Techno, techno, techno, techno!

In the words of 2 Unlimited, there's no-no, no-no-no-no, no-no-no-no, no-no, there's NO LIMITS to the frustration that technology can heap on a person. With the internet, as websites become ever more sophisticated, you never know whether there's a problem with a site or a problem with the settings on your machine. In truth, there's probably no problem with anything, but by the time you've pissed about trying different security settings in Internet Explorer and Norton, Zone Alarms and whatever other things you have protecting your machine, you've completely mashed up your system and broadcast all your credit card and banking details to the world.



There's a German rock band called Rammstein, they have all flamethrowers and stuff in their live acts. Now, there's a health and safety disaster waiting to happen if ever there was one!



Thinking about the I hate my flatmate blog, it's quite easy to construct a blog of things that really piss you off about the people you live or work with. All you have to do is take every day goings on (or occurrances if you prefer the non-ranting alternative) exaggerate them a little bit and write about them with as much anger and as venom as you can muster. Today's problem with John Doe's flatmate was that she'd left a bit of jam and a few breadcrumbs in his margarine. Well, excuse me, but when you have to live with my parents, that's nothing buster!



I once had a housemate who invited her dolescum boyfriend to live with us FOC (without asking us) and they'd cook porridge on the stove each morning. They'd cook porridge in the smallest pan they could find and let the stuff bubble all over the cooker. And then they'd leave it. Till it baked on. Really, really hard. Instead of writing blogs about them, we used to take direct action like throwing away their dirty pots after they'd been left in the kitchen for three days. It got the message across. And they were really noisy when they had sex - theirs was the bedroom directly above mine. "Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeith!!!!!!!!!!!!!" He was really skinny and he thought he was an artist and that work stifled his creativity. Lazy fucker.



We also had a housemate who had the attic room (it's always the attic room) in a different house. The bathroom was on the same floor as her bedroom and we could hear her talking to herself in different voices as we'd go up the stairs. That was scary, especially during the heightened emotional state that everyone was experiencing during finals. I had a walk-in wardrobe that was sort of beneath the stairs and I once dreamt that she was a witch who had a secret passage from her attic coven into my wardrobe. That was on the day of my final final exam: I'd gone to bed exhausted in the afternoon after the exam; I was woken by that dream and threw up immediately.



Housemates are fun. I think people in that sort of situation should make the most of all those irritations because it gives you something to look back on when you're finally settled in a place of your own where the kitchen bin is emptied when it needs emptying, where there's always toilet paper, where it doesn't persistently smell of curry or garlic or onions, and where you don't get slug trails up your cooker because there's a three day-old chilli con carne sat on there.



Lodgers, on the other hand, are a complete fucking nightmare. Lodgers want to be housemates, yet the lodgee just wants money and to never set sight on the lodger.