Christmas post-mortem musings

Snapshot recollections now that I'm back and letting the memories surface:

How boorish most of my fellow Brit males are, looking for a fight or argument, incapable of even contemplating discussion or apology

How many beer-bellied oafs sport foxy kind-faced wives

School-uniformed youths smoking at the bus-stops

Officiousness of minions at public services such as public transport and servers in shops ... and banks (see below)

Deft efficiency of those street-side newsagents, knowing exactly where their papers and mags are and accepting any large note and whipping out the precise change

Power-crazed meter maids (see also below)

Sit vacs in posh shop windows: "Fluent Russian essential"

Stunningly beautiful Russkie chicks everywhere, cooing into cells and packing wads of dough

Life-saving online reading courtesy of the Seditious one who's filing report after report of the finest.

Hearing the new Beatles compilation, Love

Below: Banks - Last time I reported from London I'd just arrived from dulcet Seattle so of course i got a buffeting. Since then I've lived in Greece *and* have dealt with Barclays bank on their many cockups of my mother's investments and general banking, as a result of which I finally cornered a CS rep who owned the problems and solved them and even called me up to give me advice for any future hassles.

Which I had, so when i called from London to the Hans Place branch round the corner (detoured via their Isle of Man call centre) I had all the data and was able to wrong-foot the rep all down the way.

Social engineering: actually i was rather naughty.

"Hang abaht, let me just log into yer site ... right ... see that file called "International Private accounts"? scroll down to 'corresp-johnston', got it? scroll to 'closure' and read ... er, let me see, yeah right, 4th para ... 'k? read from there and that might help."

Reminds me of time when some of the Amazon heros had just been defenestrated from the mother ship and were calling in about their orders under new names.

Fromgrep/Badbook: The nouveau CS types had none of our skills so we had the fun of sweetly enquiring, "really, you can't find my order? ok, dude, fromgrep XY, maybe try badbooking on this one ... yah ... cool."

As the Bard of Bezos once penned,

'Always fromgrep when you're in the queues
Drat those duplicate customer email blues ..."

Good days.