24 July 2009 (Friday) - To The Post Office

To the post office to collect a parcel. They now insist that you produce some identification before they hand over your parcel to you. The fact that you’ve got the slip they left isn’t good enough. Apparently someone might be sneaky enough to have broken into your house to nick that slip. So I showed the retard-on-duty my passport.

It was actually rather embarrassing watching him trying to read the name and address on my passport and attempt to compare it to the information on the parcel. Eventually he satisfied himself that they matched, and handed both back to me. I pointed out that surely he should have compared the photo on the passport with my face. Surely all that any I.D. with an address on can show is that you got that I.D. from the same place where the post office’s slip was left. I might have nicked that passport whilst I was nicking the delivery slip. And therefore what he’d so laboriously scrutinised was no better than just producing the slip the postman left in the first place. Surely you need to know that the person collecting the parcel is who they claim to be, not that they have potentially stolen several things from the same address?

However the application of intelligence was way beyond this retard’s capability, and I left him standing with a look of utter confusion on his dial. I think I might become a retard – life would be so much simpler.

Today was the last day of my secondment, and I got given another epic task to do. I wonder if I shouldn’t have accepted that job at the hospital at Chatham all those months ago.

Despite torrential rain I went to Margate for the last time (for a while). My lecture today was on leukaemia, and it seemed to go down well. One of the students was on holiday, but she came in especially for my session. What was supposed to be twenty minutes went on for an hour and a half.

A shame that this secondment has to end – I’ve got so much done in three months. And all the students have said they’ve got more done with me in three months than in the last year or so. I’ve gently suggested they write to management.

And for all that I hate driving, I actually like driving to Margate – well, I like driving home from Margate. Stopping of at Pegwell Bay for a crafty cuppa and to watch the kite surfers. And then the view of the cross-channel ferries from Jubilee Way driving down into Dover. I shall miss all that.

When I got home, despite the torrential rain, I mucked out the pond’s fish poo filter. There was no one home, and so I had this idea that if I was quick, I wouldn’t get any grief for doing so. I’ve taken to cleaning the thing out in the bath, as it’s easier all round. I don’t have to lug buckets of water all over the place, and the carp turds go down the plughole. The only drawback is that (for no adequately explored reason) the women get all twitchy about it. But I had the thing apart, scrubbed, back in place and myself bathed before they came home. They will never know…