Irritation Station

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I wonder if I should start a weekly column of things which have annoyed me that week.

There's no shortage of material, from the way my 75 year old father can't grasp that his computer isn't telepathic, to the way the media vacillate when reporting a protest which turns into a riot and occupation - do they call the protesters rude names like "animal" and "mindless" with loving, lingering shots of one policewoman with a cut forehead...or do they dismiss it with a ten second segment on a handful of misfits making a racket?

They don't know either, so they do both.

What should I call such a column? Ticked-off Tuesday? Why-I-Hate-My-Life-Wednesday? Kapitano's Krappy Days?

Yesterday I dragged myself out of bed for a 10am meeting with a student - to spend the morning proofreading their PhD thesis. Still wishing I was in bed at 1030, I called the student in the cold outside their department, to gently ask why they're delayed.

The response was a bleary voice saying I'd just woken them up, so could I wait half an hour for them to shower and bicycle in. I said okay.

At 1130 I called again, just to check they were still coming. The response was a bleary voice saying I'd just woken them up again, so could I wait half an hour for them to shower and bicycle in. I said okay again.

At 1215 they appeared - and wanted to go to a coffee shop for breakfast. Seeing as this involved them buying me a cup of coffee, I went along - and got talking with a friend of theirs who wanted English lessons for his wife. Another client maybe - nice.

So at some time after 1pm, we started our, erm, morning of work, which ended at 5:30 when we both needed to go home to catch up on sleep.

And started again at 9pm when we'd done that. Because the PhD was due handed in the next day. I suspect this is how all five year PhD projects work.

I got home at 2am and collapsed into bed - my plans to work on my great novel put on hold for the day.

This morning, woken up first by a strange man in my bedroom - actually a builder who needed to check something or other before repairing the drains. My parents have had a shifting cast of cheerful men in paint-stained jeans doing things to the outside wall for the past fortnight, but this is the first one who affected a plummy accent with clipped vowels.

The second time it was the student again on the phone, wanting to know how to copy and paste in Microsoft Word - on which he's spent years typing up his PhD.

And finally it was another strange man - this one in a call center, reading painfully from a script trying to sell me stock market tips. Presumably it was a company which takes commission from other companies to recommend the latter's stocks and shares as sure-fire wins - but instead of asking I just hung up.

There's an art to hanging up on nuisance callers which I haven't yet mastered. Next time I'll try doing it in the middle of their second sentence.

And finally, the weather's bloody cold, the shops are full of frelling christmas music, my wi-fi keeps cutting out, people keep telling me I can't be happy till I make some babies, the country is full of people who blame people poorer than themselves when the government makes them poorer...

...and the world is slightly more doomed than it was yesterday because Barack Obama made John Shimkus chair of the House Energy Committee. This man believes climate change is impossible because God promised Moses Noah he wouldn't flood the world a second time.

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Correction: Yes, it was Noah, not Moses. Blame my annoyed mind for not concentrating on that part.

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