Humiliation at the filling station

Last week, on my way home from work, I dropped into my local filling station to replenish the diesel in my Fiat Punto. Tank fully topped-up, I left the car at the pump and entered the payment kiosk, one which doubles as a mini-market, and joined one of the two queues. Upon reaching the front, I inserted my debit card into the machine to pay the £32.58 owing and tapped in my PIN number.

“Try it again” said the young female cashier, a hint of suspicion in her voice.

Dutifully, I removed my card and inserted it again.

“It won’t accept that card. Have you got another means of payment, sir?” Her manner had instantly changed. The warm, animated young female had transformed into robotic mode, no doubt regurgitating, word-for-word, what she had been taught on a recent staff-training event about dealing with a potential fraudster.

“It worked alright yesterday, and there are funds in the account,” I said, already becoming aware of how unconvincing I must sound, “Can I try it in the other machine?”

I was allowed to obstruct the flow of the other queue to try my debit card in another machine, but it was rejected again. My car was beginning to cause an obstruction on the garage forecourt, other garage users awkwardly manoeuvrering around it.

The girl sighed and, still in auto-pilot, said “You can try the cash-point down the road, but you will have to leave your car here sir.”

By now I was convinced that everyone in the mini-market listening to this exchange had concluded there was a con-man of ‘Robert Redford in The Sting’ proportion in their midst.

After some negotiation, the android behind the counter kindly agreed to let me use their own telephone, located on the counter within ear-shot of everyone in the mini-market, to contact my bank. It was quickly established there had been a block put on my card due to some “suspicious activity” on my account. I was put through to the bank’s fraud department.

The first set of security questions, to confirm I was the person whose name is on the credit card, were a breeze; full name, date-of-birth and full postal address, no problem. But when I was asked to name three current direct debits coming out of my account, my performance deteriorated.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, “my wife takes care of all that. I think we have a mortgage with the Woolwich Building Society.”

“How much is it for?” asked the interrogator in the fraud department.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, it used to be about 770 per month, but I think it’s come down a bit.”  

“Do you know your National Insurance Number?”

“Yes, hold on I’ve got it on my mobile phone.” As I fumbled to extract the required number from the “Notes” section of my iPhone, the cashier helpfully put the land-line on speaker-phone so I could respond without having to hold the receiver. Of course, this meant that everyone within a three-yard radius could hear the two-way conversation. I sensed the young girl was beginning to regain some of her animation.

Satisfied that I was not an impostor, the man from the bank (after cautioning me that it is a serious criminal offence not to answer truthfully) began to announce the recent transactions on my account to differentiate the genuine from the fraudulent.  

“£250 to Nigerian Leather in Abuja on the 20^th October 2012?”

“No, definitely not” I replied, sensing for the first time, that I might be gaining a morsel of credibility with my listeners. “That’s definitely not mine.”

“£38.75 to the Red Lion Public House in Liverpool on the 19^th October 2012?”

“Yes that will be mine; we had a pub-lunch last Friday.” I didn’t want my acquaintances in the mini-market to think I was an addled drunk. I needn’t have worried about such trivial matters.

“£80.00 to Naughty America on the 17^th October?”

“Umm, I think that might … it could have …”

“Sorry Mr Jones, was that a debit you made or not?”

“Yes it was.” By this point I was avoiding eye-contact with anything human, staring instead at my car left abandoned on the garage forecourt.  

“What about £90.00 to Viagra Online Generic Pharmacy on the 15^th October?”

Identity established, they transiently lifted the block on my card to allow me to pay for my diesel and, head bowed, I sped from the filling station. My Fiat Punto's thirst for diesel will, from now on, be quenched at a different establishment.     

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I am participating in the Dude Write Starting Lineup this week where you can find some excellent posts by bloggers who happen to be dudes: http://dudewrite.blogspot.com)

A rare visit to the dentist

                                                                      

I visited the dentist today. It had been almost 15 years since my previous visit, at the time motivated only by a desire to set a good example for my two children. Since 1997 my ivories have been a no-go zone for everything other than my toothbrush and a twice-daily sliver of Colgate paste.

But over recent weeks, on three occasions, I have experienced jolts of discomfort when cold water has made contact with my pre-molars, ironically when rinsing my mouth after teeth-cleaning. I don’t like pain, so I decided it was time to make an appointment with my local driller and filler.

I dislike dentists. Although my aversion is not of phobic intensity, I still harbour bad memories from my childhood. During the 1960s I recall having 12 milk-teeth extracted in the space of a fortnight. I can picture the offending dentist like it was yesterday; unshaven, bad breath and a psychotic expression of Hannibal Lecter proportion as he pressed the gas mask forcefully over my nose and mouth. Suffocation in its rawest form; I can still smell the rubber mask as I squirmed under his weight, subsequently sliding into that slumber that must be the last stop before death. Even after the butcher had extracted his ivory booty, my ordeal wasn’t over. In the weeks following the teeth removal the gaping holes left in my gums acted as magnets for food which festered and gave off a sweet putrid smell. I was a solitary child.

Anyway, this afternoon I drove to the dental practice for my scheduled check-up and stepped into the surgery for the first time this century. The smell hit me straight away, not (thankfully) that of rotting gums but anti-sceptic mouthwash. At reception I paid the £17.50 fee and was given a medical questionnaire to complete. While sitting in the waiting room, completing the form and lying about my weekly alcohol intake, the pneumatic drilling sounds from the adjacent surgical rooms permeated the area. I listened intently for screams reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in the Marathon Man.

“Bryan Jones?”

The young, fresh-faced dental nurse had peered around the reception room door and I dutifully followed her into the surgery. Standing in front of that iconic, black leather chair (the seat of as great a suffering as the electrical variety) was the  dentist in his blue tunic, face-mask dangling under his chin.

“So what can I do for you today?” he asked.

The question seemed disingenuous, falsely implying that I had control over the situation, the sort of question the medieval torturer would ask before reaching for the thumb-screws. I explained my recent teeth-twinges and the 15-year gap since my last visit. I thought I detected an expectant look on the dentist’s face that behind my jowls lay sufficient fillings and extractions to pay for his imminent house extension.

The dentist directed me to sit in the chair, and lowered me into the fully horizontal. I felt exposed and vulnerable; I stifled an urge to check that my zipper wasn’t agape. He prodded my gums with a sharp implement and proceeded to check each tooth in turn, while saliva trickled out of the corners of my open mouth. I then had to bite on a plastic gags (as if about be anally penetrated by a well-hung Turkish-prison guard) while my teeth were x-rayed.

Twenty minutes later I was recalled from the waiting room to hear the verdict. I half expected him to don the black cap before passing sentence. Multiple extractions required? Dentures the only option? Or, at best, numerous fillings needed to plug the pot-holes? Not one bit of it!

“Remarkably, all you have is a bit of gum recession requiring some resin filler. And we’ll give you a scale and polish while we’re at it. But overall your teeth are in good shape.”

I could detect a hint of disappointment in his voice.

This experience reinforces my life-long view that, for the sake of longevity, one should always avoid doctors and dentists for as long as possible!

              

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The company fridge

The Health and Safety brigade increasingly frustrate me. I know their aims are worthy in wanting to protect us all from harm, but they can often take things to an absurd extreme. The following examples, all derived from the last decade in the United Kingdom, should serve as illustration:

Prohibiting the throwing of sweets into a pantomime audience;

Banning the playing of conkers in a school playground;

The requirement that all November 5^th bonfires be registered with the local council;

Forbidding the provision of pins with Remembrance Day poppies.

Last month at my place of work the Infection Control Nurse became concerned about the state of our departmental fridge. Whereas I’ve always revelled in the recurrent Monday morning kitchen pastime of “find the source of that iffy smell,” Nurse Starchy has a radically different disposition and has insisted that the milk bottle infiltrated by Danish-blue and the banana encrusted with the sticky-black goo of decay present hazards to the health of all employees. As such, it is now company policy for each item left in the fridge to be labelled with the owner’s name along with the date it was put in; the fridge is inspected at the end of each day and any item not duly labelled is thrown away.

The implementation of this policy has led to many mutterings of discontent, particularly among the male workforce. Of course, not one of us has been brave enough to challenge Nurse Starchy – she is a terrifying woman – so our protests have remained covert. Yesterday I discovered that someone, as yet unknown, had pinned the following picture and caption onto the kitchen notice-board. It made me giggle, although I’m not sure what Nurse Starchy will make of it.     

Sexual angst of a 53-year-old man

                                                               

Mrs Jones and I have been a partnership for 31 years. During our 20s we creased the sheets with lusty regularity, fully immersed in the sensual pleasures of our smooth, lithe bodies. Everything happened naturally, without the need for introspection. This carnal abandon persisted throughout our 30s, albeit less often, the introduction of two children into the family unit acting to restrict opportunities for rumpy-pumpy. Despite the reduced frequency, my sexual performance remained top-notch (even though I say so myself - Mrs Jones might have a different view) apart from the occasional booze-related droop.

Then at some point in my mid-40s that sneaky bastard called Age started to wreak its own rancid brand of mischief. One evening, while stepping out of the shower, Age compelled me to inspect myself in the mirror. Horror! I was no longer a handsome young buck. Facial wrinkles, greying locks and an unwanted fold of skin hanging under the jowls like an over-used hammock provided damning evidence of my demise.

I lingered in front of the mirror, frozen by the creeping realisation of age-related decline. I had sprouted hair in all the wrong places, unsightly bristles spewing out of my nostrils and ears. My chest and abdomen were carpeted by wild, uneven tresses, an increasing proportion being grey; when I stared at my torso the pale bits seemed to spell out the message, “has-been.” There was even a triangular patch at the base of my spine, a kind of dorsal pubic hair.

This sobering realisation of bodily decay began to impair my sexual performance. Rather than being fully immersed in the act of making love, much of my mind was located on the bedroom ceiling, imagining how I would appear to a spectator. Where once I had envisaged smooth, iron-girder buttocks pumping athletically like Brad Pitt’s Achilles in the film Troy, the image in my head now more closely resembled Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid getting to grips with Madame Maxime in Harry Potter.

And to add to my growing self-consciousness I became obsessed with the size of my manhood. In my younger years I had no anxieties in this department. As a teenager at school in the communal showers after a sporting event I was never the victim of the “tiny todger” jibes, unlike some of my more unfortunate class-mates. I had always assumed I scored in the average range for penile length and, when an occasional doubt intruded into my mind, would reassure myself with the mantra that size doesn’t matter. But now I was increasingly inspecting the size of my genitalia in the mirror, from every angle, but always with the same disappointment. Let’s just say my meat was shrivelling northwards while my two vegetables were heading south!

During this period of self-doubt about my sexual prowess, I read a magazine article in a Sunday newspaper describing how male porn stars shave off their pubic hair so as to make their willies appear longer. Cue weekly, hazardous encounters with my electric shaver – I’d defy any man to trim his hedge with the Power-Comb of a Braun Series 5 without drawing blood!

When I reached that sobering 50-year-old milestone, my declining self-image formed a devastating coalition with my internal physiology (something to do with the blood vessels losing their springiness) to produce an escalating number of sexual failures. All seemed lost. The Jones’s sex life seemed to be on a downward trajectory. That was before I encountered what is, without doubt, the pharmaceutical industry’s most useful contribution to the civilised world: Viagra! But I’ll leave my experiences of taking this drug for a future post.          

      

  

A snotty son

The Jones family are currently riveted to the TV savouring the Olympic Games taking place in our home country. Over the weekend, my 21-year-old son and I were sitting in the living room watching the women’s beach volleyball – funny how we gravitated to that option given there were a dozen other channels to choose from – when an odd thing happened.

First, let me give you a bit more information about my son. Ryan is a great lad, bright, quick-witted and more charm than a cross-legged Indian who plays a flute for the snakes to dance to. He is, however, a bit strange in his ways. Since a child he has, for example, energetically refused to stand on a bath mat, protesting it felt “squidgy” under his feet. He is also overly alert to the risk of contamination; two years ago when I accidentally wore a pair of his new underpants he adamantly refused to wear them again despite them doing a couple of cycles of “boil wash” in our Bosch automatic. All-in-all, he must only be a foible away from being on the autistic spectrum.

Anyway, there I was in the living room sitting in my usual armchair, lap-top resting on my thighs, watching those lithe young female forms do battle at either side of the volley-ball net. Ryan was sitting on the settee, about two metres away, also transfixed on the TV. It remains a mystery as to what triggered my sneeze. I suffer with hay-fever so the precipitant might have been some air-borne pollen. Alternatively, sexual arousal can elicit sneezing (or so I’ve read – something to do with the co-location of the sexual and sneezing centres in the brain) so maybe it was the excess female flesh that stirred me. Whether it was dust or lust, what was clear was that I was beyond the point of no return towards a sneeze of nuclear proportion.

I fumbled for my handkerchief in my trouser pocket but a combination of ballooning middle-age mid-riff and sweaty thighs (from the warmth of the laptop) impeded my progress and I did not get it out in time. I tried to stifle the explosion rising within me by striving to keep my mouth shut and my nostrils constricted but all these efforts succeeded in doing was to narrow the barrel from which the sneeze was being emitted and thereby increase its velocity. 

AHHHH – CHOO! My sneeze reverberated through the living room, followed by an almost imperceptible thud, the reason for this second noise not at first being evident. I looked across at Ryan. His head was bowed, no longer ogling the beach volleyball, instead staring at the front of his designer t-shirt. As I squinted I could just about detect a green pellet of mucous on the white fabric front of his prized recent purchase. Holding the snotty part of his shirt away from his skin, Ryan jumped up and ran to the kitchen to show Mrs Jones what her “degenerate” husband had done. When he returned to the living room, still holding his soiled shirt out in front of him, I vainly tried to make amends by leaning over and wiping off the offending sputum with my (now retrieved) hanky.

“Are you sure that came from your mouth?” Ryan asked, his quivering voice suggesting he was still in shock.

“Yes,” I replied, “if it had come from my nose it would be crusty with a long tail.”

I expect to find a designer t-shirt in the trash-bin any time soon.                   

  

 

A Spanish robbery

“We’ll blink, and they’ll be holidaying together in Ibiza” I said.

It was spring 1996. Mrs Jones and I had arrived at the crèche at the end of a working day to pick up Becca, our 2-year-old daughter. Engrossed in play with her best friend Millie, our daughter had yet to notice our presence. We quietly observed as the two toddlers walked away from us, hand-in-hand, their nappy-clad arses swinging in synchrony as they made their way towards the bouncy-castle. At this time, the prospect of my sweet daughter night-clubbing in the party capital of Europe 1,000 miles away from the safety of dad’s protective gaze was both implausible and disturbing in equal measure. Little did I know that my casual comment of 16-years ago could legitimately see me crowned as a modern-day Nostradamus.

At 2.00 am yesterday morning Becca, now 18 years old, set off for Manchester Airport at the start of her first independent holiday. Together with Millie (they had lost touch with each other for a while but re-established their friendship a couple of years ago) and two other close friends, their destination was not Ibiza but the neighbouring Spanish island of Majorca. A popular attraction for young Brits, their pre-booked accommodation was at the Mallorca Rocks hotel in the resort of Magaluf (or “Shagaluf” as it is colloquially referred to by our local youths). The knowledge that my sweet baby girl was en-route to a non-stop, 11-day party marathon was difficult for my brain to digest, resulting in only fleeting sleep on the night of her departure.

The following day was uneventful. I was aware that her plane would have landed in Majorca around 10.00 am local time. No news was good news – it is striking how a previously carefree man can become neurotic, with catastrophic imaginings of carnage, when his baby girl is 30,000 feet high careering at over 600 miles per hour in a steel container. At the end of her first full day on holiday, I retired to bed early, and slept soundly. That was until 3.30 am (4.30 am Spanish time) when the intrusive screech of my mobile phone rudely ended my slumber. Only partially conscious, I groped for the handset at the side of my bed and put it to my ear. At first, all I could hear was whimpering, and the sound of someone struggling to breathe. Then my daughter’s pained voice.

“Dad, we’ve been robbed!”

“What’s happened sweetie?” I asked, trying to sound calmer than I felt.

“We’ve just got back to the hotel - (breathless, whimper, breathless) - and we found our door open - (whimper, breathless, whimper) - all our belongings strewn over the floor - (breathless, breathless) - and they’ve taken all our money - (starting to weep) - I want to come home dad.”

A huge wave of sadness hit me. My sweet, petite princess, on her first independent holiday, had been traumatised and had all her hard-earned cash stolen on the first day of what should have been one of the happiest times in her life. I switched into consoling dad mode, while thinking how I would like to rip the heads of the thieving bastards who had inflicted such despair on my little girl.

“It will be ok darling. No one has died or been injured. Report the theft to the hotel and, tomorrow, to the police. We’ll put some money in your account. Things always seem worse in the early hours of the morning; it will feel different tomorrow.”

After a few minutes, Becca calmed and regained her composure. She reassured me she’d be ok, was going to bed (this time with the door locked) and that she would contact me again once she’d slept.

Several hours later she rang and sounded much calmer, albeit a little awkward. They hadn’t been robbed after all! The true sequence of events was broadly as follows. Four excitable young women fly to Majorca overnight and land, sleep-deprived, at their Spanish resort around midday local time. Eager to pose by the pool, they partially unpack and spend the afternoon languishing on their sun-loungers guzzling Sangria. Returning to their rooms they shower and begin the prolonged ritual of getting themselves ready to party, trying on and deciding against several outfits, while consuming more of the local wine. Having decided not to purchase a safety-deposit box, each of the four young ladies hides her money and other valuables in random places within their room and leaves without locking the door, intent on enjoying Majorca’s famed nightlife. Six hours later, 4.30 am, they return, intoxicated, to discover their door unlocked and clothes and belongings strewn randomly across the floor. As each girl’s initial search for her money and valuables is unsuccessful (hiding places long forgotten) they instantly conclude that their room has been robbed and ransacked. Drama, of soap-opera proportions, ensues as most of the hotel occupants are made aware of their perceived misfortune.

Oh, to be young again!                 

   

I'd rather be poisoned!

Picture the scene. Late for work, keen to leave the house and almost all self-care tasks completed, I skip (rather nimbly) up the stairs intent on a quick teeth-clean only to find there is no toothpaste. Returning downstairs I collect the new “pump action” tube only to be confronted by that increasingly common source of modern day frustration, impregnable packaging.

My initial attempt to twist off the large transparent cap makes no impression. Further inspection of the reason for this inertia reveals that the whole tube, from cap to base, is trussed in a synthetic strait-jacket. I scan the plastic’s edge for the indentation, the weak point in the ramparts that will allow easy access, only to find that the paler streak in the packaging is just a crease and as unrelenting as the rest of it. My initial, targeted offensive with thumb-nail is to no avail and soon deteriorates into random, frantic (but fruitless) probing.

A combination of teeth, neck muscle and associated growling succeeds in removing the upper slither of polythene, without appreciably taking me any closer to functional access. The subsequent frenzied assault with a kitchen knife loosens a couple more strands of polythene, and nearly costs me a couple of digits, before the defences finally yield. Toothbrush in hand, I pump expectantly only to be further disappointed when no paste escapes from the tube, the nozzle being welded shut by an air-tight seal of silver-paper.      

Since, some years ago, an inadequate personality disordered fellow put broken glass (or other similarly noxious substance) in some jars of baby food, the health and safety brigade in collusion with manufacturers’ neuroses about the prospect of future litigation have ensured that a range of everyday items are tamper-proof. Personally, I would prefer to be exposed to the unlikely risk of toxins in my toothpaste rather than the daily frustrations associated with unassailable casing.