Unauthorised Jam Consumption
And other modern dramas.
First, from the comments, where Clam warns,
What grates, I think, is the routine overstepping of boundaries, the casual insult. Judging by the transgressive sandwiches, to which the note is attached, it seems the child was prevented from eating and, presumably, publicly embarrassed.
A while ago, one of my nieces received a snotty note scolding her for sending her son to school with a packed lunch consisting of a banana and a peanut butter sandwich, an occasional treat. Apparently, peanut butter, like jam, is a verboten foodstuff. And so, as a result, someone is employed to poke through children’s lunch boxes and to then write snotty notes to parents. A function doubtless enjoyed.
But here’s the thing. If you aren’t paying for something directly, even if you’re still paying indirectly, via taxes, you won’t by default be regarded as a customer, for whom some minimal regard might be shown, and whose boundaries should be respected. Instead, it’s quite likely you’ll be treated as an inconvenience, an irritation, someone who can be insulted and subjected to condescension.
See also, our glorious NHS.
The item linked above recounts, in abbreviated form, my attempt to return a set of crutches to the local NHS hospital – and how an ostensibly simple task became a 45-minute ordeal with farcical overtones. Entailing a trek of a half a mile or so, down endless corridors on multiple floors, from one department to another, then another, then another. An odyssey enlivened by encounters with bizarrely rude and unhelpful staff, and while walking past posters stressing the moral imperative of patients returning their crutches. An undertaking made as impractical, as maddening, and as absurdly complicated, as would seem humanly possible.
And it’s not entirely heartening to realise, as you trek down yet another corridor, that you’re entrusting your wellbeing, perhaps even your life, to an institution that can’t organise a practical system for the returning of crutches.
Oh, and while I have your attention, I bring dating instructions from the land of the badly tattooed and terminally self-involved:
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Also, open thread.
Date her? I don’t want to have any contact with her–not social, not professional.
I bet she does.
The only thing about her that I “love” is that she is so up-front about her insanity. That saves time. Much better than learning only later that she demands people play along with her delusions.
As far as school lunches are concerned, I tend to believe the ideal diet is low in sugar, moderate in carbs, and high in protein and fat–but that kids can eat more sugar/carbs than adults because their bodies burn food the way wildfires burn prairies. But still, a diet very high in sugar can cause childhood obesity.
But all that aside, it is not for school officials to dictate what lunches kids can bring from home.
I laughed but I feel your pain. I had the same experience with a walking frame my mum had used.
The thing is – in person, at least – I’m scrupulously polite. I like politeness, and appreciate it. And I arrived at the hospital in a very good mood. But within seconds, I could feel that mood being drained away, against my will. The whole thing became a determined effort to remain civil, albeit unilaterally, as one demoralising experience followed another. For forty-five minutes.
I had plenty of time to wonder how the person for whom I was returning the crutches – who could now walk, but not far – would have fared with the same forty-five-minute trek, back and forth, on multiple floors, across what felt like the entire hospital complex.
Not the NHS, but in other health related news, a new “pandemic” drops, the pandemic of grief.
No, really.
The global grief from the fact that black on black homicide is the primary cause is the fault of wypipo, of course. Fortunately we have the Centre for Research and Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims to explain this to us rubes.
Fortunately we have the Centre for Research and Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims to explain this to us rubes.
And here I am wondering if the media axiom of “if it bleeds, it leads” perhaps is a greater influence. While still a scourge, social media at least sometimes brings us back to normal, everyday life, even if it is only to see a post and think, “Oh look, Sharon went to Whattaburger for lunch . . .”
In food related news, the current situation is pretty much summed up.
The Black Ferns of New Zealand meeting King Charles is an absolute delight.
“‘Sup, G?”
Fact check of note.
For some people, dishonesty is like breathing.
Heh. Also goose droppings.
[ Thaws lump of chicken stew for dinner. ]
For some people, dishonesty is like breathing.
I remember back in the ’80s my school, an independent where the parents were explicitly the customers, tried to ban crisps. It lasted about a fortnight.
I did the stew-freezing thing (it never occurred to me before to do it) and learned to put a paper towel between the baggies or else they freeze together.
Direct payment – a provider-customer relationship – generally confers some leverage. The difference in the dynamic of, say, my local dental surgery, which I pay directly, and my local doctor’s surgery, which I don’t, is pretty obvious. A dental check-up may not be my idea of a rollicking good time, but at least I can be confident that I’ll be treated promptly, efficiently, politely, and with some attentiveness.
Making, say, eight portions of stew or chili, or twelve, instead of just four, is much the same in terms of time and effort. And it’s handy to always have pre-bagged portions in the freezer. I can’t spend every day toiling in the kitchen. I have to be here, scintillating for you lot.
Noob.
I should, in fairness, mention that stews and chilis are among the handful of things I can cook reliably well. T’aint fancy, but it is tasty and fortifying. Tonight’s feed includes onions, leeks, garlic, ginger, chicken breasts, chicken stock, potatoes, carrots, swede, broccoli, celery, sweetcorn, a handful of peas, and, oh yes, a blob of Marmite.
[ Waits for rumblings from @Karl. ]
To be served in a Yorkshire pudding and with a generous dash of Henderson’s Relish, obviously.
Apple and blackberry crumble to follow, since you ask. With proper – i.e., non-vegan – custard this time.
It’s about time we quantify that.
[ Aims scintillation detector at David ]
[ Smiles, undoes top button. ]
[ Scintillation detector peaks in the yellow ]
Without that Marmite would have saturated the detector.
The one thing in stews, very necessary to most decent stews, that imnsho doesn’t freeze/thaw well. Carrots have a similar problem but seem to hold up a little better up to a week or so.
I suppose I could have used Umami paste, but you don’t want to look too flash.
Swedes? Best not to mention that, what with all the recent news about Haitians.
[ Strokes tiny jar of Umami paste. ]
There’s a bad dad joke about impolite vagrants in there somewhere, but damned if I can find it.
Detachable penis?
In the future you’ll own nothing . . . because you’ll be owned.
Too often “Oh look, Sharon went to Whattaburger for lunch . . .” is followed by “What the Hell is she doing with those ketchup packets?”
2024 IgNobel winner.
But most mammals only exhale.
Apparently, The Grand Tour was a “motoring, travel, and heterosexual banter-themed series.” Oh, and it was “regressive, unedifying… racist… ableist… reactionary.” With “a legacy of bigotry and stunted masculinity.”
Maximum bed-wetting!
Cloud making factory discovered.
Indeed. As I said a couple of weeks ago,
Which beats reading generically po-faced articles in The Independent.
“Gender expression” is sometimes just narcissism.
The Grand Tour was a “motoring, travel, and heterosexual banter-themed series.” Oh, and it was “regressive, unedifying… racist… ableist… reactionary.”
Seeing as how it and Top Gear (with Clarkson, May, and Hamster) were among the most viewed shows worldwide, I am going with NO you pinhead, it is because nitwits like you got your frilly pink knickers in a twist because Clarkson said a couple things you didn’t like and you and your ilk’s ululations caused the equally woke buffoons at Amazon to nix their production contract.
Where do they dig these clowns up?
Again, no autonomous mental activity, just the sound of a programme running.
It reminded me of the Guardian‘s George Monbiot and his demands that Top Gear be taken off air, due to its morally corrupting influence, before equating the series with The Black & White Minstrel Show.
Or when Monbiot’s Guardian colleague Linda Bellos asked with great earnestness,
As I said at the time,
In all three cases, what’s interesting is how those doing the ostentatious tutting don’t let things like facts, logic or basic research impede their indignation.
As I type, The Other Half is watching a scene in which Clarkson, being quite fat, is unable to lift himself out of a 1970s Formula 4 racing car. To enable his escape, the car has to be disassembled around him.
Still funny.
Leftists have no sense of humour. Unless a non-cult member falls into a blender or something; I’m sure they’d find that hilarious.
I wouldn’t be able to watch a full episode of Top Gear, as I can’t tell the difference between one car and another, and I’m alienated by that style of male bonding, I do enjoy the goofy Youtube clips, and not because of “heterosexual banter” but because it reminds me of a pre-heterosexual boy world where there was all sorts of tomfoolery where landing flat on your face didn’t affect your heterosexual prospects. I only appreciated boy world in retrospect – while I was living in it I wanted to be with girls for the usual reasons, and my cultural betters were telling me that it was morally necessary too, but then from the age of 14 or so when there were girls everywhere all the time, I felt that while my male friends were better groomed and more polite, they’d also lost something – they were less spontaneous, more cautious, more calculating.
Top Gear also has to be spoken of as probably the BBC’s biggest global hit, even bigger than the Kabaddi results or the news in pidgin. It turns out the the Global Majority who are morally better than us and who are going to replace us in our own countries, they’re ok with male bonding, and they think that having a car is better than not having a car, and that having a nice car is nicer than having a not-nice car. The fretting displayed by the Indie journalist – that’s a first world style of masculinity that’s dying out.
No sympathy at all with the miseryguts wanting to ban jam sandwiches, but there is more cause to avoid peanut butter in schools, as there is now a fair number of children who are allergic to nuts (one estimate puts it at 1 in 50) and anaphylaxis can be fatal.There shouldn’t be a problem if a child with that allergy sits next to a friend who has a peanut butter sandwich, but most schools feel it’s better to be safe than sorry. Parents today are far more likely to sue schools than they used to.
Direct payment – a provider-customer relationship – generally confers some leverage.
You would think so. But it has become common in private education for teaching staff to scold parents over woke issues. We sent both my sons to private school for grades K to 6 at a rather steep price. Sometime around 2007 we received a note home with the boys’ lunches saying it was unacceptable to use ziploc bags to wrap their sandwiches because it made mother earth unhappy, or some such.
I had many run ins with this particular teacher. One of my favourites was on Athletic Fun Day. I had volunteered to work the grill for lunch. Someone generously donated hamburgers and hot dogs for the kids and parents. Of course, for food safety reasons they arrived frozen. I had just put a bunch of dogs on the grill when said teacher came up to get dogs for one of her kindergartners. I told her it would be a couple of minutes as I had to ensure they were cooked all the way through. She insisted her precious ones wouldn’t eat anything with a grill mark. Having young ones myself, I understood but explained they were frozen. She continued to badger me until I finally slapped a frozen on the inside wiener on a bun and handed it to her.
Needless to say she came back acting rather sheepishly and told me the hot dog was frozen and could I please cook it a little longer.
I’m going to state a premise here, one that most of the world won’t like one damn bit…
The sad reality of things like that “jam Gestapo” individual even existing stems from a very sad fact: The world does not provide that creature with immediate negative feedback about their conduct.
We’re simultaneously “too civilized” to respond appropriately with effective feedback, because “…that would be impolite…”, and because we’d likely be charged with assault and battery. Because of that, these daily impositions become built up like lint in a dryer, until the entire appliance becomes clogged and a fire hazard, burning down your house.
Our civilization is that dryer, right now, filled with a build-up of jam Gestapo lint. When the tipping point is reached, and enough people are fed up with it all, the whole “politely restrained” facade is going to go up in flames that will illuminate an entire century of history.
There was a senior NCO in the US Army who I used to work for, years and years ago. He made an observation to me about leadership and life in general that’s stuck with me all these years since: “There’s only so much ‘OBEY’ in a man… Be careful not to use it all up at once…”
At the time, we were discussing one of my peers, an individual you could probably describe as a bit excessive with his demands on his subordinates. Call him “Corporal Bligh”, and you’d get some insight into the how/why of his people turning on him and leaving him effectively adrift in a metaphoric small boat on a sea of oppobrium from his seniors. Like Captain Bligh, his career did not prosper in the aftermath.
I think of that metaphor a great deal, of late. I observe that the “powers that be” everywhere are steadily burning down their “OBEY accounts” with the general public, and that one should probably not rely on everyone being restrained by “good manners” and social convention for much longer.
Ms. Jam Gestapo would likely be far more circumspect with her little passive-aggressive notes, if every one of them were met with a punch in the mouth. Same with a lot of the little petty authoritarians who rely on people’s increasingly abused good nature to get away with their abusive power trips…
Like Captain Bligh, his career did not prosper in the aftermath.
Point of order, Bligh wound up as a Vice-Admiral and Governor of New South Wales
@Farnsworth M Muldoon,
Good point. I should have specified I was referring to the popular view of the man, which you have to acknowledge is atrocious. Whether it’s biased or not, I honestly don’t know… I’ve read accounts in both directions. His post-Bounty career is spotty, particularly the whole Rum Rebellion phase of it. Bligh passed into history as a profoundly unloved man in the popular mind…