WorthyOnTheWeb

So it’s New Year’s Eve 2020 and this seemed like a good time to write a short(ish) post to round off the year. There is very little I could say about 2020, that hasn’t already been said far more eloquently by somebody else so I’m just going to give you my take on certain aspects of it, throwing in a few random quotes, a couple of analogies and who knows what else.

I’ve been lucky the year. I’m lucky enough to be able to list all my pandemic negatives on one hand and essentially they really boil down to worrying about others and not being able to see and touch the people I love and care about. People that you love too much to risk spending time with. People that you have to worry about from a distance, because you know that their bodies are vulnerable, even if yours isn’t. I have a couple of friends with serious long term health conditions that can’t even risk getting a cold, let alone a dose of Covid.

I’m not really a hugger. I don’t automatically hug people on arrival and I don’t do a round of embraces before I leave. A Claire hug is a bit like a Paul Hollywood Handshake. It means something. I’m not anti-hugging, it’s just more of a specific occasion thing. If I start hugging you, then you needed it. 2020 has shown me how much I have always underrated physical touch as a way of communicating. You can say things with a hug that you can’t with words and there have been so many times this year that I’ve wanted to hug people. As a grandparent it’s quite hard to stop a small child from flinging themselves into your arms, whilst they wish you happy birthday and no matter how long I live, I won’t forget how horrible it felt to stand on the path in my friend’s front garden whilst she told me the latest round of bad news relating to her health. I have never wanted to hug anybody more in my entire life, but unfortunately the risk of germs was much stronger than my need to let her know that I loved her. I’m guessing that she already knows. I don’t use the L word much, but I choose to believe that the people I love, already know about it, at least I hope that they do. When I say tell people that you love them, I don’t just mean the boy – girl / girl – girl / boy – boy romantic kind either. Your friends, your family, whoever it is that matters to you, don’t keep that to yourself. Don’t let people wonder whether or not they matter to you.

Usually we get the chance to show our love through our actions but this year has made that harder. Do people still know that you love them when they can’t see it in your face, when they don’t get to hang out with you, when you’re not escorting their drunken arse out of a taxi and safely into their front door after a night out. When we can’t do all the things we normally do, can they still tell? If not them you need to find a way to tell them. Cards, texts, phone calls, tagging them into stupid memes on social media – whatever it takes.

So far my close circle haven’t been infected by the virus, my husband is a key worker and I have one of the few jobs that I can do from home. As long as at least one of my laptops works and I have access to the internet I can still work. Virgin Media has done it’s best to kill my business from time to time, my iMac has interrupted the majority of my video calls by trying to noisily eject a Justin Timberlake CD, which has been stuck there since the spring and my MacBook has cranked the volume right up on it’s fan in a vain attempt to make me leave it alone, but despite these minor challenges we haven’t had to cope with the additional pressures of our day to day finances being decimated, but I know a lot of people who have. Getting 80% of your income on furlough sounds fine, but there are a lot of people out there who already had 99.9% of their full income accounted for.

Traditionally the run up to Christmas was busy for retailers, hospitality and the beauty industry, then after Christmas retailers had to tempt consumers with discounts to clear old stock and make up for the post Christmas dip in spending. That model has changed a lot over the last few years but this year has turned into something that nobody on earth could ever have predicted. So many things have been affected by the lockdowns and there are so many businesses that will be in real trouble by the spring. Christmas Do’s and New Year’s Eve nights out used to mean people buying party dresses and accessories, getting their hair and nails done and sometimes even hotel bookings – this year all of that has gone. Zoom is fun but it’s no match for the big end of year blow out, especially not if your business relies on it. Imagine being a beauty salon this year. Imagine knowing that your rent is due when you haven’t had weddings, proms, birthday parties throughout the year or Christmas. Imagine knowing that your rent is due when you’ve spent most of the year closed.

Running a small business has always been hard but this year will without doubt be too much for some of them. There will undoubtedly be some people who have been fortunate enough to change their operation and carry on trading, some will even have financially benefitted from the pandemic, but most small businesses have struggled in one way or another. Being self employed and able to work at home isn’t too bad if your youngest child is a studious individual in their late teens, but running a business from your kitchen table with a toddler and three other children that now need to be home-schooled is a very different proposition.

Whilst the supermarkets and a certain online retailer have never been busier, people with small businesses that haven’t been allowed to open their doors are genuinely struggling, especially those with premises whose landlords will still be expecting a rent payment for the next quarter. As ever I hope that you remember the small businesses that looked after people when the first lockdown kicked in. Whilst some companies were filling their boots with their “vital” status, small local shops with no way to conduct their day to business started to step up to make sure that people who couldn’t get to the supermarkets didn’t go hungry. It’s also a good time to recognise the cafes that started doing deliveries to NHS Staff, the small bakeries that started doing delivery rounds to make sure that people had bread. The community groups that carried on offering support to those in need. The volunteers that stepped up and did things for strangers. We can of course never forget the amazing NHS staff and the sacrifices they made this year, (I’m resisting the urge to talk about the recognition of clapping on our doorsteps whilst continuing to reward them with dismal pay) 2020 was a great year for ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

A lot of things changed this year and as a Black woman living in the UK it has been impossible to ignore some of them. My post a few months ago covers my thoughts on how it felt this summer to live through the sharp focus on race, the sudden “wokeness” of the big brands and the reminder that I’m racial minority in the area in which I live. As a result of this focus on race there have never been more Black people on television and there are suddenly a lot more films featuring Black people and telling their stories. If I’m honest I’m still too traumatised to watch a lot of them, because unfortunately a lot of stories are centred around racism and frankly after the summer of reminders of how many racists I’m sharing this island with, I’m happy to watch nothing but kids TV and rom-coms for a little bit longer. I hope that they’re still there in a few months, because I know that I’m not the only one who can’t face any more triggering images at the moment, but despite the low level trauma that I’m recovering from, it’s nice to see an increase in representation and diversity. I’m looking forward to a time when these things don’t occur as a result of murder and mass protest and it would also be nice to have Black people on TV and not have to actively avoid the comments section, but let’s just call it progress and take the positives into 2021.

“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get”

Forrest Gump’s Momma

To borrow this analogy from the film Forrest Gump, this year has been a box of coffee creams and most of them have been pre-chewed and put back in their wrappers! So many terrible things have happened since last New Year, that at times 2020 has felt like a box of chocolates where half the fillings were made of ear wax and the other half were made of dog poo. However, despite the very obvious awful bits, there have been positives in this year. Most off them have been buried avalanche style by the sheer volume of negatives but for many people there have been some positives and my hope for 2021 is that we are able to take those with us.

If the year we’ve just had has made us appreciate each other, our pets, our local businesses, our gardens, our local beauty spots or our individual health then those are the bits to take with us.

Happy New Year everyone. Fingers crossed for a happy and healthy 2021

Claire

p.s. Knock it off with the fireworks, my dog’s not happy!

There are a few things that you should probably know about me. Firstly that I’m the sort of person who will fire out a random social media post about any minor unimportant thing that annoys me. The second thing that you should probably know about me, is that if the mood takes me I’m quite prone to taking things too far, especially if anybody encourages me. If I make a stupid statement and one person backs me, I class that as a full blown green light to go and do the pointless thing I just mentioned. If I can get two or more people to nod encouragingly, I happily translate that into “the whole world needs me to do this”

A couple of days ago I tweeted that one day I was going to write a blog post about things that make me angry. Not the big, important, life changing stuff, the other stuff. There is a very long list of big important stuff but the ones that spring to mind are things like systemic racism, social injustice, sexism, the lack of support for victims of domestic violence, corrupt politicians, property developers stealing greenbelt land and the diagnosis and treatment of certain medical conditions. There are things on that list that I will roll my sleeves up and work to change. There are things on that list that I will help raise awareness of and there are things on that list that I will spend the rest of my life campaigning for, but this particular post isn’t about any of the big important stuff. After the things that have happened this year, I need to give me brain an hour off and avoid focusing on those big serious issues. I want to give my head a short rest from the very real, life threatening things that are happening to some of my friends. I’m giving it a quick pause from the terrifying things happening around the world and today I simply can’t bear to read one more toxic comment from people who feel threatened by there being more black people in this year’s Christmas adverts.

So now that we’ve established what this blog post definitely isn’t going to be – what is it? It’s me moaning. It’s a few paragraphs of self indulgent, opinionated, pointless nonsense about boring, day to day, petty crap that doesn’t really matter. It’s me whining online about the stupid things that annoy me.

The List

So here in no particular order and no categorisation is today’s list of unimportant things that have irritated me recently, starting with the thing that activated my pointless rant mode –

Spotify adding their own songs to my playlists. This is the thing that triggered my original tweet.

Like when you make a playlist with Spotify and they insist on adding extra songs to it. Petty nonsense, that can often be fixed by not being such a tight arse and upgrading from the free tier. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve sulked about this.

@WorthyOnTheWeb Twitter November 2020

The adverts make sense, they’re annoying but they make sense and so does the lack of skipping but messing up my playlists by throwing your own songs on there crosses a line. It’s like they don’t understand the whole point of creating your own playlists \o/

@WorthyOnTheWeb Twitter November 2020

Music is a very personal thing and the very best thing about consuming it digitally is that you don’t have to listen to any tracks that you don’t love. I was a teenager in the 80s so I started listening to music on vinyl which meant that if you didn’t want to listen to a particular track on an album, you had to walk over to your stereo, use the little lever to lift the needle, carefully reposition it over the gap before the next track and then lower the needle. Not ideal. Cassettes were similar and involved fast forwarding and rewinding to get past songs you didn’t like or replay the ones that you loved. CDs improved things because it was a lot easier to skip tracks, but you still have to get involved and then somebody somewhere invented MP3 players. For the first time I could easily make playlists for different situations and turn them into CDs. I made playlists that reflected my mood, playlists that only included a particular genre or let me tailor it to the audience in the back seat of my car. (I could make hip hop playlists that only included the radio edits so that my kids could sing along, minus the hoes, bitches and gun talk.) When Mr WorthyOnTheWeb bought me my first iPod I discovered that I could make playlists that only included the songs I liked. It was revolutionary. Playlists meant that I could create a soundtrack of artists I loved which didn’t include any of their naff album tracks that I didn’t like. I love playlists and their content is very personal. So bearing that in mind, you can see why Spotify deciding to not only make recommendations, but actively add extra songs that I’ve often never heard of to MY personal playlists activated my rant mode.

Loyalty card apps that log you out of your account and require you to input the numbers from your physical card to log back in. I’m looking at you Tesco and I’m side eyeing you too Morrison’s. The whole point of having the loyalty card app on your phone is so that you don’t have to carry the little plastic card. Discovering at the till that you can’t use your loyalty “card” because you agreed to let the supermarket spy on you with the app, instead of carrying a physical loyalty card is not looking after your customers. You’re on a yellow card Tesco, if it happens again – well technically nothing is going to happen, but I won’t be happy.

I also have a whole separate moan about claiming the points you’ve accumulated on supermarket loyalty cards. You get endless emails about claiming your points, but there’s often no obvious way to do so. Morrisons needs you to press something within the app, which then means that you can print off the vouchers when you buy something in store, meaning that you can’t actually use them until next time. Unless you want to spend them on petrol, which means that you can’t ever use them because you’re not allowed to spend Morrisons loyalty vouchers on petrol, despite that being how you accumulated the 15,000 points in the first place.

Online forms that let you spend ages filling them in when they have already logged you out without saving the information you just wasted 20 minutes inputting.

Customer service phone lines which tell you that the best way to get information is to visit their website. Trust me if I could have resolved this by visiting your websites I wouldn’t have wasted the last 15 minutes listening to Greensleeves / Olly Murs which is interrupted every 40 seconds by the same announcement.

Next on my list is yoghurt labelling and specifically the labelling of fudge yoghurts. I like fudge (a lot) but I don’t know how drunk you would have to be, in order to think that it belongs in a yoghurt. That’s a massive no for me. I am however willing to accept that other people might like it. I have no idea why, but these people exist and they walk amongst us. My issue with fudge yoghurts is that they’re generally labelled in a way that makes them look very similar to hazelnut yoghurts. On two separate occasions I have mistaken a fudge yoghurt for a hazelnut one. I am well aware that this is peak pettiness, but if you only really enjoy hazelnut yoghurts and find yourself with a mouthful of the horror that is a fudge yoghurt, it’s upsetting so it made the list.

Inconsistent clothes sizing. If you are a clothes retailer – you can’t just pick any even number between 4 and 20 and apply them randomly. There needs to be some level of common sense. The same person can’t be a petite size 8 and a size 14 in a different shop at the same time. We shouldn’t have to memorise what size clothes we are according to every UK shop and don’t get me started on the my top size is this and my bottom size is that thing.

Small Medium and Large clothes sizes. Those terms are fairly subjective but I think that we can all agree that a size 14 is NOT large. Stop it.

Customer service phone lines where you have to press 1 for this and 2 for that, which 3 rounds in, cut you off and make you start all over again.

Computer security software that runs a scan and includes not having the most expensive version of their software installed as a “threat”

Pay at the pump petrol stations that ask if you want a receipt, but never have any paper.

Jackets and blazers with functional pockets that have been stitched shut! If I get on my soapbox about pockets, this post will be longer than a dissertation.

People who leave rubbish in the bottom of supermarket trolleys.

Shops that never clean their plastic baskets.

Bra underwires stabbing you in the armpit.

Bra underwires leaving your bras and disappearing into your washing machine

People who try on clothes in full make up.

Supermarkets displaying things next to the exit so that you only see them when you are leaving the store.

Daytime television adverts of death that do their best to freak out elderly people by talking none stop about funeral costs. As a society we don’t talk enough about death but it seems that when we do, most of it is generated by companies using television ads to scare elderly people into signing up for life cover and being rewarded with a free biro!

Library books where somebody has written notes or underlined bits. That is not how you should treat books. Stop it right now or at least buy your own copy.

My tumble dryer turning itself off, so that I think it’s been drying my clothes for half an hour, but it has actually only been drying them for 30 seconds.

Apple changing the headphone socket and requiring either special headphones or that stupid adapter. (I know that I could go wireless but why should I?)

The people I live with stealing my Apple compatible headphones and adapters.

Mobile sim only deals that boast 99.9% coverage of the UK and offer you 30GB of data but you somehow only seem to end up with a 4G service when you’re at home slurping your own wifi. If you actually leave the house and want to use your mobile data you can barely manage a 3G signal, despite the very same networks not having this problem when you were paying them £50.00 a month on contract.

People in supermarkets who leave the freezer doors open whilst they look at things. It’s a glass door for a reason.

People unplugging the wifi booster

Those people who let off fireworks for days on end

That game the bin men play where they either hide your freshly emptied bin nowhere near your house or use them to create a modern art installation on the road meaning that you have to get hands on with everybody else’s bin just to get your car out of the street. Sometimes they play both games.

Using a phone charger and getting that irritating message from Apple saying that this accessory is not supported, which is basically them saying that I should have overpaid them for exactly the same thing instead.

Supermarkets selling you wet vegetables. I don’t mind food being bagged, especially at the moment, but if it’s already wet when you put it on display then there is something wrong.

When you’ve been sewing for ages, but the spool thread ran out 5 minutes ago.

Having legitimate paid access to a full Virgin Media TV Package, Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Video but not being able to watch old films without paying for it. Especially when the cost would be more for a single viewing rental than it would be to buy the DVD.

Grammar, when it matters and People whining about grammar when it doesn’t. If you want to misuse there, they’re and their on your personal Facebook posts, then fine go nuts but if you’re a professional organisation or you are communicating something official then you’d better get it right. If you’re a primary or secondary school teacher, then don’t even think about it.

Forms built with Microsoft Word

Excel spreadsheets that act the fool for no reason

Supermarket till operators not removing the security tags, leaving you to have an awkward conversation with the security guard as you try to leave the store, followed by frenzied searching for your receipt and an uncomfortable period of hovering around the door waiting for them to get the tag removed.

Crap wifi signal

People who let their off-lead dog run over to you when you’re walking yours and cheerily announce “It’s ok, he’s friendly” Yours might be, but mine isn’t! Get that mutt back on a lead or learn how to use recall effectively.

People that don’t pick up their dog poo

People that pick up their dog poo and then leave the bag. Not only is it disgusting and dangerous for wildlife, it doesn’t even make sense. The worst part of the job was picking up the warm dog shit. Carrying a sealed plastic bag for a few minutes and putting it in the bin, isn’t the bit that makes you gag.

Software upgrades that make the product worse than it was before. iTunes used to be great back when iPods had big round dials in the middle, now it’s a mess.

Products being connected to the internet when they don’t need to be. It was bad enough that I had to dick about with iTunes to add songs to my iPod but then they decided that an iPod touch was a suitable alternative to an iPod Classic. This habit of connecting everything to the internet irritates ranty middle aged women like myself and also means that there are lots of devices and toys designed for use by children and young people that put them online for no reason. The ability to game online is fine but it’s not essential and the default options almost always steer you towards being connected.

Streaming a film on Virgin Media and half way through it suddenly announces that it’s unavailable – ???

People listening to their own music on a bus without headphones. You are not a DJ, the sound quality is appalling and you’re getting on my nerves. Pack it in, especially if your music is crap.

Spam comments on blog posts. It’s even worse when you’re inexperienced and the comments are complimentary and make you think that it really was a brilliant post and that they’ll be checking on your site soon.

Twitter showing you tweets by what is most popular instead of what was most recently posted. It’s a great way to help users look stupid by letting them comment on things you posted a week ago. (Technically you can change it back but it always ends up back on most popular, especially if you flip between accounts)

Apps that log you out all the time for no reason.

Simpsons Tapped Out trying to make me spend real money on fake donuts to buy cool stuff for my fake Springfield.

Kids pestering you to buy very specific foods, that then sit in the fridge and end up as food waste.

Facebook Help, Has it ever actually helped anybody? Judging from some of the response dates to every single thread I’ve ended up looking at, they haven’t even tried in the last 3 – 4 years.

Buying clothes, football boots, school shoes etc for your kid who insists that they fit, rips the tags off and then announces a couple of weeks later that they didn’t fit. This will of course be after the school shoes have been worn outside or the laces have been removed and put in a different pair, the football boots have been on their feet just long enough to get muddy and the clothes have been screwed up in a laundry basket despite having never been actually worn.

Endless updates. Yeah I get it, mobile apps need to be updated but I’m currently getting over a dozen apps a day demanding to be updated.

Pop ups. I build websites and I’ve studied marketing so I know why you do it, but some of you need to just give it a rest.

Little kids running through groups of pigeons.

Facebook’s endless and often unannounced layout changes.

Getting an instant DM the minute I follow you on Instagram or Twitter

Getting Hi beautiful lady DMs from people I’m not even following on Instagram

Spam emails

Email accounts that work fine one minute and then don’t – ever again in some cases.

People who follow up an unsolicited email with another unsolicited email

When you ask for something specific in a shop and they tell you that they don’t sell them because nobody wants them! I’m right here trying to buy one.

When a cosmetics brand stops doing the only shade you like.

When supermarkets stop selling products you like. It took me a long time to get over Asda discontinuing their Whoopie Pies.

Craft magazines in plastic bags that don’t let you see the price or what you’re getting for your money. Last week I was in a supermarket and spotted a Sewing magazine which includes three sewing patterns. One pattern is for an ugly dress that I have no intention of making and the other two are still a mystery. You can’t read what they are on the front of the magazine because the patterns are in front of them and it’s impossible to see patterns two and three properly because the patterns and magazine are all inside a sealed plastic bag. After much bag fondling (whilst being stared at by security personnel) I managed to establish that one was something for a small child, possibly a sweatshirt and the other was some form of soft decorative item or cuddly toy. The teeny tiny print that my middle aged eyeballs had zero hope of reading, was eventually confirmed as being £9.99 after a considerable amount of sealed bag content arranging and verification by my teenage companion and their youthful eyesight. The tiny printing of the massive price tag, is technically a separate moan but we’ll let that go.

When music streaming services stop having the songs you’ve favourited.

Which brings us roughly back to where we started which was me complaining about online music platforms messing with my personal playlists. Thank you for indulging my desire to moan about petty unimportant things. It was very cathartic making this list. I don’t expect that this blog post will change things, but if somebody could have a word with Spotify, Apple, the big 4 supermarkets and whoever makes the decisions on yoghurt labelling, we could definitely halve this list.

Bye for now

Claire a.k.a. Ranty McRantface