h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I compltely agree with the futile activity of Betterware shopping and the extra expence is worth every penny just to make sure I have something to read whilst on the toilet.

My only problem is how do you stop the catalogue from comming?

Mine is delivered by invisable pixies so I have had great difficulty informing them that I do not wish to recieve any more. ( I have a pile of 8 unread catalogues to my shame, which I shall make the effort to read asap)

Any suggestions as to informing my mystery mail pixie of the situation will be much appreciated.

cubix.

You're lucky. These guys (and dolls) can get quite annoyed if you lose their magazine. Here are a couple of ways you can deter them:

a) The 'don't go there they are crazy people' approach.

In this approach you wait until they collect the magazine and then rush out and hug them. Thank them profusely for bring the mag around. It is good if you can actually cry with emotion. Ask them how much for everything in the catalogue. If they actually work it out and tell you then go into the house and come out with some obscure object such as a sponge cake and see if they will accept that as payment. If they refuse tell them that you are secretly a king Alien who can easily have them abducted and anally probed.

Anyway a few minutes of this and they are bound to pass your house next time.

b) I just killed my wife.

Wet your forehead so you look like you have been sweating. Say something like 'Oh Hi, you were probably expecting my wife, well she's not in today' 'No I don't know when she'll be back, she's visiting friends.'

If they ask to come in then really panic and say that you're having the house fumigated so you can't come in.

Then ask if you can have a shovel, a large plastic sack and some quicklime. Also some rocks and string, because you need to 'weigh something down'.

Hopefully they will leave. Warning, don't do this if you really have killed your wife.

I find leaving the catalogue on the doorstep (from date of arrival to date of collection) is fairly effective, the catalogue gets rather soggy in the good old British weather, even though it has a plastic coated cover.

The collector is not happy with having to bend down and pick up a dirty wet magazine which they can't use again, and better still, you don't have to explain why you don't want to place an order.

I must say, the worst thing is going into someone's house and seeing the handy black plastic remote control tidy on the mantel piece - you just know where they got it.

I am ashamed to admit that Mrs Kebab bought a remote control tidy from these nutcases (the guy who delivers ours is really - like a character from a David Lynch movie). It didn't work - the remotes kept falling out of it. She sent it back. Sums it up, really.

Don't worry, Mrs Kebab has redeemed herself by sending it back! She doesn't buy anything from Avon does she?

Hey, I used to be one of those 'invisible pixies'

It wasn't one of my better jobs

I didn't think the stuff was all bad though. Some of it was not that bad but nothing you couldn't buy elsewhere.

Hey guess what. If you throw the catalogue away the delivery person won't care a monkeys. As for soggy wet ones. I jsut threw them away, it was part of the job.

And you'd be surprised at the number of people who buy stuff. There's a lot of them out there