Frogshake

I don’t know who came up with the concept of having joint activities at birthday parties, but they sure deserve a kick in the noggin. Those activities can take various frightening forms and reach from stupid, made-up games (I hate going to my uncle’s parties - not sure they deserve this label) to passing something around the room to music and when the music stops the person holding the item has to do/say something. I got the pleasure to enjoy the latter at a 40th birthday last Saturday. Not that I cannot appreciate the nice thought behind it, but for Pete’s sake, what is wrong with those people? Maybe it’s just me (though I doubt that) but every time I am in the middle of some party-torture-game-thing I panic. Literally. Apparently, so does everyone else. People passed the umbrella (of doom) around like it was a leper, anxious to get the virulent thing out of their hands.

There I was staring at Pandora’s Box making it’s way over to me. The music had been going on for ages, centuries and it was bound to fall silent soon . . . very soon, when the umbrella reached me kind of soon. Discomfort turned into swelling fear rearing up inside me. As I extended my hand to grab the Kryptonite the music stopped. My fingers had already touched the handle but the guy who gave it to make still had it in a tight grasp; his fingers seemed to stick on it as if it were made of ice. My hand jerked away, seemingly on its own. I got spared, felt blessed and stopped sweating.

The only thing I have ever experienced that was worse than party activities was a 15 minute long Power Point presentation consisting of childhood pictures and retarded music for a 14 year old girl. Thanks, uncle.

Avid readers of my blog know by now that I am ridiculously sensitive when it comes to noise. Also, I’ve already told you that always, every single time - I kid you not - someone weird sits next to me when I got to the movies. They either have the sniffles and cough or sneeze all the time, they breathe really loudly, or make some other weird noise. Was I important enough, I’d suspect a conspiracy. For now I’ll have to settle on the worst cinema-karma in the history of mankind.

I went to watch Sweeney Todd the other day and it was a wonderful movie. The acting was great, the music pretty cool and the story exciting. However, once again I could not fully enjoy the movie because of the three following reasons:

Number one: Johnny Depp fans. A bunch of 20-something girls giggling, screaming, going nuts.

Number two: The guy next to me, apparently, needed a lot of space between his legs as he was kinda pushing my knee away with his. I felt violated.

Number three: The guy who sat three seats over. He was talking throughout the entire movie, I heard every single word he said - keep in mind I was three (!) seats away - and 10 minutes before a major plot twist occurred he, of course, blurted out what was about to happen. Fortunately, lucky me had already figured it out. Other topics of his lively conversation with his better half (she just had to be (the better half that is, I don’t even want to think of the possibility that he might be…gawd)) were, i.e. the amount of blood used, how the subtitles (everything but the songs were dubbed) were not a 100% match to what was actually sung, and what was about to happen next. I wish I had had the courage to tell him to put a sock in it. Fortunately, I hadn’t as the guy turned out to be three times as big as me.

I rent a voice chat server with my best friend to stay in touch as much as possible as she lives in another country. Since she is billed for the server, I send her some money now and then to pay my half. Last time, I thought it would be hilarious, well, kinda funny, to write “Porn” in the PayPal transaction subject line. As it turned out, PayPal employees did not appreciate my fine sense of humor. Who knew! They sent her, surprisingly not me, an email explaining how wrong it was to take money for something which obviously (to them) is oh so wrong. First of all, even if I were paying her for porn I do not see why it is any of their business; and second of all, who on earth writes “Porn” in a subject line when actually purchasing porn? Think about it!

Anyway, it was all fun and games, until they threatened with suspending her account. What? Is PayPal run by some crazy, tight-ass nutbars? Apparently, it is. The issue was resolved with an email telling them that no porn changed sticky hands. Perhaps, I should use something less offensive like “slave child” or “eastern European woman” next time because porn, obviously, crosses the line. Gsus!

Here’s the second part to the Sony sucks! story. Surprisingly, I got a reply from Sony; but only to tell me that I had contacted the wrong department. So I wrote to the department they told me to write to and they again referred me to someone else. One last time I attempted to make someone care about my dilemma and the reply I got - and this is no joke - was that I should go to the sony.co.uk website and look for help there.Wow. I was glad they told me as I would have never thought of that on my own! Gsus.

Since contacting Sony brought me nothing but sorrow I stopped to pursue this fruitless endeavor and decided to send and email to amazon.co.uk instead. Boy, had I no idea what I was about to blunder into. Not that they weren’t helpful, they were very much so; however, it was confusing. I will not quote all the emails which have been sent back and forth, but will paraphrase the important parts.

My first email: Hello amazon employee, I purchased the The Shield Season 5 DVD and the last episode is 20 minutes short. Please tell Sony to fix it.

Amazon reply #1: Hello, we are very sorry! We’ll send you a new DVD box and you don’t even have to send the one you already own back “as the cost of returning the package is in this case prohibitively expensive.”

My second email: Hi! Well, thanks, but it’s really not your problem and I doubt a new DVD Box will solve the problem.

Amazon reply #2: Hello, we are very sorry! We will still send you a new DVD box, but you have to send the one you already own back.

My third email: Cheerio! Ok then, send me a new DVD box, but do you want me to send the first DVD box back or not?

Amazon reply #3: Hello, we are very sorry! You don’t even have to send the one you already own back “as the cost of returning the package is in this case prohibitively expensive.”

One of the three amazon employees I dealt with suggested giving one of the boxes to charity. I wonder if any charity would want it.

In the end all this emailing, wasting time surfing the web for information and obsessing didn’t get me far. In retrospect it didn’t get me anywhere. As a result I am stuck not with one, but with two DVD boxes which, not all that surprisingly, have the exact same flaw. I heart amazon.