HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

To celebrate the fact that I turned 29 on Sunday I decided to throw a little ‘soirgay’ at my place so my friends and I could all get ‘to-gay-ther’ and have lots of drinking and debauched fun, to a soundtrack consisting of Madonna albums, Madonna soundtracks, Madonna greatest hits, and Madonna 12” mixes, with the odd Madonna DVD thrown in, just to mix it up. It was also an opportunity to put a theory I have to the test. The theory involves a cooker, The Folks and their love of proving how fabulous they are in front of my friends, and is a mixture of complete cuntistry on my part and complete genius, also on my part.

I have been after a new cooker for a while now, as the one I have is older than me, is as temperamental as me and needs to be given lots of attention before it will even heat up a tin of soup. It is like that annoying vibrator you own that sometimes works after being charged all day and sometimes doesn’t. Or like sleeping with a male escort, you never know what you’re gonna get. The oven door hangs off, the grill doesn’t work, it is impossible to clean and halfway through meals it will randomly turn itself off, which is incredibly frustrating when you are trying to get something to rise……

Anyway, I have been dropping hints with The Folks for the last 4 months in the hope that they would buy me one. I’d say things like ‘I would have cooked you something but the oven is on the blink’ or ‘I’m living on breakfast cereal at the moment because the hob will not light up’ or ‘Sorry it’s so cold in here, I usually heat up the place with the stove, but as you know it’s not working’ and was sure I had done just enough to secure me a sparkling new cooker for the Christmas just gone. I was convinced that they would buy me one, so decided to spend the money I had put aside for it on even more Christmas presents. For myself. So you can imagine my utter disappointment when they arrived with my presents and the closest thing to a cooker I got was a candle lighter.

I cursed myself silently for spending my cooker fund, and the harsh realisation hit me that I would now be living on toasted cheese sandwiches until I could afford to save for another cooker. How COULD I have been so stupid I asked myself? And as soon as I thought the question in my head, the answer came to me even quicker than David Beckham does in my prison rape fantasy. As always, there was a major flaw to my plan.

The Folks are very generous and love nothing more than to lavish gifts upon me; in the last year they have bought me a state of the art tumble drier, a rather fabulous barbeque, fixtures and fittings, appliances and much more. However, all of these have been given to me in front of people. Now, as I was spending Christmas with friends, and they were spending it at home there was nobody to see the presents I had been given and therefore no need to buy something extravagant. What is the point of giving if you have no audience eh?

So, with my birthday, approaching and now growing sick of cold soup and toasted sandwiches I had an epiphany. To have a ren-gay-vous ON my birthday with lots of guests and invite The Folks. Surely if there is an audience there will be a cooker.

The Folks arrived at 2:30 and presented me with a card and a bottle of champagne and of course big birthday hugs. Mmm I thought handling the bottle, is this my cooker? By 4pm everyone had arrived there was no cooker in sight, and I had already had too much to drink. I began to think that all I was getting was said bottle of champagne. Not much cooking you can do with that I thought, so I opened it, downed it and started to feel somewhat hard done by. I went to the bathroom and sat in there wondering why The Folks hated me so much. What had I done to deserve this?

I was already starting to feel quite drunk as well as sorry for myself and decided not to leave the bathroom for the rest of the day. This shindig had been a complete waste of time and I wondered what the Sarah Jessica Parker I was thinking by putting this on? Just as I was about to take an overdose of the Vitamin C in my cabinet everyone outside started singing Happy Birthday, and I walked out to find The Folks, with the cooker I had been yearning for, and all of my friends gushing telling me what a lucky person I am and how fabulous The Folks were. And just like that, it went from a celebration of my birthday, to a celebration of The Folks.

So, I got what I wanted and they got what they wanted. I got the cooker and they got the adoration of being the world best Folks, just as I had predicted. If only I had thought about it logistically pre Christmas, who knows what I could of bagged myself for my birthday?

I now want a flat screen TV so, I guess I will be having another ‘soir-gay’ next year, and of course, The Folks are invited.

Is it cuntistry, or just pure genius?

Just when you thought it was safe to install a BT line

A colleague of mine was just talking about what a nightmare she is having with getting a landline installed in her new place. BT have been mucking her about for nearly three weeks and it was outrageous she said. Have I ever heard of anything so shocking from a large corporation she asked? Yes, I have I thought........

I moved into my new fabulous riverside flat in March this year, on my birthday in fact. Whilst it costs more to run this two bedroom flat than it did to rent my previous three bedroom house with a garden, I am still immensely happy that I made the move. It is the perfect flat, and it is the nicest place I have ever lived. It seemed to have everything I could possibly need. Except for a telephone line. How on earth the previous tenants had managed to live for 15 years without a landline was beyond me, and I put it down to them being aliens from another planet that communicated via the toaster.

There is no way that I can live without my Sky TV so had to get a telephone line installed before that could be fitted. Three weeks I had to wait for an appointment for an engineer. I can't tell you how many episodes of Will & Grace I missed in that period. I know I have them all on DVD but still, I like turning Living on at 7pm and knowing that I have an hour of the last greatest sitcom to watch before I even consider feeding the cat or feeding myself. So these were three very tough weeks indeed. I decorated, cleaned out my wardrobe, filed papers, caught up on washing, put shelf's together, put curtains up organised pot cupboards, alphabetised my CD, DVD and book collection. Not as productive as sitting on the sofa in front of Sky I'm sure you will agree. Who wants to spend their time doing that? All I want out of life is escapism. I watch these shows and pretend they are my life. I don't want to have to deal with reality, so I absolve myself in sitcoms and hang my every last hope on a witty new one liner they produce that I can drop into conversations with my friends to have them laugh hysterically and think I am devastatingly funny.

The BT engineer arrive promptly at 1:30pm. I asked if he wanted a cup to tea, which I think is always nice thing to do even though you are secretly hoping they will decline. Thankfully he did, but asked if he could use my toilet So I left him to it, as he wasn't very attractive so I didn't feel the need to ask if he needed me to hold anything. He seemed to be taking an awfully long time, and I was about to knock on the door when he came out. "um, I just have to pop downstairs he said" Fine, I thought, he obviously has to install the line from outside and is off to get cracking on it. I was slightly confused when I watched him jump in his van and speed off. Maybe the connection box is around the corner I pondered? Nothing really mattered at this point except the fact that Sky TV was on the horizon. An engineer was due at the weekend to install that. Everything was going as planned, which is so unlike me.

An hour and a half later he still hadn't returned and at this stage I was starting to worry if he had been a BT engineer at all. maybe he had just come here to case the joint. All sorts of things were going through my head. I wondered if he was a sex maniac that enjoyed knocking on peoples doors, asking to use their toilet and then masturbating in them, whilst the tenant remains oblivious to what has happened, he has got his kicks thank you very much and off he goes. But no, he didn't do that. Nor had he place a bomb in my bathroom. He had dropped a bomb though. Looking into my toilet I saw the largest turd I have ever seen in my life. It was like an Anaconda. it was so big that it had it's very own postcode and website.

Turns out the BT engineer had blocked my toilet, felt so supremely embarrassed and mortified about the whole thing that he decided the only thing to do was run out of my flat never to be seen again. He didn't even have the decency to fold it up in some tissue and take it with him and dispose of it somewhere, anywhere but MY flat. But more to the point he hadn't fitted my land line which would enable me to watch Sky. I was livid. Not only did I have to call a plumber as he had shoved a years supply of paper down the toilet as well as leaving what had to be half of his spine in the loo, I also had to call BT and explain what had happened. Try explaining that to a call centre in New Delhi. "Sir, we are not plumbers we are British Telecom, we cannot help you with your enquiry" 'I know you're not plumbers, but I need to call one because of the reptile your colleague has left in my flat. Who is going to pay for this" I screamed . The response was the same monotonous robotic drivel I have come to expect from these larges corporate companies that outsource their call centres to far away places without minimum wages and pay their staff in grains of rice. "sir, what is the call regarding?"

It was infuriating. I was getting nowhere and really losing my temper. I had to speak to a person rather than a robot.

Me: Please can you put your manager on the line, I need to speak to somebody with a better grasp of the English language

Vikash: To my manager sir? And what is the call regarding

Me: The fact that you cannot help me with my problem

Vikash: What is the problem sir

Me: Your engineer has just blocked my toilet, I need to call a plumber and I expect you to pay for it. I also expect you to get someone around here to fit my land line

Vikash: Sir, we are not plumbers, we are BT

Me: Oh shove it up your arse

Vikash: I'm sorry Sir, but what is your call regarding

They really do NOT know how to deal with people and this guy at the end of the line clearly thought I was at home licking the light switches. I hung up and tackled the problem by sending an email the following day when I was back at work. My land line was installed three days later naturally by a different engineer. Titanic Turd obviously didn't want to return to the scene of the crime. The chap they sent was very nice indeed, He didn't use my toilet, and was very professional. Well, I say professional, after he installed my line he did call an hour later to ask if I fancied a drink some time. I declined. I decided that I'd had quite enough of all things BT by this stage. I promptly changed my number and service provider.

It has left me with a lingering question though. What does BT stand for? British Telecom or Blocked Toilet?

Thursdays are the new black

When my alarm woke me this morning, I at first thought I had suffered a stroke. There was a funny taste in my mouth, I couldn't move and my head was extremely fuzzy. I had visions of myself laying there paralysed for weeks only to be discovered when neighbours complained of a funny smell coming from flat number 5............ However, slowly last nights antics came flooding back and I realised I had not had a stroke. I had just had Telstar over last night. The funny taste in my mouth was from the last fajita I had wolfed down at 2.52 am and the reason I couldn't move could probably be related to the 4 bottles of vino we had shared, and my head was most likely fuzzy because it was 7:30 am, and Telstar and I had been up drinking until 4:00 am.

I am of the opinion that Thursday is the new Friday. I have always preferred going out on a Thursday, because it is a school night and you are technically being naughty as there is work the next day, but you can justify staying up drinking like we did last night as you only have Friday to get through, just one day of hell. Put like that it just makes sense. For me there is something rather comforting and familiar about waking up the way I did today. It means the weekend is here.

Telstar and I had much to discuss last night, firstly his impending redundancy. I know exactly how he feels, because I suffered the same thing back in July from the same company. The funny thing is, at my leaving drinks I had jokingly said to Telstar- you'll be gone by December. I was a month out, his last day is 31st January. Neither of us are particularly happy about the situation, Telstar because he is out on his ear, and me because my psychic powers are not as finely tuned as they once were. So we spent some time planning our revenge and have decided the best way is to contact Watch Dog who will in turn expose them as the charlatans they are to the nation. We have both decided that our interviews for the showare to be filmed with us silhouetted..... We are clearly very bitter about the whole thing, but like mother always said, revenge is better than Christmas.

We then talked shop, making many new discoveries along the way, such as whilst Telstar is a staunch atheist, I am borderline agnostic. We are both currently having issues with our step parents and are considering cutting our real ones out of our lives altogether. We both have the new Jamiroquai cd on our wish list, and neither of us are any closer to realising our dream of sleeping with hot Brit actor Danny Dyer.

I then made us chicken fajitas, (with no offer of help to be had) while Telstar sank wine like prohibition was coming in, played with my cat and made a general nuisance of himself by dancing around my kitchen while I was trying to prepare a meal. To be honest I was quite glad he was where I could see him. usually when he comes over he is far too busy stealing my clothes and Will & Grace box sets to offer me any form of help in the kitchen....... the DVD's I completely understand, I mean, Will & Grace is the best sitcom ever made, but the clothes confuse me. I am 5' 5" and a little bit, shall we say rotund, and Telstar is over six foot and makes Nicole Ritchie look like she should be on the Zone. When we walk down the road together, we look like the number 10.

Things took a turn for the worse when I pulled out a joint that I had secured form Mr C the previous evening. Neither of us have smoked a joint in about 2 years, and it was like riding a bike, you never actually forget how to do it. What you do forget is the effect that it can have on your speech and coordination. We smoked it like we were a pair of Rastafarians swaying in hammocks, listening to Buju Banton, who were used to smoking the equivalent of their dreadlock weight in gunja a day. But we are in fact two light weight queens who bit off more than they could chew. Telstar was having trouble getting the contents of his fajita in his mouth, and I was having difficulty speaking in my mother tongue. The next thing I know, Telstar is rummaging in my fridge looking for double cream and a melting chocolate sponge pudding, whilst I am giggling so hard I drop my glass of wine onto the kitchen floor. This resutled in even more hysterics, and at one point only the cats and dogs in the neighbourhood could hear us. It was all getting a little bit too real for our liking so we decided the only way forward was to drink ourselves into stupor in a bid to cancel out the effects of the joint and to ease our paranoia.

All in all it was a good night, and I for one, can't wait to do it all over again