Tag Archive for WTF?

Unemployed museum volunteer forced to work for free at Poundland

January 12, 2012 WTF? 5 comments

An out-of-work university graduate was forced last year by her local Jobcentre to stop volunteering at a museum and do a voluntary work placement at Poundland to keep her unemployment benefits.

When challenged about this, the DWP which administers unemployment benefits said:

Working in retail is perfectly good experience for a career in a museum. There are very similar transferable skills involved.

Yep, I get that.  But surely better work experience for someone looking for a career in a museum is working in a museum?  Like the museum she was already working in you cretins!

And here was me thinking the slave trade had been abolished.

Shropshire Council spending £1m on 22 traveller pitches

January 7, 2012 WTF? 2 comments
Paddy Doherty

Tarmac your drive? Terty grand.

Shropshire Council is spending a million pounds on 22 new pitches for travellers.

A million quid!  For 22 pitches!  That’s 45 and a half grand per pitch!  Multiple exclamation marks!  They’re a sign of a diseased mind!

Let’s see how much value for money Shropshire Council are getting …

How much would a 56 acre caravan site with a fully-stocked 21 acre fishing lake with planning permission for 79 static caravans, 58 already sited, multiple out-buildings and planning permission to convert 3 holiday cottages set you back do you think?  Going on Shropshire Council’s figures, that’s £3.59m just for the pitches without taking into account the out buildings but no, it’s available for a mere £1.5m.

What about a 10.5 acre caravan site with 80 pitches and 135 storage bays?  That’s £97.8m at the £45.5k a pitch Shropshire council are paying but amazingly the owners only want £800k for it.

How on earth can Shropshire Council justify spending £1m on 22 pitches for travellers when that sort of money can buy you a fully developed, profitable caravan site with four times the number of pitches and facilities already built?

EU referendum not a priority but line of succession is?

October 28, 2011 Bullshit One comment

David Cameron told us that now wasn’t the time for a referendum on the EU, saying it was more important to sort out the economy and that most people were more interested in jobs and the cost of living than having a referendum on the EU.

Queen with the PopeSo it’s not the right time to sort out the cause of our doom-spiralling economy, high unemployment and high cost of living but it is apparently the right time to sort out the laws governing succession to the throne to allow the monarch to marry Catholics, girls to accede to the throne ahead of boys and to remove the requirement for the monarch to authorise royal marriages.

I wonder how many people have written to their MPs asking them to make these changes?  I reckon most MPs will have had somewhere in the region of zero letters about this and quite rightly so – it doesn’t matter.

But the changes that are being made are.  The monarch is the head of the Anglican church, how can they marry a Catholic?  The changes require amendments to Act of Settlement and the Bill of Rights – I just don’t trust the British government to make changes to the English constitution.  They’re already talking about a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities again, is this going to be used as an opportunity to do away with the English Bill of Rights and replace it with an inferior British alternative?

This is a pointless distraction, an unnecessary tinkering with the English constitution and a complete waste of time and money.

Elected Police Commissioners … why?

July 6, 2011 WTF? No comments

The British government is graciously allowing the proles in England and Wales to vote for police commissioners.

We want the vote on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty that we were promised and we get a vote on changing the voting system from one undemocratic system to another, marginally less undemocratic system.  We want a vote on devolved government for England and we get a vote on who fills out the race and faith diversity forms in our local police force.

Electoral and constitutional reform is worth bugger all unless it actually makes a change to peoples’ lives (for the better of course) and it’s something people actually want.

DIY air con!

June 27, 2011 Technology, WTF? No comments

I’m away on a training course this week and staying in a rather nice two-bedroom apartment in an old manor house-type thing (I think it might be Edwardian judging by the windows)  on the bank of the Thames with a colleague.

The place is covered with wi-fi which is pretty essential if you’re away from home even if it is barely faster than dial-up.  But dial-up would have been an improvement over the broadband last night and today.

The signal strength was fine but the connection to the outside world was dropping every few minutes so I went to the site office to report it.  As I walked into the office I saw someone vaguely techy looking standing in the doorway to a broom cupboard filled with servers, switches and wi-fi routers.  Ah-ha, I thought, they’ve got someone on the case already.  But no, he wasn’t a techy at all and was, in fact, merely holding the door open so that the electric fan that they’d stood in there pointing at the rack could do its job of cooling the cupboard down!

It’s been a rather toasty, globally warmed 30 degrees celsius down here in Surrey and it appears that the broom cupboard they are using as a server room is not only unventilated but doesn’t have aircon either.  By the time I got back to the apartment the internet seemed to be behaving so they either threw a web monkey at it in super-quick time or their wi-fi router doesn’t run well when it’s hot enough to fry and egg on it and the fan was doing the job.

Either way, I’m connected to the outside world again and I’ll appreciate my 20mbit broadband at home a little bit more when I get back.

£2.2m taxpayer funding for BBC Arabic

June 22, 2011 BBC, WTF? No comments

BBC Arabic LogoThe British government have announced a £2.2m funding package for the BBC Arabic service after the BBC announced it was closing it as part of its cost-cutting measures.

Apparently the “valuable work” it does in the Middle East is more valuable than, say, the cost of 100 life saving courses of the breast cancer treatment, Herceptin, for English women who are left to die because the “National” Institute for Clinical Excellence thinks £20k is too high a price to save an English life.  Or providing free university tuition for a year for 222 English students who have been priced out of university education by the British government’s English university tuition fees.

Parent forces school to cancel trip

January 3, 2010 Education, Scotland, WTF? 2 comments

A primary school in Inverness has cancelled an adventure holiday for its pupils after the mother of a disabled pupil threatened to sue the school for discrimination because her daughter was incapable of taking part.

Rather than tell the idiot mother to crawl back under whatever rock she’d dragged herself out from underneath, Highland Council has cancelled the trip.

The British government’s DirectGov website has these guidelines on obligations for service providers under the Disability Discrimination Act:

Under the DDA, it is against the law for service providers to treat disabled people less favourably than other people for a reason related to their disability. Service providers have to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to the way they deliver their services so that disabled people can use them.

[…]

What is considered a ‘reasonable adjustment’ for a large organisation like a bank may be different to a reasonable adjustment for a small local shop. It is about what is practical in the service provider’s individual situation and what resources the business may have. They will not be required to make changes which are impractical or beyond their means.

Is there any reasonable adjustment that can be made to enable a disabled child whose mother says would be unable to take part in any of the physical activities to take part in an adventure holiday?  No, quite obviously not and Highland Council need a slap for caving in to this idiot.

Queue? What queue?

November 8, 2009 WTF? 3 comments

One thing the English are famous for is queuing.  But someone forgot to tell that to the people at the petrol station today.

Every pump was taken with people waiting so I positioned myself strategically covering both sides of one pair of pumps.  Then a woman came out of the forecourt shop and got into her car and then pulled alongside the car in front of me that was parked up at a pump.  I assumed she was waiting for someone else to come out of the shop but she then pulled into the pump in front which had just been vacated by a motorbike!

A pump on the other side of the forecourt was vacated so someone else who was waiting alongside me pulled up and very kindly waited while the woman in the pump in front of him adjusted her mirror, did her makeup, tinkered with her hair, etc (I’m exaggerating) so he could pull alongside the front pump so I didn’t have to wait.  Which was very nice of him and much appreciated.

While I was filling up an old dear pootled onto the forecourt, drove in front of a waiting car and despite the waiting driver honking her horn at her, pulled up alongside a newly vacant pump.  She then proceeded to sit about 5ft away from the pump and presumably waited for the car in front of her to finish filling up and leave.  I say presumably because I had time to put diesel in the car, queue at the till, pay and drive off while the old dear just sat there blocking a vacant pump that she’d got to by queue jumping.

Bizarre.

Manifesto Clubs calls on schools to stop demonising children

November 5, 2009 Education, England, Police State, Political Correctness, WTF? One comment

Three years ago one of my kids was punished for “racism” at school after he called one of his black friends a monkey when we was pulling monkey faces and making monkey noises.

The Manifesto Club has finally noticed that something is seriously amiss when primary and nursery school kids are being accused of racism and called for changes to the law that requires English schools to fill out racist incident forms every time a child says something that could be construed as racist.

Most of the children accused of racism on these forms are between 9 and 11 years of age.

Help me, I’m turning into my dad

October 27, 2009 WTF? One comment

I’m away from home this week on a training course and I took a walk into Watford town centre this evening to find somewhere to eat.

Maybe I’m just getting old or maybe society realy is taking a turn for the worst because I found myself shaking my head in dismay at the sights that greeted me on Watford High Street.

The sight of a good looking woman in a mini skirt is certainly nothing to complain about but when young girls who don’t look old enough to be out on their own after dark (some of them looking no more than 13 or 14 years old) are walking around dressed in something like this * …

… then a) I don’t want to see it and b) what the fuck are they doing out at night in a street full of bars dressed like whores?

Do their parents know where they are?  Do they know they’re tottering down Watford High Street in 6 inch heels and a mini skirt so short it barely covers the cheeks of their arse shouting at gangs of lads?  If not, why not?  And if they do then why do they allow their young daughter to go out dressed like a paedophile’s wet dream?

I swear to god, if my daughter ever came down the stairs dressed like that she’d get through the front door over my cold dead body.

Christ, I’m turning into my dad.  Somebody shoot me!

* The picture isn’t of one of the 13 or 14 year old girls, I’m not a paedophile