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

Why are curtain tracks so vindictive? They sit there happily doing their job until some crucial part of your day - you know, about to leave for work, people about to arrive for an important 'do', just got to the most serene and complicated part of your Pilates routine - when 'click' and 'swossh', there's cloth across your ears and you know the swine has fallen down again.

I mean, it can't wait for you to actually open a curtain, can it? Okay, it has the occasional little joke by popping a bit of material off a hook or creaking ominously as if it might come loose from its grip, but it has to wait until you're happily occupied elsewhere until it throws the curtains and dust all over you.

Curtain tracks are gits.

Curtain hooks are just as bad.
They wait until you are going to put some curtains up and then leap off of the curtain track into a nook or a cranie where you will never find them.
This leaves you with no alternative - you have to bunch the curtains up. There are just not enough hooks to go round.
If you listen very carefully I swear you can hear them laughing.

And then there are curtains. Simple job, being a curtain - keep out the light (or dark, if darkness threatens you), give you some privacy, be decorous - not hard, hmm? Given that they have achieved the onerous task of remaining hung, you'd think a curtain's life wouldn't be too difficult. Well, we've obviously made it too easy because curtains use their hanging around time dreaming up ways to annoy me.

There's the old favourite 'get mixed up with other curtains and pretend to be a pair until you've hung me up' method, the 'ignore all pretty smells and absorb noxious fumes then gust them towards me when I sit down', and best of all the 'make a gap' - ideal for letting people see you when you're trying to be 'not in' or doing something embarrassing (yes, traffic sitters, I was dancing half naked to Ricky Martin last night, thank you for your applause, I didn't bloody know you could see me, did I!) Then there's the 'throwing a beam of light across your face when you're trying to get to sleep', teamed with 'make the room totally dark so I fall over on the way to the loo' - thier timing is impeccable.

And don't get me started on curtain's summer games with insect life...

B******s.

The tie back. A simple invention designed to keep the curtains tucked out of the way. A small piece of material with
rings at each end which hook onto the bit in the wall. Useful, one would think, until they have thier fun.
I recommend that you never, ever, use a tie back in the kitchen there is a window above the sink because all tie backs came fitted with a washing up detector. They wait until you have the sink full of greasy smelly saucepans, you know the kinds from last Thursday's fry up which you finally got round to working on, and then they leap. Now this is no ordinary leap. They have some clever system, some piece of technology which ensures that they jump straight into the centre of any local grease pools. They proceed to roll around merrily in the grease until they are totally cover and unrecognisable. The only rule for thier game is that only one tie back can do this at a time and any other tie backs in the house must hide from veiw until the human who needs them has got fed up and given up the search for another pair that just about match the curtains.
They may think it is fun but they begin to think again when they find out that thier self inflicted stains will not come out.