You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2007.
I don’t like to swear, I can’t remember the last time I strung together a string of profanities with any real venom and in general I don’t think that using bad language to express dissatisfaction with anything really gets anyone anywhere. I think that there should be a better way to express what you’re feeling that resorting to profanity, but sometimes there are situations where nothing else seems to fit and right now is one of those times. If your mum would disapprove of you reading words like “shit”, “fuck” or “contract law” then please stop reading. If you’d like to see me losing my cool and having a fairly chunky rant then please read on… normal updating will continue from next Monday.
Right… no updates in a while, I’ve just been a little stressed out about the shop as I’ve been trying to hurry up the guy at number 10 Cheshire Street to get on with changing over the contract so that we can give him his money and be done with it. It’s been more than a month since we agreed a price for the transfer and so I’ve been gently (perhaps more than gently at times) harrassing him for the past few weeks I suppose and I guess the strain of trying to sort out the simple transfer of a lease contract has just been too much for him to cope with.
He’s pulled out of the deal and so I’m no longer just about to move into a shop.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHDICKCHEESERATBASTARDGIMPRABBITFUUUUUUUUUUUCKERRAPEGOATFELCHINGSHITWANKINGSONOFABITCHANALBISCUIT!!!!!!!
Was more or less what I said when I heard the news.
I’ve been annoyed with him before being slow, being indistinct, being greedy, being irrational, being out of touch, being indecisive, being generally clueless, but now I’m just intensely burningly angry with him in general.
Basically his reason for pulling out has been “all this legal stuff” or so I was told by Faisal on the phone today. What’s that supposed to even mean? If you’re transferring a lease from one person to another then of course you need to do “all this legal stuff”! What can you possibly do without “all this legal stuff”? We’ve got to transfer a donkey sodomising lease contract over, it’s not as if when I move in that the magical contract pixies come down in the middle of the night when all the children are asleep and shimmy their magical litigious phalluses over everything and suddenly it’s all fucking peachy. If there’s no transfer of contract then there’s nothing!
I think he might have some sort of crazy idea that the lawyers are all out to steal his money and that somehow if we go through this the right and proper way then he won’t get paid anything and I’ll somehow screw him over. Ironically I think the exact same thing the other way around, which is why I’d rather not do it his way… the only difference is that I’m right goddammit! I’m going to go meet him one last time and try to explain what it is the lawyers do and that if he hires one then it becomes his job to make sure that I pay what I should, not steal his money and take his soul. I’m not massively optimistic.
If it turns out that I can’t convince him what a good idea it is to do this with proper procedure then really… good fucking riddance! I don’t care if I end up paying more money to get another shop just so long as I don’t have to deal with him and his incomprehensible bullshit any more. He’s been driving me crazy for the past 6 months and it’s not like I don’t have other options. His chances, on the other hand seem quite severely limited so I hope he develops a taste for the (metaphorical) rusty spiked and ever expanding anal pear shaftings that will be coming his way when he actually needs to move back home like he says he wants to and tries to find himself a buyer.
If he had a particular way that he wanted things done then why didn’t he say at the start?! Why did the gimp-straddling bastard have to waste 6 months of my time trying to sort out a suitable agreement with him when I could have found someone so much more reasonable to negotiate with instead! If he has such particular demands then why the fuck couldn’t he have been clear rather than leaving it to me to lead? Maybe I was a fool to spend so much time and effort to try and work something out with him, but I really do like his shop, it’s just a pity about the shit eating slut gibbon inside it.
Incidentally, Faisal’s still the dude, he sounded more generally upset by the deal being off than I was, but when I reminded him that we’ve still got Nadim in number 28 to go to too and that I wasn’t annoyed with him at all, he brightened up a fair bit. He’s such a lovely happy-go-lucky sort of guy.
Well, I do like to sign off on a positive note and although I do feel fairly happy still about everything in general and especially about the prospect of never having to negotiate with Mr.Number-10-Cheshire-Street-Man again, I just don’t think I can do it. So instead I’d just like to use this space to say…
Fuck you Mr.Number-10-Cheshire-Street-Man. Fuck you for your ridiculous and tenuous grip on modern business practices and reality. Fuck you for your dodgy anachronistic ways. Fuck you for spending most of your time apparently playing solitaire while I work two jobs simultaneously. Fuck you for your aloof and uninterested attitude in everything. Fuck you for your iniquitous and ever changing “negotiation strategy”. Fuck your strange demands. Fuck you for your fear of contract law. And just in general, fuck you… fuck you through your urethra and into your soon-to-be-very-severely-haemorrhaged bladder with a vomiting hammerhead shark covered in lemons.
Goodnight.
This may sound like the worst and least exciting bit of news ever considering the huge gap that I’ve just had in updating and it’s probably a sign of my worsening grip on reality that I would consider this news but…
I’ve just worked out how I’m going to redo the floor in the shop’s basement!
I’ve been vaguely worrying about this for a while since the floor down there is just concrete at the moment and hardly a decent surface for a kitchen floor (I’m sure the health and safety people would agree) but if I even wanted to coat the room in the cheapest lino that I could find (and actually I really did) it was still going to cost somewhere in the region of £1000 if I actually wanted to have a half decent underlay. As much as I would like my kitchen to look like sort of horrible throwback with slightly stained and thoroughly cheap everything the idea of paying out the same amount of money for a tacky lino floor as I did for my gorgeous coffee shrine was just plain galling. I had a look round various alternatives about 3 months back or so and didn’t really come up with anything good… but that was just because I was searching for actual flooring.
After finally finding someone really helpful at Food Safety I actually got a chance to talk about details on how I should lay out the shop and what I could put where and what things should be made of. He stressed the policy line that surfaces should be “easily cleanable” and that ventilation should be “adequate” just like everyone else I’ve spoken to has, but actually put some thought into his answers. It was amazing! After running through countless conversations going something like
“Hi, I wanted to ask your opinion before I bought a countertop for my shop. The regulations say that any easily cleanable surface would be sufficient. So, what surfaces would I be allowed to use?”
“Oh, any surface that would be easily cleanable.”
“And what surfaces are allowed under your definition of “easily cleanable”?”
“…”
“Is varnished wood easily cleanable?”
“…”
“Is untreated wood easily cleanable?”
“…”
“Is slate or marble easily cleanable?”
“We would have to judge on inspection whether the surface was adequate.”
“But I want to get your opinion first before I actually buy anything and to me all those surfaces seem fine. Would any of them be inadequate?”
“…
I’ll need to ask my manager.
…
…
…
Can I take your name and number and we’ll call you back when we can advise you?” (except that they never do)
it’s a breath of fresh air to have someone who listens to what you need to do and then recommends things right away based on what he thinks the would satisfy the regulations. It’s a joy to talk to someone with any sort of authority who feels ok saying that a chunky extractor fan is probably overkill for the basement and just having a vent fan like the ones you need for toilets should be perfectly fine. So Sensible! Not only that, but when he says that he’d call me during the week he called me first thing on Monday morning!!! It’s awesome.
Anyway when we were talking about what we’d need for a stockroom he thought that if the floor in there was painted concrete already then it wouldn’t need any new flooring after since it’s pretty good stuff. Having been told that I went and had a quick google of painted concrete floors and found out that actually, once you get them properly sealed and underpainted and then painted and then covered in a couple layers of polyurethane, you can having them really well finished, marvelously easy to clean and just about everything else I could possibly want. Apparently it’s even becoming quite fashionable in some parts of the States as a normal interior floor. The best part is that even if I buy all the different bits I could possibly buy it still only costs a fraction of the price of having lino put down… and I can even get it in not-particularly-welcoming-really-rather-industrial-grey – my favourite colour in the whole world!
I think I know what I might spend my hard saved cash on…
Recently my favourite blog on the net has been Yuka Yamaguchi’s sit, Plastique Monkey. I love everything about it from her strange deformed child/animals to the little videos and things she finds fun or cute, to her absolutely stunning gallery section, but what I really love most are the recipes and the pictures that go with it that get interspersed throughout everything.
Go and check out her site, it’s really lovely and I’m sure you’ll be entranced.
It’s also made me want to take photos of things… err… the family camera’s a little funny and seems to like to take photos of things far away rather than what’s in front of it. Which would be lovely if I were trying to take a photo of mum’s painting in the background rather than a closeup of a chocolate centre.
It does look rather pretty though. At least I’ve got a picture of some borscht that can go up.
