me breathe a humph of irritation. The comment was “That’s not real chocolate”. I replied back it was real chocolate then asked “Do you know what the main ingredient of chocolate is?” I didn’t get a response instead I got “Real chocolate has milk in it”. Well that’s milk chocolate not chocolate.

I continued to ask this ignoramus what the main ingredient of chocolate was.

This dickhead didn’t answer me and just looked more stupid. The moron  didn’t know that it comes from the cocoa bean. So I enligtened him to  the origins of chocolate and the cocoa bean. But still I got “But it’s not real chocolate”. I didn’t bother with this anymore.

Olympics

I hate to sound pessimistic, but…

I’m happy about the Olympics happening here – I really am. I’ve been a cheerleader for it ever since we won the bid, countering doom-mongering arguments with Keanu-Reeves-in-the-Matrix-like nimbleness.

But over the last couple of months a few niggling doubts have grown and grown into big old belligerent beasts, and I can’t hold it in any more. There are some things about “the greatest Olympics on earth” that are absolutely terrifying me. And even more things that are seriously, desperately, wall-punchingly-irritatingly narking me right off.

Londoners, we are a nation of moaners. So let the moaning be unleashed, and join me in an unrelenting ululation of woe. (Then hopefully we can get back to being positive again. Maybe.)

Security shambles – it’s even worse than you think!

Aside from the fact that G4S completely ballsed up the security contract by not having enough people, as recently as last Sunday it still hadn’t told temporary security staff what days, where or even if they’d be working at the Games. Yup, I had that straight from one of the temporary worker’s mouths a measly 12 days before the Games begin. Bodes well for the general organisational state of Games security, doesn’t it?

Travel Armageddon, as mismanaged by “a bunch of Soho media twats”

A senior army bod told me over an indiscrete pint of Pimms recently that travel during the Olympics will be a “fucking nightmare” because it was “being organised by a bunch of Soho media twats”, who chose 20 people for a brainstorm over one manager to make a call on anything.

The same senior army bod said he and his military colleagues had several times raised questions such as: How exactly are you going to accommodate the one million extra people expected in London on the tube and buses? Are there going to be lots of extra tubes and buses running? Have you employed extra drivers for these tasks? And extra staff to manage the extra people moving in and around the stations?

All of which the Soho media twats would invariably reply: “They’ll walk.”

“Really? Really?” Mused senior army bod and I. You really think one million extra people, VISITORS to London, with potentially no familiarity with the city whatsoever, are going to opt to navigate its more than 600 square miles by foot? Like he said: Soho media tw*ts.

To make matters worse, TfL has plastered over all the usual tube signage that London residents use on a daily basis with big pink stickers pointing you in the direction of things like “Hyde Park” or “Pall Mall”, even though such locations might be a mile or two away. A couple of days after they did this, I happened to come up from the underground at Victoria and was looking for my exit. Except I couldn’t see the sign thanks to bloody pink stickers right over the top of it. Fellow travellers were clearly experiencing the same issue. Cue a mass of bunching of London residents stopping immediately after going through ticket barriers to try to figure out whether Pall Mall is in the same direction as their office.

And I’ve heard from more than one semi-authoritative source that we can expect two-hour plus queues at change-over stations like London Bridge.

All these extra crushes on transport make me even more worried about…

Terrorist threats

Heaped on top of our shambolic security situation is my personal concern about all these extra people on the tube. It’s bad enough on normal days’ peak hours when your face is squished like warm Silly Putty against the glass windows of Northern Line carriages. Or at Victoria when you have to queue for 20 minutes to get in and out of the underground on a Friday evening.

Now imagine those situations plus even MORE people. And then plus a bomb threat or fire. It doesn’t even bear thinking about how on earth all those passengers would be safely evacuated on time.

Ticketing shambles

So part of the reason I can’t wait for the Olympics to start (despite all these gripes) is that I have tickets. Hurrah! Only cheap ones, mind – or at least that’s what I thought originally. Two tickets, £40 in total. Oh, except I moved house last summer, a few months after buying the tickets. Lo and behold, you can’t update your address on your Olympic ticketing account. Instead, the on-site Q&A tells you that you MUST set up a Royal Mail redirect if you’ve moved house. Two trips to my local Post Office with two charming 20-minute waits each time and another £20 later, I had set up the redirect.

Except my tickets got sent to my old address anyway. How helpful! Numerous phonecalls later, I managed to get my tickets sent to my new address’ local Delivery Office. Then hit a most welcome 10-minute queue there to pick up the tickets which should have been delivered direct to my front door in the first place. Great!

Ticketholders face two-hour waits to get into events

This one has come straight from LOCOG: an email providing “critical information” about my event. This email advised ticketholders to arrive TWO HOURS before the start of the event to accommodate the security checks for attendees, which would be akin to “taking an international flight”.

So after spending three hours on the tube to get anywhere you then have to queue for another two hours before you’ve even got into an arena. By which time you’ll be so thirsty you’ll have to bankrupt yourself by buying sponsor-brand-only refreshments which will no doubt be edging towards the £300 mark per 100ml.

Which reminds me of another thing…

Ruining the fun for small businesses

By now you will have heard or read about cases like the family-run butchers in remote countryside locations told to remove Olympic-ring-style sausages from their window displays, or the village high-street sports shops told to take down the Olympic logo hula-hoop shop windows. Because naturally local residents would otherwise have assumed that these three-people local businesses were Olympic sponsors who had paid multiple dozens of millions of pounds for the privilege. And that wouldn’t be fair on Coca-Cola, McDonalds and co, would it?

Meanwhile, small food carts and stands within the Olympic Park have been given the once-in-a lifetime opportunity to sell their products to visitors from every country on earth. A fantastic chance for small UK caterers to expand their brands, no? Actually, no. Because all non-sponsor food carts, despite serving their own food and drink, are banned from using their own company name or branding while doing business at the Olympics.

(Side note: I know that sponsors’ rights have to be protected – when they’re paying that much money, of course they’re going to ask for some brand protection. I get it. And I know they’re also doing lots of truly fantastic things for British businesses and suppliers, and launching community programmes, and being innovative – all of which I warmly and wholeheartedly applaud, I really do.

But it seems the ODA and LOCOG are being so paranoid about the whole thing that they’ve taken all sponsor rights issues to a ludicrous extreme – and I find that very sad.)

Ruining the fun for locals, while also disrupting their lives

The Olympic sailing is taking place in Weymouth. Of course, this will cause huge disruption for the Weymouthians, as their roads are blocked, their town overloaded with Olympics-type visitors, and their restaurants booked out by corporate hospitality packages. But it’s okay, because at least they’ll get to watch the sailing, right? Or even just gaze out onto the open ocean to calm themselves among the throngs of unwanted visitors?

Of course not. Because there will be a giant wall blocking them from glimpsing even the white blustery whisper of a sailing boat going past. Those in Dorking face a similar circumstance. Residents will see main roads barricaded from 4am on Saturday 28 July, causing them not inconsiderable inconvenience. But rather than LOCOG thinking that actually quite a nice compensation for this might be to let them watch the cycling go past, they will instead be charged for tickets to see anything, or else blocked from viewing the event, just like in Weymouth.

How utterly miserly of LOCOG, and how entirely inconsiderate.

A couple of final gripes

If you bring a product that rivals a sponsors’ into Olympic venues, you could be arrested.

A lot of Olympic work that seemingly went to UK companies actually got outsourced overseas.

The greatest sporting event on earth is being sponsored by two of the most obesity-inducing, health-ruinous, diabetes-peddling, Child-Catcher-like multinationals on this planet. It’s just wrong!

Great Britain? Hmm. We’ll see.

Lazy parents who cant walk 20 feet!

You know the ones, they live 5 fucking minutes walk from the school but they insist on driving to school to get their kids – now it’s understandable in bad weather but just plain bloody lazy in good weather. But it’s not all of them specifically that i am talking about. No – it is the one’s among them who insist on parking directly alongside the school despite a car park directly across the road. To give a direct example i will use my son’s school. Recently there was a parked car incident where a nursery child almost got run over because of the parked cars. So the obviously the school asked the parents to have the common sense not to park in front of the school and also handed out a letter.

Now obviously some of those parents are still so fucking lazy that they still park in front of the school. I confronted one of them today and his reply was – it’s only the late morning session nursery kids coming out – “i wouldn’t do it during the main times such as when all kids come to school and the afternoon school finish”. Now i don’t give a fuck how many kids are coming out at what time of the day – if their is so much as one kid coming out – don’t fucking park in front of the school. Especially when there is a car park 20 fucking feet away. How lazy can you possibly be!

What this guy and the others who still do it based on the same reasoning are suggesting is that rules should only apply at certain times. It’s not a fucking bus lane – it doesn’t have a time rule schedule.

Dog Owners

Mr. Cranky has really stepped in it this time. Not bike lanes or old buildings or racial politics. I am talking about dog shit, and I don't mean s***, doo-doo, poop, excrement, or mess. The right word matters sometimes.

The scene of the crime was the Lees Park playing field, which has over the years become an unofficial dog park. I was walking toward home when I got distracted by — what else? — a dog running toward me, stepped carelessly, and, bingo.

This is not the crime of the century. That would be when your dog shits in my yard and you don't clean it up. And I admit I once owned large dogs that ran free when they escaped or I let them off the leash.

But times change. We used to have unprotected sex with strangers, smoke unfiltered Camels in indoor public places, drive without seatbelts, and double-size our fries.

Free crap versus loyalty in the newspaper world

Newspapers have really stepped up their promotional schedule in the last few weeks. But is anything that they have given away worth having?

Last week the Mail on Sunday gave away DVD of a new unreleased film that probably would have done no business at the cinema. Therefore the distributors probably gambled that they would make more money from what the Mail paid them and the marketing they put behind it. Ultimately a crap film is still a crap film even when it is free! Did anyone watch it and if they did did they finish it?

The Times this week were giving away a real first, free REM iTunes tracks to help promote their new live album. The only problem with this is that half the tracks are some of their best music and any self respecting music fan would already have them. Who wants a live album anyway, they’re rarely as good as the original versions and REM have had better days. Nice idea but where’s the value apart from for REM’s record company’s marketing department?

The Mail on Sunday have given away a best of Robbie Williams CD this week, again to support the release of his new album. But again if you wanted his best music wouldn’t you already have it by now? So the Mail are happily being the main platform of the record company’s marketing campaign and 95% of the CD’s will never get played. How does the consumer benefit?

For all the instant sales that these promotions may gain the promiscuous readers that take these up will jump paper for the next freebie next week so where’s the marketing value?

The way forward for newspaper promotions and partnerships surely has to be The Times’ new loyalty scheme Times+. This imaginative scheme rewards loyal readers on a long term basis with exclusive content, offers, prizes and money can’t buy events like meeting The Times’ journalists. This is surely the way that all newspapers should be approaching promotions in the future, no free crap, no free marketing for fallen pop stars or terrible films but actually thinking about what a loyal reader wants and rewarding them.