Wanna Cry!

Every time Cumwot May and her string of oversized mothballs opens her silly big mouth to speak about 'Brexit' she devalues the Pound against the Euro. Every single transaction between these two currencies ever since 24th June last year has been effectively stuffing European pockets full of free Pounds. There! And they all thought it would result in giving less money to Europe. Wrong! It's just that this is free money and you don't get anything in return. Idiots! (Not You! Them!)

Our bank has one of those ticket machines devised for fair and proper queuing but for a long time now people have been abusing the system. Either they will call in at the bank at the start of their morning's errands to pick up a ticket, then go round town doing their business and finally return much later, their number having been called perhaps an hour earlier, and assume they can walk straight to the front of the queue. Or they will pull out five tickets and trade them with friends.

I had to go to the bank today and was most surprised to discover that at 11:38 I had pulled ticket number 002. There were plenty of other customers already waiting to be served and then I saw that the numbers above the desks were switched off. Aha! Another customer kindly showed me to the neat little pile of small pieces of scrap paper upon which a staff member had carefully written consecutive numbers by hand. Was there really a problem with the system or were bank staff fighting back against queue cheats?

As I sat and waited I noticed people leaving and replacing their numbered scraps of paper on top of the pile. Clearly this was not going to work as planned.

But then extra excitement! The air-lock entry system failed. The bank has an entrance chamber and an exit chamber. Each chamber has an exterior door and an interior door. You cannot pass through the second door in either direction until the door you have just passed through has closed and locked. The first (exterior) door to the entrance chamber was failing to lock and so the second (interior) door was failing to unlock, therefore customers could not enter the bank. Three members of staff tried fiddling about despite the fact that they clearly had no understanding of how the system worked. One had the wit to telephone the engineer. Quietly and with no fanfare whatsoever the number system above the desks began to work and eventually reached number 002. I was out by 12:33 having purchased a few Euros for rather too many Pounds.