Getting it off my chest....

[Willow2]

Anyone want to join in on a thread just devoted to sounding off about (non parenting) things that have annoyed you? Well here goes...
I would like to say a big thank you to the absolute xxxxxx that pranged my car while it was parked outside my house sometime in the last 48 hours. The fact that you didn't feel it necessary to leave your details just adds to my love for you. You are probably one of the caring commuters who parks in my road (for free) all day before taking the train to town - glad that we can be of service. Nor should you let the
fact that your journey has turned our quiet little cul-de-sac where kids play footie in the street into the fifth lane of the M25 worry you in the least. And don't be perturbed by the fact that I, and all the other mums in the road, can now no longer park anywhere near our houses when we come home with the supermarket shopping and a car full of screaming kids. Hey, it's all just helps make our day even more fun. So thank you, nameless stranger, for completely annihilating the front of my car and losing me my no claims bonus. My week had looked really boring, now, thanks to you, there's so much to do... I have to go to the police station, get insurance quotes, fax my insurers and then wait for them to send an assessor round to view the damage. And then, if I am really lucky, I will lose the use of my car for several days. Gee things are looking up. You have really made my day.
Sorry chaps, just had to let it out.

Willow2, we have a similar problem in our road. So when we are just popping out for a few minutes we put out traffic cones!!!

We have a GP's surgery at the end of our road and the other side of the road has a yellow line between 10-11am to stop the commuters so it means all the patients park on 'our' side.

Sorry to hear about your car. R.

Willow2, I am really sorry to hear of your infuriating situation. You've been mad, now get even. Our road is handily placed for a major route into London and a railway station and apparently had similar problems. We now have a residents' parking scheme whereby permit-holders only can park in the road between 9am and 11am. Result has been the complete disappearance of these inconsiderate drivers. The fact that my mother-in-law once got ticketed by a similar scheme elsewhere has nothing to do with my whole-hearted endorsement of such an idea. You could approach your council!

Am I allowed to have a rant on a parenting theme? having given up all those yummy delicacies in life now I'm pg, I was very p**d off this week when i was throwing up all night with food poisoning!!!I have no idea what from but I haven't eaten any of the evils listed by my midwife, so what's a girl to do?

Mussels and goats cheese for dinner tonight then!

Lil, I had exactly the same first time around. I was absolutely meticulous to the point of obsession and ended up with 2 very nasty bouts of food poisoning. This time, I have been much more relaxed and haven't had any problems at all.

I am a great believer that it is food hygiene that matters more than the type of food. I would be far happier eating a dish that contains undercooked eggs for which I have bought and stored the eggs and done all the preparation than say eat thoroughly cooked chicken which may not have been refrigerated properly. My worst bouts of poisoning have come from city sandwich bars where things aren't kept at the right temperature and where I would suspect that the staff don't wash their hands properly!.

Willow2, I would definitely recommend you approach your council about the parking problem. We did so recently and had an immediate and supportive response. We have since had a range of new measures introduced which have helped enormously.

Commiserations on the car - same thing happened recently to a neighbout. £900 damage and only 3rd party insurance. It has blown her finances to pieces.

My rant would be against all the idiot drivers who think zebra crossings are there to make the road look pretty and predestrians hang around them just for the view! I do admit that in the great scheme of things it is not a huge issue but isn't it always the little things that make you grind your teeth and wish nasty things on the perpetrators(hurry up with that spellcheck service, please!).

hi i dont drive but the one thing that make steam come out of my ears is shops and the thick idiots they employ i want into tile magic a few days ago we had decided on the tiles but they had no price on {typical} so going over to the counter to find out how much they were you get a blank look he says i will find out he askes sombody and comes back and says 80 pence per tile we say ok and pay but when we get out reciet suprise suprise it not 80 but 150 per tile i ask why it's 1.50 he says oh it's the other colour that it 80 pence oh boy i want to smack him like i used to work in a shop and it is not rocket sience to get it right he could not be bothered it makes me so mad

Call centres. Aaarrrgghhhh. I've just rang my bank to make sure I'm going to get a new debit card when mine expires at the end of the month. All the damn security measures - 'can you tell me how much you spent on the 23 August 1992', 'can you tell me how much you spent at Tescos 4 months ago', 'sorry to have to ask all these questions'.

Look, I'm not trying to transfer wads of cash overseas, I'm not trying to drain the account and leave my husband penniless, I just want to make sure I get a new debit card at the end of the month!

Anyway, her advice was to call again a week before my card expired and order a new one if one hadn't turned up by then. Except I was trying to order a new one now to ensure I do have one by the end of the month...as I said before, aaarrrrgggghhhhhh.

Does appear that the only way to get rid of the commuters is to get permit parking - but that's the reason we now have them. I live about a five minute walk from the station and the three roads nearer than mine have just had permit parking put in. The result is that all the commuters, rather than just a few, now park in my road. Some berk at the council obviously thought that putting in permit parking over a 500 metre radius around the station would wipe out the problem - duh. Like having to walk another two minutes was going to stop them - they've all simply shifted up to my road. It's got to the point where I daren't use my car in the morning unless I absolutely have to as I know I won't be able to park when I get home - so morning supermarket trips are out of the question.
We've been told that the only solution is to get together a petition asking for permit parking - so who wins? The council charging £70 a car - when before they got involved we had no major problem and could park for free. The other daft thing is that the restrictions will be from 10 till 4 - so any friends or relatives visiting will have to pay to park too. Aaaaargggh!

An honourable mention for the garage who "repaired" our car after dh crashed it. At that point we'd only had it 3 weeks, it had done 20,000 miles when we bought it. 3 months and 4,000 miles later it's failed its MOT because they didn't repair it properly, and the wheels slope outwards, thus wearing the tyres down to metal in 3 months. Not to mention the times I've driven up and down the M6 with my children and my niece over the last 3 months in a potential deathtrap. And then they didn't want to give us a courtesy car while they put right the damage!
And while I'm having a rant, thanks to the "driveway specialists" who tarmaced our drive WITHOUT bothering to break up the original concrete and put down an impermeable layer, so we've got some lovely weeds pushing their way through.
AND finally, thanks to the person who bought our old car, didn't bother to register that they'd bought it, and parked it illegally, thus earning us a parking fine.
GRRRRRRRRR. Can you tell I've had a stressful couple of weeks? No wonder I need my glass of wine. No wonder I ramble on.

I remember my mum walking out of a shop once. She had asked an assistant if they would take School Grants and he said yes, and she said do I need ID and he said no. We got to the counter with various pieces of school uniform and then the woman said "do you have any ID on you". My mum threw the clothes at her and the woman couldn't understand why she was upset. We'd had a horrible day trying to find shops which took School Grants - and half of them look at you like you are scum for having a grant and then we get to this shop and get treated like that.

Emsiewill, I hope you didn't pay the parking fine. The same thing happened to us, we just wrote to the police passing on the few details we could remember (having been good citizens and posted our end of the documents off to DVLC) and that was the end of several parking tickets.

Lil, during my first pregnancy, after weeks of morning (afternoon and evening) sickness I picked up a tummy bug, spent two days not knowing whether to sit on the loo or put my head down it, only to receive a phonecall from one of my (female) employers asking, in very derisory tones if this was "Proper sickness or just a baby sickness that I could work through". Said former employer is now trying for a baby. I'm not a vengeful person but oh boy I hope she is sick, really sick!!

Instead of parking permits a friend of mine has a yellow line on the road (in her area) with a sign informing that no parking is allowed between 11am-12noon M-F and that deters even flexitime workers and then visitors can still visit and either avoid 11-12 or just leave a note saying that they are at whatever number house they are parked outside. It's been working for about 2 years now and they don't have permits to pay for which I feel are really unfair to residents and their visitors.

My friend lives in a road which operates the same scheme Rivi mentions & it works a treat. People did continue to park there for the 1st couple of days for commuting but once they got a ticket they never returned. When I visit my friend I put a note in car window stating 'visiting relative at No4' & I've not got a ticket yet (had a knock on the door though from a parking attendant checking I wasn't a lying commuter though.

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Robinw, you could try U-Net. We use it - it started out by serving the academic/research community in the UK, so it is small-scale and has good customer service. It's not the cheapest but I think we only pay about £100 per annum plus local calls. It has never given us any problems in four years of home access.

My rant is against certain condescending GPs. My own GP is great, but the guy I saw today made me very angry, and upset. I took my 2 yr old to an 'urgent' appointment, because I was very concerned about him - temperature, vomiting, and has been coughing for over a month. Anyway, the only appointment was at a very inconvenient time, but of course I accept there was no choice - son no.1 would usually be napping, son no.2 would be resting, and I would be cooking lunch. We are 2/3 mile from clinic, and only transport is on foot. And of course I had to take both of them, and keep them entertained/occupied in the clinic. We had to take a picnic lunch in order to get son no.2 fed and still dropped off at nursery in time. But the GP - when I finally got to see him, didn't listen to me properly at all, and treated me like a complete timewaster, who was only there because I was bored and had nothing better to do! I wish they would look at your notes, and realise that if you only go twice a year, then you have genuine concerns, and are not a timewaster.

I hate that. Once my skin was bleeding all over and I didn't know what it was and the emergency appointment was all I could get unless I waited nearly a week. I got there and the doctor said to my face "this is not an emergency". I said to her, it is to me.

Can I rant about CYCLISTS - apologies to any of you that are. Maybe it's just a London thing, but do they not realise that when the traffic lights turn red they have to STOP!!!! They just see it as an opportunity to nip across while there's a bit of extra space because all the cars have stopped. I've lost count of the times it's been the pedestrian's right of way to cross and I've just managed to yank the buggy out of their path.

Yes - I was hit by a cyclist on the pavement on my way to work last week. Fortunately he hit my backside which is pretty much indestructible. They can be incredibly aggressive in London, particularly the couriers.

Bells, hope you are OK after that incident, that could have been nasty - glad your bump wasn't hit.