Hell in a handbasket: Pt. 17

Well, a fairly uneventful but still enjoyable weekend. Dinner party with all my buddies on Friday, and work on Saturday; complete with apres work pints at the Wrens Inn across the street.

Anyhoo, in my effort to recount at least 10% of all the crime I experience in this country, I can relate the following two (three?) incidents from the weekend. 1) Although I wasn't there, on Friday night some people came into our cafe and tried to sneak out with an old lady's purse. My boss, an assertive (but lovely) Indian lady, smelled something fishy when the thieving couple tried to leave without buying anything and demanded to search their bags. Cowardly as most of the English thieving class of scumbags are, they relented and gave back the handbag - saying they 'accidentally' stole it. 2) Saturday morning while I was walking to work, I stopped to watch a busker playing the sax, while I was watching, a little kid (read: street urchin) came buy and stole some of his money out of his tin. The saxaphone player shouted for someone to help him and catch the kid, but this being England, nobody gave a crap, even though there were thousands of people and at least a score probably saw the kid steal the money. Myself being not-English, I followed the kid and when I caught up with him I grabbed him by the neck of his coat and made him give back the money (although he said it was only 50 pence and I had no way of proving otherwise). 3) On the way home from town today somebody threw or slung something at the window of our bus and smashed it, scaring the crap out of everyone and giving the poor old lady sitting by the window a near heart-attack.

This raises my point about England, the so-called 'land of hope and glory'. By and large, it's really crap. The problem is the people. They can't be bothered to do anything, ever. Over the two years I worked at the call-centre, I became very well acquainted with the English national motto: "I can't be arsed". It's what English people say whenever you ask them to do something that might benefit someone other than themselves. Whenever I got a call from one of our customers whom we had screwed over through some error on our part (a common occurrence) my managers could never be "arsed" to right the situation. Bus drivers often "can't be arsed" to stop and let you on the bus (last week I saw a bus-driver close a door in the face of a paraplegic rather than get off his fat 'arse' and put down the ramp. Many people in my neighbourhood can't be "arsed" to raise their kids properly, or go to work, or pick up their dog crap (or even go for a walk with the dog: English dogs, usually some type of pitbull or Rottweiller, walk themselves - makes for a really safe neighbourhood for kids and small women).

Anyways, I'm thinking of designing an alternative flag to the St. George's cross. Instead, it will have a hand giving the two-fingers (England's equivalent of the middle-finger), and underneath it will say "I can't be arsed".

There, just had to vent some spleen. Thanks for reading.