Month: September 2006

Categories
Displeasure Guidance Meander

How to obtain a Bankers Draft

1. Walk into the bank at 9:02 in the morning. Walk straight up to the enquiries desk, and tell the lad behind it (who, incidentally, is young enough to be your son) that you want to arrange a bankers draft to buy a house.
2. He will ask for ID. You give him your bank card and driving license. He disappears into the locked-down area, calling back over his shoulder “It will take about 15 minutes.”
3. Loiter.
4. A couple of minutes later, he will reappear with a form. Eventually you will manage to wrap your head round it, and fill it in. He disappears with the form again.
5. Loiter.
6. Twenty minutes later, he will reappear and give you back your ID. He will tell you that the system is just checking your signature, and it will take a couple of minutes. He disappears.
7. Loiter. Wish you had brought a book.
8. Twenty minutes later, he reappears with a slim brown envelope. He asks you to check it.
9. You check the amount carefully.
10. You are distinctly underwhelmed by this thing. It’s basically just a cheque without your signature on it. It appears that you are going to have to deliver this thing yourself. You ask, and lad confirms.
11. 9:45 – Anticlimax.

Categories
Meander

Or maybe the gate ran into the car?

The first thing that I saw this morning, upon leaving the house, was a small white French hatchback embedded in a gate, with considerable damage to the front bumper, and two guys tugging furiously to try and free it.

The arse end of the car was poking into the street, so naturally traffic flow was somewhat disrupted. While I idled in this queue, I pondered the possible steps that could have led up to this collision, as I often do. Taking into account the angle at which the car was embedded in this gate, and the nature of the road on which the gate dwells, I could only conclude that the driver had hurtled out of a side road at inappropriate speed and… well… kept going.

Presence or absence of skidmarks on the road (now now, don’t snigger at the word skidmarks) would have given more information: did the driver attempt to turn, but lose front-wheel grip? Did the driver attempt to turn, discover his route blocked, and straighten out, after deciding that a collision with a gate was preferable to a head-on with another vehicle? Did the driver faint at the wheel?

By the time I’d done my pondering, the number of guys tugging on the hatchback had swelled to half a dozen, including a couple of well-built road workers in high-visibility gilets ((Hmmm, that was strangely satisfying. Gilet. Gilet. Gilet.)), so I considered that my skills as a computer programmer were probably surplus to requirements, and I drove on. Somehow, I doubt that the cause of the incident was a software error.