Master of Boredom

People have many skills in life. And when you develop skills, you keep going further and further with them until you reach a certain point in your life where you feel you have mastered that or those skills. Like any used-to-be-a-monkey being on this planet I too have some skills contained in my husk of a body (lacking a SOUL). Some skills, such as drawing which I proudly admit I am decent at, have been with me for life. Others are more recent, such as the apparent ability to imitate an ostrich, chicken, pigeon and Velociraptor (maybe I hatched from an egg when I was born?).

"Name: Seán O'Beirn
Age: 1
Soul Status: Non-Existent "

But I would never say I have mastered any of these skills, but I'm continuing to develop them. One skill I have mastered however, is something I face everyday. In fact, many of you, like me, have most likely mastered this skill too but I'm calling the throne on this one because I'm writing about it. I have mastered Boredom. Now I know you're probably thinking "Duuuuuh! But Seán, boredom isn't a skill, hyuck!" which is true, it's almost as wrong as saying that Brian Cowen is pretty.


"Our Taoiseach isn't too photogenic... or any-genic for that matter"

It's a state of mind really, but challenging boredom with even the simplest of things you eventually find ways to always, and I mean ALWAYS (facebook stalking anyone?), escape boredom . So I like to call boredom a skill in the sense we do little things to eventually master our boredom. It's like a portal to developing other skills. I know it sounds a little silly to say "I have mastered my skill of Boredom". However, I think it sounds a little better than "I have mastered the skill of entertaining myself" so I think I'll stick with the previous.

When we're bored we usually begin to experiment with things around us. We will do anything to beat our boredom, which ends up literally letting our mind unhinge. This is the first phase, or as I like to call it "The Stupid Phase". I think I can honestly say, this video pretty much sums it up:



We basically go a little "Sarah Palin" crazy and release all of our energy in extremely odd and stupid ways while no one is around (no, that shelf isn't climbable...). This ends and we go into the second phase, which is "The Routine Phase". In the Routine Phase we begin to walk around the house finding things to clean or laundry to do (I for one, like to listen to the Inception soundtrack while doing this, it makes laundry time undeniably EPIC). We eat tea, we drink custard cream biscuits and we stare at something in the room that's partially covered and wonder what it is for 5 mins. This phase varies in length for everyone (depending on how many custard cream biscuits you might have) but when it ends we reach the final stage.


"The Routine Phase may last a while..."

In the final stage we reach the "Productive Stage". In this stage we find something grabs our attention longer than that of Mel Gibson trying not to be racist. This can be a skill we're good at, like cooking, or taking up something entirely new such as, in my case, writing on this very blog. It's usually something that we enjoy or have become interested in recently and we begin to build on our knowledge of it and how we use this skill. It's kind of like Angelina Jolie, she got bored one day and decided that she wanted to get into adopting, an boy oh boy, has she been refining that skill since!


"Angelina Jolie: Soon... Soon you will ALL be MINE!"

I think that the first two stages can swap around for different people but the final stage always stays put as the final stage. Eventually as each stage plays out more frequently (ala, because you're on the dole) you become quicker at adapting to boredom and soon enough, like pterodactyl on speed, you're flying it, pun intended (har har har). In the end, the moment you feel bored, you'll know when you've mastered the skill of boredom when you find something worth doing straight away instead of phases 1 to 3.

Now... begin stage 1 my pretties....

Waking Up in Strange Places

Have you ever woken up in a strange place and forgotten how you got there for a brief moment? Until reality comes crashing down on you, or in my case, you go crashing into reality (aka ground).

Let me tell you a story about one of the more odd places I've woken up in. How I got there was obvious, I was indulging in a few underage drinks with my friends. And like all underage drinking nights, something stupid happens. To me. I remember the night not clearly now, back yonder to my sweet 16 days, it was my friends super sweet 16th birthday and it was super fucking cold out...

I don't remember exactly how we got the drink, but anyways, we used to drink in this field between two estates thinking it was safe, when in reality it was actually quite a retarded place to drink. Anyone could trap us there and people, mainly parents, frequently walked it on visits or on catching-underage-drinkers strolls. Luckily for us, the Garda in Castlebar are as retarded as we were (double negative makes a positive!!), so we never really did get caught.


"Oh no! Double Garda means double negative! That means there poooositively will be trouble!"

So we would drink there, bushing as it were, and we would go clubbing (or we would go "club", because there was only one really worth going to, unless you had one of those spontaaaaaaneous  urges to be stabbed at the other). This particular night though, it turned out that going club was as fun as sitting in a cold shower trying to light a cigarette. If that doesn't make it clear, I will just say, it was not fun. Fun it was not. Luckily clever little ustards stashed some extra drink back in our field. So back we went back, flaming 3 can heads on us, we WERE Castlebar!!

We arrived at the field, it was beginning to rain, but like good alcohal does to you, it makes you forget why our bodies warn us of cold, of pain, of stupid decisions, of just about everythingness. So we drank for a while and then for the first time ever noticed a peculiar tree about 100 metres away. It looked a little something like this:


"We might've been seeing a little extra that night..."

One of my friends let us in on a little secret, apparently it was a BANSHEE TREE, oh my! So not only did parents, Garda, scumbags and children walk this field, but also screaming dead old women. I have to say that was certainly a little more alarming than most things (apart from Irish Radio). Especially if you believed in it, which unfortunately one of my friends did (at the time). I won't mention his name though because James will get really angry at me.

So we left the field because this tree was creeping people out (or person). The weather had also gotten a little bitchy so that last pulsating part ourselves that was sober managed to give common sense a shout and get us to make a move along. We did move along, but alas, underage drinkers don't really have a place in the world besides in the wild emerald banshee infested fields of Ireland. So what was the next best thing to a field? Well since we felt neglected by nature, with it's sky piss and tree whores we decided to drink in a place that was fighting back for us, a building site.

At this point  I had drank a few more cans, and being the Captain Incapableofalcohal I was, I was pretty shteamed.  We found the building site, with a lovely shed to shelter us and lots of cardboard to go pyro with. So we had it all, shelter, warmth, drink... but wait, we didn't have ONE thing. Music! Now, before I go on, I don't  really listen to bands at all, I'm a bit of soundtrack buff, or scores or whatever you wanna call them. I like them ranging from TV shows to films to videogames. This night in particular I felt like being a videogame music. So I kept singing this:



Now don't even ask me how or what I was doing, let alone the fact that only one of my friends actually knew what I was talking (singing?) about. The rest just stared on at me while I constantly repeated myself until (and I'm just realising that this was probably the case) they actually had to resort to giving me enough drink to put me to sleep, which admittedly, wasn't a whole lot. I gladly took it, they gladly saw it worked. I blacked out, which was unfortunate because everything in the night was fairly non memorable, yet the part I forgot was pretty much essential in knowing what shouldn't have happened next.

Anyways, all I remember next was waking up cold. I didn't open my eyes because I didn't exactly quite realise I was awake yet. So like I always do in my bed, I turn over to get a little more comfy. Except I wasn't in my bed. And what happened next certainly wasn't comfy. If the coldness didn't wake me, the 7 foot fall to the ground definitely did. As I laid there sideways in the kind of pain that can only be described as listening to Justin Bieber, I saw that I had laid my shoes perfectly and neatly next to the scaffolding that I had just taken a short cut off of. It turns out that at some point in the night I felt like that the higher I was the safer, BUT I HAD to make sure my shoes were neatly stowed away first. I probably just wouldn't have slept otherwise!

Anyways, I think one or two of the lads were awake in the shed, and I'm pretty sure if they weren't, the sound of me hitting rock surely did (I was something of a human alarm clock). We awoke, we felt pain, we felt misery, we felt hungover. Yes the boys of  the super sweet 16th certainly WERE Castlebar that morning (that sentence is to be read like the narrator in desperate housewives).

Any of ye ever awake in a funky place?

Flight of Doom

There are a few things in life that absolutely terrify me: Leaving the cupboard slightly open when trying to sleep, using the toilet and then realising there's no toilet paper left, trying to change the channel from E4 when Hollyoaks is about to start but you can't find the remote, etc.. But none of them come as close as being in one of these while they are doing their thing:



These flying metal cargo coffins are quite simply one of the safest most dangerous ways to travel. People always say flying is the safest way to travel and that you're more likely to crash on the way to an airport than to be in a plane crash. That's all dandy, I mean, how often is there crashes in Ireland really? Oh wait, all the TIME. But there is one key difference between a car accident and a plane crash, let me illustrate with this video:



It's called playing a little game of "Chances of Survival". I think even the first air plane crash of the video illustrates what I'm talking about. Just parking the f@&king thing proves to be a life or death situation, at least when I'm in my friends car when he's parking we're not going to drive into a goddam jungle and explode. On top of that you're sitting in this confined space with probably 50 other strangers screaming in your face while thinking "I wish I got to see Batman 3" *sad face* before becoming a gravity pancake with a topping of flaming petroleum (the only way this could be possibly more terrifying is if the Hollyoaks theme song played over all of it). Now, I'm not gonna lie....

...Good, I'm glad we got that out of the way!

Anyways, I actually used to be quite calm on planes but unfortunately for me, the National Geographic Channel decided that when I was 17 years old it was as good as any time to unleash Air Crash Investigation into my naive little World. It was like watching CSI about planes (without gingers), it was addictive, it was frightening, it was mysterious and then it finally hit me all at once after watching 20 episodes: it was REAL. Then the reality of the show really hit home when I was on a plane to London (which is only a one hour flight) that I was able to pinpoint every moment of my flight where I could potentially, you know, DIE. Air pocket = Plane falling for a couple of hundred meters,  calm air hostess = where's my f@&king parachute, plane turning = go more than 60 degrees and we'll resemble something of an overcooked Irish breakfast within minutes. Indeed it was a confined smelly demon (a fart?) flight that day.

Now, I kicked my ACI addiction after while because it was doing me no good service (sort of like UPC: NTL Internet/TV/Everything), but then it turns out,  plane crashes had become a hit phenomenon on television shows anyways. Did you ever see that episode of LOST, I think it was saaaaaaay, the FIRST GODDAM EPISODE? The plane decided to take a break mid way through it's flight, quite literally sending passengers cascading into a confused writers most cherished mistake. Then there was a film that decided to enact being in the fracking explosion:



Even worse was that I was compelled to actually sit and watch these, as I reckon it is my fate at this point that it will happen to me. Although when the time finally comes  and the plane nose dives, I think I'll laugh, make a gigantic crap in my pants and start tickling the person next to me, I'd be screaming "fate you penis, you finally found me hahahaha!". And I know it will be at this moment fate will go "hold on a minute, he's enjoying this!?" and fate will super street fighter uppercut the plane and the flight will return to normal.  And I will be sitting there, my laughter slowly dying away, and a probable new restraining order staring me in the face and on top of it all I will have a giant crap in my pants. At which point I will realise that I have ironically become the most terrifying thing on the flight, stupid fate.

I think, in the end, the main thing I'm trying to tell everyone here is probably this: Don't fly with Seán O'Beirn.

And don't watch Hollyoaks.

Quitting Smoking and Other Aggravations

So, I just arrived home, it's 1.03AM and I am actually quite tired. Before I go to bed I usually have a mug of tea and something sweet. This I just realised answers a lot of insomnia problems I'm having lately, amongst other things, but no tea just doesn't feel right!

So to tire out the monkey having a sponge bath inside of my head I decided to do yet ANOTHER blog post. Reading is optional from now onwards.

So as the title mentions, I have recently decided I'm quitting smoking. It has been 5 days of smoke free in my lungs and my plan is to stick with this smokey-free-eeness. Alas, there is a downside to this. You see an addiction needs a distraction, whereas my distractions appear as a new addiction to something else. Now, I'll admit, I have an intoxicating relationship with tea already, but now it's increased 5 billion times fold since I quit smoking. If tea were a person I would be it's Josef Fritzl, I love it unhealthily now ... I wonder if he quit smoking too? (from now on I'm calling tea addiction "Fritzled")

"A Tea Party????"

So along with caffienating myself for 14 hours of my waking day which will without a doubt lead my dad into thinking I'm a diabetic yet AGAIN (oh the summer of 2004, you evil bastard), it's still not enough to divert my dependency of cigarettes. I smoke usually on 3 occasions, either when I'm extremely bored (which is quite often), frustrated (I'll get to that one in a moment) or when I'm drunk (which is quite often).

So boredom usually somehow links to frustration. Sadly the main bout of frustration usually happens around the time I play the Wii. So, this is how it goes.

1. I make a mug of tea and sit down to play the Wii.
2. I pop on the Wii and leave my tea alone for a while, it's still quite hot.
3. I insert my copy of Monster Hunter 3 to play

And there you have it. Monster Hunter 3. The Hitler of the gaming world, the pooh to your hungoverness, the Joey to our sitcoms. Usually what happens during this phase of my day is that I go into blackouts of raging frustration. The game just plain doesn't like the human species (much like my laptop). So after spending an hour thinking I'm achieving something in this game, it comes out of the left field with a big fat "F@&K YOU" which makes you feel like this:

So now I'm pissed, I just wasted an hour of my time playing a video game and achieving nothing. BUT I can't have a cigarette soooooo I go to drink my tea, but it's COLD. Because I wasted an hour of my time, my damn tea has gone cold. My frustration is now slowly beginning to morph into rage at this point, much like the power rangers morph, but way less cool. So I go to the kettle and fill my mug with hot water which spills all over the counter. Shit, that's annoying I better clean it up. I clean it up and then drink a big slug out of my mug. Forgetting there's hot water in it. The noise that comes out of me at this point is probably something not even a Lyre bird could imitate. Let's just call it "unpleasant".


Ok so now I'm quite fuming, but there's a day ahead of me to calm down and relax. Just shower and relax. Phone rings, "hello?", Phone voice "Seán we need you at work", me "ok". So I don't have a day ahead of me anymore, just 5 mins for a cold shower and -5mins to eat.


When I arrive at work I usually have self contained my rage. To workers I appear quiet because I don't want to inflict the anger on them. To customers I most likely appear something like this:





Just dandy, costumers are gone soon enough so they'll most likely forget my horrifying rage, their children will have nightmares however.


So I work away for the few hours wishing I could just have a cigarette but eventually that subsides and so does the anger. It's near the end of my shift, I'm moving a cage happily now knowing I will be gone soon. I roll the cage over my foot due to being distracted by the thought of having a mug of tea. At this point I really thought tea was trying to harm me, physically and mentally. But I just ignored the seemingly severedmytoefrommyfoot pain and just went on till the end.


I break through the doors leaving with my bag on my back. This day which I awoke to with the theme from Knight Rider stuck in my head (usually that's a good sign) had transformed into something of a Michael Bay film, without the explosions (which basically means all the shitty bits).


I need a drink at this point, I have to drink. Luckily for me I have a friend who is usually willing to, or can be made, drink (you know who you are). Actually that last part in brackets can apply to a lot of people (you ALL know who you are...). So we get appropriately shit-faced and then it happens. I buy cigarettes, smoke about 40 when I only bought 20. Wake up with a hangover as raging as I was the day before and regret every single moment of it. The only thing in the end that pulls me through my day is being Fritzled.


That, my friends, is why it is so hard to quit smoking.

Extremely Extreme Sports

Every now and again when I'm spending countless hours stumbling or just staring at the internet (or not working as I like to call it), you come across something so cool that it's below absolute zero. Well, not that cool, that would break your laptop and possibly cause you a lot of harm.

Anyways when I woke up this morning I decided to break my morning routine of eating and tea and go on my laptop instead (well first I had to find a socket that would let it charge first coz my laptop is a bit racist to my kind, ala JUST me)..(also my morning routine is actually going on my laptop, I would be breaking it if I ate).
So I went on to one of my favourite news feed sites and came across this little gem.




Now I was watching this thinking "hmmm, this music is awesome" and off they went skiing with parachutes and I was thinking then "oh they're probably going to jump around the place a bit" but then they go flying over the cliff at which point I went "Oh my Barbara Streisand!". It's like they combined  skiing, a relatively safe sport, with base jumping, an relatively unsafe sport (it's basically jumping off a cliff and making sure your parachute works before you hit the ground).

These people obviously got a bit of a Velociraptor gene in them because they're total badasses, they'd have James Bond stuntsmen working the corners in no time if they got onto Hollywood with these videos. And the music, I bet that music comes on everywhere they go making you want to make gratuitous (thank god for Google spell check) parachute love to them.

Also the music in the video is top class, check it out here



And then play it over other videos on mute, like this:



I'll admit the hamster had it going for him already, but this music just suits this demon critter to the ground, FEARLESS!!

Speaking of Dinosaurs...

    While I'm still on the topic of Dinosaurs (but veering far far away from Don Bluth) I've decided to take some time out to talk about the most awesome rockin smack-yo-bitch-round-the-jungle dinosaur ever created by evolution (and trust me, evolution was being a right dickhead to it's other creations this day, and absolutely awesome to itself).

    In fact, what I think happened (and seems pretty plausible) was that Evolution was having a chat with God one day. "God" it says, "I bet I can make the most awesome rockin smack-yo-bitch-round-the-jungle dinosaur ever". God sat there and thought for a moment, but since he/she is all and everything then it was actually an infinite moment that non of us can comprehend.... After a moment God replied "I accept your bet, but what is the wager?". Evolution says "If I do make the most awesome rockin smack-yo-bitch-round-the-jungle dinosaur ever, we do a role swap, because as you know, I only last as long as this rock does". So God replies smarmily, but also transcendental of self awareness and therefore without tone or emotion "DEAL!", thinking Evolution won't be able to create anything as awesome as the planets, sun or the very cosmos itself. So Evolution got to work, and guuuuurl did it!

    What Evolution created was something more awesome and terrifying than what they probably put in a fig role.... THIS:

    Velociraptor, the greatest animal of their generation and time (and ever as far as I'm concerned). Most of us didn't even know they existed until a little film called Jurassic Park came out and threw them out into the big bad world opening doors all around them and being "Clever Girl"'s. Now, before I get TOO into this, I want to say that the makers of Jurassic Park did use poetic license to change a few things about the Velociraptor (pretty much most things). BUT since they made something that was already badass enough as it was into a OMFGTDIRMM (Oh My F*@king God This Dinosaur Is Raping My Mind) Badass, I'm gonna stick with the film version instead.

    These bitching lizards' looks are seemingly only rivalled by their atomic powered ferocity. The movie tells us they hunt in packs, tricking us stupid humans into a coup where they eat us from all sides, they can jump as high as Everest and run as fast as a JATO rocket (those last two things might be an exaggeration). My point is, if you ever came across a Velociraptor, that would be nature flipping you off.

    It gets better though, by the third film Jurassic Park throws the fact that these magnificent bastards have an actual social hierarchy and even talk to each other! Evolution you certainly showed God how to do it. Speaking of which, what I think happened between Evolution and God was quite obvious. God got jealous, blew up the dinosaurs (although he/she/everything claims he/she/everything tripped and knocked a bit of space rock at us) and made people out of dinodust (thus taking on certain traits of dinosaurs, like talking.. and cannibalism) thinking we would be superior to Evolutions most amazing piece of ass EVAR! God was wrong in my opinion. Even worse now, God an evolution are still feuding, instead of it ending there and then Evolution is now trying to persuade the world that it is the creator and that God's biography, the Bible, never really happened. Oh my, those two really have it in for each other, if only they'd stop fighting and fix my laptop screen....

    Aaaaaanyways, the Velociraptor is not only a total Chuck Norris of the prehistoric era, it's also a pop culture Icon nowadays. It's seen as smarter:

AND divine:

   Seriously, more divine than God's wrist child! There's an actual religion based around a Raptor Jesus, how cool is that?!

   So, ignoring all factual knowledge and using Jurassic Park 1-3 as a bible, we have our God, our Teacher and our Saviour, maybe YOU could learn a thing or two from our friend here. I can say, I've learnt a thing or two from the Velociraptor in my lifetime so far (mainly how to open doors, and for the love of God, or should I say Evolution?, do NOT steal their eggs).

   I guess I could talk all night about this but I wont, this is all I have to say about the Velociraptor to ye, for now. Good bye!

Oh, and you would totally do this if they existed too:

    The lasers is the sheer energy of awesomeness coursing through me from the Velociraptor (which I have named Cherry).

Childhood Trauma

We all experience traumatic moments throughout our childhood that teach us lessons, like, "that dog seemed nice" or having your younger brother spilt your head with a rock (lesson learnt: younger siblings can be stupid). They come in a wide variety of situations and we always can take something out of them.

But very very few can actually steal your childhood innocence in one fell swoop. Your dog getting mauled by a train in front of you or that Ronald McDonald clown... in general...

Or something that THIS man created

For those of you who don't know (and in fact I didn't know what he looked like till I looked him up there), this man is called Don Bluth. For a lot of people this name may ring a bell, he did after all create a lot of childhood animated movies, All dogs go to Heaven, the Fievel Films and several others.

And no, before some people think they've got the film I'm about to mention, it is not Bambi. While Bambi is known for taking a proverbial shit on many peoples childhoods, the movie I am about to mention takes a dump so massive that it would probably collapse in on itself annihilating our universe. Proverbially of course.

The movie I am talking about of course is this:




If you haven't seen this (just the first one, the rest are shite) then I consider you lucky. Bambi is an injury, this is a bulldoser through your soul.

I'll explain briefly what it's about. Dinosaurs are hungry, so hungry in fact that there's really only one place left in the world that they can eat, the "Great Valley". Queue shots of different herds walking across treacherous terrain (because if there's no vegetation there's only room for volcanoes) while watching a few die. Yes that's right, from the outset we watch a few things die. But it's alright, we don't know any of these, we haven't formed any emotional bond with them yet. The film knows this and rectifies this problem with catastrophically effective results.

So here we are with Little foot, our main long necked friend in the picture, he is the only baby long neck left and apart from that there is only his mother and his two grandparents. We watch Littlefoot and his mother form a special little bond, something only a mother and child can form and we relate happily to it off screen.

Then shit hits the fan. Littlefoot decides to dance with a T-Rex, forcing his mother to protect him and on top of that Don Bluth decides this is a perfect time for the planet earth to have a tectonic plate disco party. We watch lots of things die at this point, the ground collapses away sending thousands of dinosaurs to their dinograves while others just fall over and die (presumably from eating TOO much). We watch as littlefoot gets rescued by mammy, whom gets injured by the T-Rex and then we watch all the dino babies get split up by a massive chasm.

Woah that was intense for a 5 year old wasn't it? Even horror films takes their breaks in overwhelming tension, but Don Bluth just fucks it at us like oil from BP's broken well. Well done Donny boy, you've nearly broken a child with your apocalyptic vision of dino annihilation. But thankfully it's over.

WRONG, after beating you over the head with his imagery of prehistoric hell, Don then gives you a sucker punch so hard in the gut that shit comes flying out of your eyes, ears, nose and mouth (not really but I think I get across the point I'm making).

What I'm talking about is THIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgJhVgK0tPI

I was seven when I saw this scene. I was seven when I lost my childhood innocence. No... It was stolen from me. By a man. A man with an ambition to create a Hiroshima sized crater in a child's mind. Well done Don, you succeeded.

P.S. I absolutely love the film Don!

One month

So now it's been a wonderful whole one month since my first post on my blog. I still have literally no idea what to do with it, I always have had intentions (for the month it's been there)  to use it for good but ever since a facebook app informed me that I'm 58% evil I think I've been a little deterred from the "good" idea.

But since I have no money to do anything remotely evil in any harmful way (other than buy someone a yorkie bar when they wanted a twix) I'll just resort to a slightly dramatised version of my recent month gone by: (By the way nothing ever really happens in my life so this will either be really short or really long just so I can tell my friends later that I wrote a really awesome blog post)

So what has happened in the last month. I can't say much now, besides falling off a stage at a club, which resembles something along the lines of this:

And nearly smashing my laptop and inadvertently fucking up the screen instead, which I would show some resemblance video of too but I'm too lazy to look for one,  I've been mainly sitting around staring at my laptop wishing I didn't go near it when I was drunk. And I changed my ringtone on my phone to some loud noises from Inception, which was a bad idea because I quite like the soundtrack of that film so now when my phone starts ringing I blissfully listen to it for a while until I decide to finally answer, which is usually about the time that Caller-A has decided to hang up.

So this leaves me with a lot of alone time to write on this. But what to write? Well I think there's nothing better to read about sometimes than a good ol' bitch about something right?

For example, work. When I was working one day in Workplace A, I brought out a vacuum cleaner for a customer. However upon bringing this vacuum cleaner out some father nudged his little girl up to come up to me with a receipt. I was thinking "this father is a little cruel, he's sending his seven year old girl up to carry a vacuum cleaner roughly half the size of her and twice as heavy, back to him". So I looked at the receipt and saw that they were actually looking for a smoke alarm which was fair enough.Now usually I wouldn't care in this situation if someone got mixed up about what product they were getting if it appeared similar to someone else's. Except in this case, in which the fact is that a vacuum cleaner is neither the same size nor looks anything like a fucking smoke alarm. On top of that then, you have another customer getting confused as to why their vacuum cleaner is the size of a smoke alarm.

One of my co workers eventually came out two minutes later looking for someone to give the smoke alarm to. Zombified and desensitised by my own shock of the stupidity of this father I took the smoke alarm and handed it to the little girl, this smoke alarm was more like a smoke alarm because it was a smoke alarm. As I handed it to the girl I also couldn't help but see how massive the difference was between the vacuum cleaner and the smoke alarm, it was at least a 30th of the size. It would be like someone giving you a bike helmet when you asked for a refrigerator. Anyways, another confused customer approached me shortly after the little girl had left in which I had to assure her that the cleaner was hers and I wasn't giving it to the little girl (not that she would've been able to carry it anyways).

I could actually go on about this a lot more but I think there's only so much time in a day that you can spend talking about smoke alarms and vacuum cleaners. What I can say though is that if this vacuum cleaner did go home with Daddy Stupid and Daughter Unfortunate, the cleaner would most likely end up doing this to itself:

Well, that's the end of that rant, and now I want tea so I'm going away to mull over what other things I can talk about when  I return in a months time. 

buh...bye