This new category of my blog is dedicated to my friend Jim who is able to express umbrage at anything from the idiocy of the Iraq war to the junk mail filling up his letterbox. Indeed he recently starred on page 3 of the Sydney Morning Herald ranting about the latterly mentioned stuffed letterbox.
What would Jim do? is a question that provides a boundary to my increasing fits of grumpiness. Sometimes I think I am a one old-woman consumer rights association but then Jim pulls out a rabbit and takes the title hands down.
In the past few weeks in the land of consumer rights trivia I have:
- taken a $5 bunch of daffs back to Woolies because they wilted within 24 hours;
- repeatedly reported next door’s leak to the Council since it keeps flowing into my yard and across the footpath;
- threatened to report a minor bingle to the police until the other party (who appeared to have only an Indian driver’s license) came good with a claim number;
- returned an inadequate v. expensive salt grinder for the second time;
- whinged loudly in the fruit shop about having to pay to lease a trolley to shop there and ending up leaving; and
On two recent occasions I had bad cafe experiences: –one where there was a rubber band in my soup; andanother where the avocado in the salad was black.
Both times the atrocities were quietly pointed out and on neither was I charged.
Outcomes that have encouraged me to try charm as an offensive for a change.
Surely things weren’t as bad in our day? Perhaps because the world was slower, more accountable and smaller. Then traders lost reputation if they sold dying flowers or flawed salt cellars; people felt responsible if their water leaked across the footpath.
Anyway I intend to keep whinging about bad service, bad bureaucracy and bad manners. Lousy financial advisors, skinny fashions and blond women driving 4 wheel monsters are next in my sights.
At least my mate and I are having a shot of making our little corners of the world accountable. If we don’t do it, who will? Besides these little pokes keep our skills honed for the next big ones.
And really all this superficial trivia of life is meaningless indulgence when 25% of children in a country like Britain are destined to live below the poverty line; there are 15 million poor children in American now; there are a million starving people in Somalia tonight; and hundreds of children are being sold into sex slavery.
Any wonder I escape into the immediate and the manageable.
A Game Old Dame 