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

I slept late this morning - I'd been working for 12 days (including last weekend on call), so needed a lie-in. I didn't hear the wife get up and go out, but when I did get up I found the dreaded list on the table.

Now, if this was just a supermarket shopping list, that would be fine. I can happily do that without any mental effort whatsoever. Sadly, the lists I'm left include all the difficult things: obscure items I have to drive between shops to find; gardening and DIY jobs which require serious planning and resourcing; and a sprinkling of odd errands which on the face of it appear simple, but which cause time-consuming problems.

One example was to buy some stamps for Christmas cards. Sounds simple, doesn't it? It took me 3 visits to different post offices to complete. The local one was closed because of a local power cut. The one in the nearby town had some sort of staff shortage - with one counter open out of six* and a static queue of people out of the door and around the block. I eventually got them from another village post office many miles away.



*The old joke is that post offices always had four counters, but with three of them closed. In order to tackle customer dissatisfaction, the organisation invested lots of money to improve the service. Nowadays, post offices have eight counters, with seven of them closed.

[Amy P]

You need to go to Italy for your postage needs.

A mature student I taught once (very mature, he was in his 70s and doing a PhD) spent several months in a Tuscan village. One day, he needed a stamp, so he hied himself to the village post office. After a long wait, he discovered he was in the wrong queue. This one didn't sell stamps. So he had to requeue and wait some more.

By the time he finally got to the front of the queue, the gentleman had forgotten the Italian for 'stamp'. Instead of asking for 'un francobollo', he demanded 'una franca bella' - a beautiful Frenchwoman. The wit in the PO replied that he wanted one, too.

Whereupon the whole place broke into a conga line, chanting, 'Una franc-a BELL-a, una franc-a BELL-a...'

"It took me 3 visits to different post offices to complete." [Icy North]

I'm sorry that you don't live in a country where stamps can be bought at supermarkets or even ATM machines. It's been years since I've needed to visit a post office to get stamps.

You can buy books of stamps from corner shops and supermarkets, but she wanted a very precise number of Christmas-themed stamps, so the post office was the only option.

Love the Franca bella story

Reminds me of the Jerome K Jerome episode where the guy goes into a German shop to buy a cushion, and embarrasses the assistant who thinks he's asking for a Kusschen (a little kiss).

Ah, the amount of trouble you can get into, even without Google translate...

The whole world is a Monty Python sketch in which foreign-language phrasebooks are full of naughty phrases .

Even sticking in English comes up with problems, such as when Ebooks translated 'arms' as 'anus'...

<BB<

Man in restaurant asks waitress for a quickie. Waitress leaves. Manager comes out to explain the pronunciation of 'quiche'.

That one belongs in the puns thread.