In the last twelve months i have visited the local tip more times than i have in my entire. I have experienced many things at the tip in this time including a member of staff taking a box of muesli out of a skip and loudly proclaiming to his colleague “there’s nowt wrong wi it”. I had never at any point however felt slightly threatened, until yesterday that is.

Since moving house there has been quite a lot of work to do, in fact there is still quite a lot of work to do especially in the garden. Last weekend i attacked the garden hacking, slashing, smashing and all sorts pretty much all weekend. I did not have time to take all of the garden waste and rubble to the tip, yesterday presented as the perfect opportunity to fix this. Off to the tip i run in the car, it took me four trips in total. Trips one, two and four presented nothing in the way of problems, trip three however was a bit of an issue. I took a lot of garden waste, mainly branches from some bushes i cut down which were loose in the back of the car meaning i had to grab arm fulls of branches. The result of this was that i occasionally dropped bits on the floor, while heading back to my car i picked up the bigger bits that i had dropped on the floor.

After finishing unloading the car i noticed at the back of my car a small pile of earth and some loose leaves. For me to pick this up would be ridiculous, i felt kinda bad about leaving it there but figured there was nothing that i could do and that the staff would have a way of cleaning it up. As i was getting in to my car a member of staff shouted to me, i walked over to him and he passed me a broom while saying “that’s a big pile of shit you’ve left there”. I was a little taken aback by what he had said to me, so shocked that i took the broom and swept it up. This is quite unlike me, i can be a little confrontational in situations like this. I think it was a cross between shock at the way he had spoken to me and the fact i wanted to come back and bring another load. When i gave the bloke the broom back he said “are you coming back?” i replied that i was, his response threw me even more “i’ll be waiting for you”.

I’ll be waiting for you??? I got the feeling that he didn’t mean to help me unload my car, it felt slightly menacing. I got in my car and drove home, with every passing second i was getting angrier and angrier with what had happened to the point that i almost turned around to go back. I got home and told Jen, she was as astounded as i was, thank god i thought it was just me. I decided that when i went back i would ask the guy for his name in order to report him. Trip number four i unload the car then do the full on movie moment where i stand at my car door with the key in the lock trying to decide whether or not to just leave it or ask for the guys name. I decided to ask, i approached the guy and asked his name which he gave me and then asked me why. Another member of staff was with him and he denied saying it. I told him i didn’t appreciate his tone and that i was goiong to complain, he then claimed that he recognized me and that every time i come i always leave a mess and that he was sick of it. Talk about trying to get yourself out of a sticky situation.

I will definitely be complaining, mainly because if he speaks to a guy my size (i’m not saying i’m massively muscular or anything but i am six foot seven) nothing is going to stop him speaking to other people like this and that is totally unacceptable.

It’s late I’m awake and thought i’d blog. This is not a game review it is merely me talking about my thoughts, and in this case frustrations, with a game.

Recently due to circumstances I won’t bore you with (I’ve only blogged about it minimally so as not to turn my blog into an online megaphone of dreary whining) any video games I have purchased have been very cheap as I don’t have a lot of cash right now. The price of the games I’ve been buying has a direct correlation to their age. One of the old and cheap games I have been playing recently is The Saboteur.

I remember thinking I liked the look of this games when it first came out and managed to pick it up recently on eBay for super cheaps. After the first five minutes I was genuinely surprised by the rude content, I honestly had no idea. Other than this it started quite nicely, characters were ok, I enjoyed the main characters OTT Irish attitude and turns of phrase. It had a playable flash back section, there was nothing to not like. I started to think it was very like GTA but the word Saboteur infers it will be sneakier. This was backed up by NPC dialogue meaning i was expecting a shit ton of sneaking. The problem being I never saw any possibilities for sneakiness.

Missions are assigned to you in a manner identical to GTA to the point I referred to it as Grand Theft Nazi in a tweet. So mission is rescue this guy from this building. Now if it were GTA you would be given hints, clues as to ways this objective could be met. This is not the case in The Saboteur, you are given no direction what so ever. It is literally the case that there is a building, you need to get the bloke out and that is it. On more than one occasion I died at least 10 times just trying to get in said building, I am not claiming to be an awesome gamer but this was irritating as shit. It was pointed out to me by my dear lady that I was stupid because I said I needed hints. This (I hope) is not the case but I’d like to think anybody who has played GTA knows what I mean. It gives you enough information to work out how you are supposed to do it rather than than dumping you outside a building for the following to happen.

Ok, stealth kill a Nazi steal his uniform, approach building, another nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Sneak around the back of the building, climb up building, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Sneak to another building, climb that, use telephone wire to go to next building, sneak around on roof, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

Find a truck near the building, plant explosives to cause a distraction, walk away from truck, truck blows up, a nazi sees me and sounds the alarm, death

I get totally fed up with sneaking, run in guns blazing, kill many Nazis, either complete mission or get loads further than usual, many nazi’s have seen me and sounded the alarm, death

Suffice to say I got so annoyed with this I’ve decided to give up on the game altogether. I don’t care enough about it to endure this on nearly every level. I was hoping for a game that would set missions where after poking about a bit you would say “oh right, that’s what you need to do”. If I then die knowing I’m doing the right thing then it’s not a problem, but to die that often and still have no idea how to progress???? Not worth my time and barely worth the money.

Last night during a conversation with Jen it was sort of decided that I need to get a social Work job regardless. I have taken steps to put my family before my career recently in that I soon start a job I don’t really want in order to ensure my family don’t suffer. I find this fact a little depressing as anyone would and Jen doesn’t want that for me.

My amazingly supportive wifel (which as everybody knows is a woman’s title in the year before she gets married, a man is wusband), who put up with me not having any money while at Uni and then continued doing so after I graduated, suggested that I start looking further afield for jobs.

This could mean one of three things as far as I can tell.

1/ big ass commute – Some of the jobs I’m looking at would involve a very large commute by my reckoning around a 150-200 mile round trip. I would more than likely need a car while at work Which means unless I leave my car somewhere in the area I’ll be working (an insurance nightmare) I cannot use public transport. Doesn’t sound very appealing to me as I will surely be tired and cranky all the time as a result of prolonged hours on the road. Not to mention the ridiculously early mornings combined with not getting home till kids are in bed. The petrol cost isn’t really factoring on this decision as I would rather earn call centre wages after travelling costs doing something I’m passionate about, enjoy doing and spent 4 years getting qualified to do than work in a call centre. I am not doing down call centre workers, I’ve done it myself. It’s more the wasted qualification aspect I’m getting at.

2/ live away from home through the week – reeeeeeally hate the idea of this prospect. I do not want to be away from my family and as I’ve pointed out my family come first for me. However Jen says that we would cope, she is prepared to essentially become a single parent in order for me to do the job I want to do (I am ridiculously lucky to have this woman in my life). I would hate being away from the kids and I would hate knowing that Jen was on her own looking after them and that I could do little to help her. The cost aspect of this would depend heavily on where I got a job but again I refer you back to my comments on cost regarding transportation in option 1.

3/ The whole family moves – this solves the issues in 1 & 2 but creates a whole bag of its own issues. We have only just moved into a house that was essentially built for us (not quite but almost) and as a result are in a stupidly fortunate position due to not having a mortgage. To move would change this plus we would be moving out of our beautiful new house into rented accommodation before possibly looking to buy in the area we move to. Then there’s Ruby, she’s about to start school in September so it could mean uprooting her out of school shortly after starting. We would still have to come back home at weekends so Ruby could see her dad meaning traveling a lot at weekends effectively making our weekends shorter and way less enjoyable.

It’s a great big sloppy mess potentially which is why I haven’t looked previously but it may be my only way forward in My chosen profession. Of course this may all be redundant as job opportunities are liable to be as scarce and have as many people applying for them as they do locally, but I have to try.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post, actually that’s generous. Yesterday I wrote an enormous angry rant. The angry rant was then accidentally deleted. That is what actually happened, it was written on my iPhone and I didn’t save it before restarting my phone and this was probably for the best.

I was angry because I had been put in a dangerous position at work and luckily with assistance handled the situation. Actually I wasn’t angry about this at all, the thing I was angry about what happened the following day when I mentioned it to the agency I did the work for. I was informed by the agency that I was in the wrong! Apparently what I should have done is remove myself from the situation. I’m not entirely certain how you can remove yourself from a situation where you have been attacked without provocation so I asked for clarification. The following conversation was a back and forth of them reciting company policy and me getting angrier as I asked how that was possible in the situation I was in to which I never got a satisfactory response.

After getting commended for my actions by my peers and thanked for the help I gave them to then be told I was in the wrong was frustrating as hell. I had reassured my colleagues that in a situation such as that I had their backs only to find out that the agency didn’t have mine. I am a passionate and sometimes impulsive twit and it took everything in me not to tell them to stick any further shifts somewhere uncomfortable as I have done in a few jobs in the past. I held on to the thought that I would not be working for them much longer and need the money, it was all I had and appears to be all they offer. Now I’ve calmed down I can see the irony in the fact that they were giving me little support in my role as a support worker.

At this point I have only had access to Google+ for a day but I wanted to write down a few thoughts not necessarily to do with the service more to do with how I use social networks.

First off I love google+ I get the same feeling using it that I did using Facebook for the first time. It’s simple straight forward and just works. I can definitely see me using it in the future if it weren’t for one thing, Twitter.

These days I barely use Facebook, I really don’t like it. So why do i use it?? The issue is that Facebook is jam packed full of people that I know that don’t use Twitter, namely family and people who don’t recognise how awesome Twitter is. The way I have come to use Facebook is to share thoughts and content that I think both my Twitter followers and Facebook friends may be interested in. Twitter is my mainstay, I love it and have many real life friends on there. So the way I operate is I throw everything at Twitter both directly and through 3rd party services. Those 3rd party services also update Facebook and then I occasionally throw scraps of the direct content at Facebook as well.

This basically means I use Facebook as a secondary, in fact for the most part I don’t even log on to Facebook itself. I only ever go on if somebody has sent me a message relating to a piece of content I have pushed there via Twitter, four square, posterous, my blog or similar. As little as I use it I’m loathe to get rid of it as I do occasionally strike up an interesting conflab with an old friend I don’t stay in regular contact with. What the hell has this got to do with Google+ you may be thinking, well I will tell you.

I can’t see me leaving Twitter anytime soon, so deeply does my love for it run. I think Google+ has a lot of potential, so much so that I don’t want to treat it like a skanky ho in the way I treat Facebook, I think it’s to good for that. The problem is when using two social networks one is likely to be treat in this way. No matter how hard you try one will be dominant over the other. I can’t see anyway that Twitter will be deposed by G+ as Twitter remains so basic, so simple and easily accessible.

So to sum up I want to use G+ effectively, I want to utilise it well but the thing I foresee happening is that I will ditch Facebook and G+ will take its place which is exactly what I want to avoid happening. It’s still early days and I’m sure G+ has even more potential than I have seen in the short period I have been using it but so far my feelings are that I would quit Facebook in a heartbeat for it. However it’ll take something major to make me a Twitter Quitter.

Hey I’ve got this blog thing I never use, it’s probably a good place to record something as important as the birth of a child.

While this post is delayed it is delayed for fairly good reasons ie kids take up a lot of your time. Please welcome to the world my now more than week old son Alfie Flynn Langley.

I should have known when I booked a Friday 13th dental appointment that it would not be a lollipop and rainbow experience, but little did I know I would be seen by a rogue dentist with no regard for pain and a maniacal laugh.

I knew from the get go I was not
getting my regular dentist, I’m not scared of the dentist or anything but yesterday morning I tweeted:

Friday 13th and I have a dental appointment with a different dentist. I have @SteveMartinToGo in Little Shop of Horrors in my head

I arrived and was warmly greeted at reception, this changed fairly quickly when I was asked if I pay for my dental treatment. I answered no and the girl on reception instantly ceased smiling and took on the persona of an eastern European woman in a late 80′s to early 90′s Hollywood film. “what do you claim” was her terse response. After signing the necessary paper work with a big beaming smile on my face to try and counteract that chill in the room I was directed upstairs. I waited no more than five minutes before being directed into a room. I was greeted by an eastern European woman with the persona of an eastern European woman from an from a late 2000′s early 2010′s real life. This however may well have been smoke and mirrors because before long she was operating that equipment with the same dexterity and ability to cause pain as Niska from Firefly.

I told her of the recent sensitivity I have had in my molars, she had a poke about and decided to x-ray my teeth. This discovered a cavity within one of my teeth. She injected me, it felt to me like it was the wrong place but what do I know, I’m not a dentist. She immediately picked up the drill, IMMEDIATELY!!!!! My mouth did not feel numb at all, she told me to raise my hand if I felt any pain. I tried to raise my hand on feeling the pain but I think the massive head jerk was probably her first clue. It was decided we should wait a minute to let the anaesthetic take, genius thinks I but did not dare voice as I was obviously dealing with a dangerous and highly trained woman. Once mote the drill came out and once more I writhed in pain. This then happened a third time before she decided to give me another shot of as anaesthetic which not only felt like it was in the right place but after a few minutes numbed my face.

The hole was drilled with me only being able to feel the vibrations in my skull. The dental nurse said in a shocked voice “what are you using” I shat my pants, this was no time for highly experimental tools or procedures. If she was considering using an old skool piece of apparatus that her mentor showed her when performing emergency dentistry in an unlikely scenario I didn’t want to hear about it. Fortunately for me her response was “composite” which took both me and the dental nurse by surprise, you could feel the nurse’s disapproval. This meant I was getting a White filling, I was getting a free White filling. I got the feeling the nurse was just dying to tell the dentist off but swear I saw the dentist give her that “know your place bitch” kinda look. It was absolutely intense as I’m sure this conveys.

I have now lost count of how many ‘I haven’t blogged for ages but I’m gonna start blogging again’ posts I’ve made and frankly it’s started to annoy me so rather than blah blah blah this is what I’ve been up to since the last post round ups I’m just gonna open up with a story about my own childish stupidity.

I recently moved house (ok so that kinda says a bit about what I’ve been up to since my last post but honestly there won’t be any more) and this new house has a distinct lack of carpet, it could be said that it is in fact carpetless. Being a mature 34 year old father and role model brings many responsibilities, one of which is teaching the children how to correctly slide on shiny floors in socks, I feel so passionately about this that I even do it when they are out, it may appear to the untrained eye that I do this purely for my own enjoyment but I can assure that is totally not the case.

Yesterday I was in a rush to get out the house but as I got to the front door realised I did not have the car keys, I took a few large quick steps then set in to skid. It was majestic, gliding across the floor like a piece of butter on a hot pan right up until I hit a less shiny piece of floor. My feet stopped, I carried on and I crumpled up on the floor with a pained blood curdling yelp. Yes I’m 34, yes I’m a child, no it won’t stop me doing it.

The saga continues, in my Last post I spoke of how I probably wasn’t entitled to jobseekers and this has turned out to be the case however this is the least of my worries.

My not being entitled to Jobseekers was quite frankly a punch in the face, more due to the fact that my lack of entitlement seemed to be based on the fact that I went to university to try and better myself rather than the fact they wouldn’t give me any money. The reason for this is that Jen works and as a result we are entitled to working family tax credits. This tops up whatever income is coming in meaning regardless of whether I got jobseekers or not we should still get approximately the same amount of cash coming in. That is of course if they get everything to do with our claim correct, I mean they won’t screw that up will they…?!?!?

Yeah they did!

The friendly helpful guys at working family tax credits decided way back in February when I told them I was no longer employed that they would not bother altering my income. So they had me working zero hours a week but still earning a full time wage, the result of course is that we are getting a lot less cash than we should. Now this story would be pretty dull if it ended there so let me continue. The start of the new tax year means that all information is frozen as they are sending out annual renewals, I will receive my renewal anytime between now and June. They cannot send my renewal out any quicker, tell me when it’s coming out or change any details until we get it meaning we could well be receiving several hundred pounds less than we should until possibly June.

I’m not entirely certain how they expect us to feed our kids and apparently they don’t care. There are people who resign their entire lives to not working, play the system to their advantage and rake in a decent sum of cash being work shy gits, I want to work and have fallen on hard times and get squat.

Oh and a little added bonus, there is such a thing as a crisis loan which can be obtained. It’s an interest free loan from the social fund to be used, as the name suggests, in a crisis. I would say barely having enough cash to cover the bills would constitute something in or around a crisis, the question is would they? Well we won’t find out because the very fact that we get payments from working families means that we are not even eligible for a crisis loan.

Life gets more fun by the day

I’m sat in a house that we are due to move into in 2 days and it looks like a before picture rather than an after.

To say Jen and I are doing to much is an understatement of the highest order. Neither of us has had a day where we haven’t been at either work or the new house trying to get it fit to live in since January 4th and the stress levels are teetering over the edge of epic and plummeting into biblical. This is not our only stress of course because the local supermarket a 3 for 2 offer on stress and Jen can’t resist a bargain. A baby on the way and a wedding a year in may (don’t worry there will be no more rhymes, it was an accident) and throw into the mix that I’m recently unemployed and it’s all a bit messy but it got messier still when I went for my ‘work focused interview’ at Job centre +, I think the plus is that they have a working bog.

Quite depressed about the prospect of claiming dole already I arrived to find the experience was very different to my last dole experience approximately a decade ago. On this occasion I saw nobody that I thought was going to try to sell me drugs, beat me up or ask me for business. A harsh sentiment from a qualified social worker you may think but ten years ago I found the whole dole experience rather intimidating and frightening, I’ve grown up now I am no longer that person so perhaps this is why my thoughts were different, either that or it was only 11.30 so they were all still in bed. When my number was called (or when it was up which is a scarily accurate analogy) I was informed of something that made me want to punch somebody in he face, not the guy delivering the information as I am aware of his lack of control in this situation. He informed me that I MAY NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR JOBSEEKERS.

WTF how can I not be? Basically because I went to university. Jobseekers eligibility is decided bass on the amount of tax paid in the last two full financial years so in my case April 2008-April 2010, when I was at uni!!!! The guy sat there and told me I may not get a penny. The fact that I worked solid from 1994 to 2007 with only 2 months of unemployment in that time means absolutely nothing. I was incensed (which is an awesome word if nothing else) and may have sworded at the nice man who’s fault it was not. I did work in that time period but not a lot so the chances are I’m gonna be shafted. The hideous bit is if I’d become unemployed after April I’d have been judged on 2009-2011 in which period ive worked a ton more. Life, kicks you in the nuts before feeding them into a wood chipper while laughing maniacally.

Rant over