Watching Steve McClaren's face during the game tonight you could see him thinking, "I've lost my job, I've lost my job. Hold on. Hold on. I've saved my job. I lost my job... have I saved? Oh no, he missed. I've lost my job." How careers are decided and whilst I don't think we deserved to qualify overall, we could easily have done so, just had a bit of luck gone our way. And at least one man's career depended on that chance.
Still better to have the disappointment now than during the actual finals. And congratulations to England for prolonging th agony for as long as humanly possible. Personally I think the manager of Andorra should resign. If only they had scored in the last minute we'd be going through - and would that have saved McClaren's job? Probably it would. He can think about that when he's cleaning toilets in his next appointment. But I think fortune gave him enough chances and am surprised he didn't resign immediately, though I suspect that he probably gets paid off if he is sacked and not if he jumps ship.
Standing in the post office with the prizes for the "Oh Fuck I'm 40" programme competition and a few other signed bits and bobs for fans I was slightly regretting my decision to send out maybe a 100 or so differently shaped and sized packages in the new competition. I haven't thought it through. But then like Heather Mills I do an awful lot of charidee work and like her I don't want to take the risk that people won't realise I am doing it, so it's good to mention it and let people know just how much effort it is. No-one has a harder life than me.
But then the Post Office is a depressing place and the queue seems to always be so long and there's usually someone getting agitated or who is mentally ill in the mix and it's a pretty stressful experience. I feel very sorry for the people who work there and noticed as I waited that the number of the local police station is prominently displayed on the wall and I assume gets at least daily use.
A harmless, but loquacious madman dressed in the style of the vagabond was at the front of the queue, telling the disinterested woman behind him a story about the little known details of the death of Miles Davies. I wasn't there for the start of the conversation, so don't know how it started, but the woman's body language and lack of contribution seemed to indicate she had been conversationally ambushed. Finally the man went to the counter, where he drunkenly and theatrically went to collect some money, before walking out of the Post Office, still talking to no-one about nothing. A woman further back in the queue shouted after him (though not loud enough for him to hear), "Yeah, how long are you going to keep talking to yourself?" Given that she was essentially doing this herself and given the general lack of need for any comment at all, I appreciated the irony that she was really only a step or two behind him in the madness stakes. I thought about pointing this out, but then that would make me a step or two behind her and well up the ladder to the loft of insanity.
I continued to wait, being annoyed by the TV screens that they had above the queue advertising the Post Office's services. You have probably seen the rubbish TV ones where Bill Oddie and Westlife (with the blonde one inexplicably shouting) come to a branch run by that bloke who used to be in "Cops" (was that what it was called?). They are bad. The in store ones are worse though, as they mainly consist of characters from those ads attempting to put up posters about th Post Office's offers, which keep falling off the wall in a slapstick fashion as they endeavour to tack the corners down. Watching people fail to achieve something as you are stuck in a queue makes the whole enterprise even more frustrating and it didn't make me take any notice of the things on offer, it just made me think that the Post Office must be pretty inefficient if they can't even find staff who can put up a poster. After finally managing to get all four corners of one poster flush against the wall, though untacked and just holding it with their hands, two of the pretend staff are so delighted that they high-five each other, thus causing the poster to "hilariously" fall to the ground. But how stupid must they have been if they didn't realise this would happen? And after expending so much effort, as well. It makes the Post Office look crap.
Another of the adverts (and the fact I saw so many testifies to how long I was waiting) is for the Post Office's telephone directory enquiry service. The woman one from the team is bemoaning the fact that she can never remember the number of her local plumber and is pleased to find out that the Post Office has a telephone number you can ring where they will find that out for you. The ad shows the number and then requests that you save it on to your phone right now before you forget it. Which is rather a circular argument, because if the woman just saved the number of her plumber on to her phone then she wouldn't need to ring the Post Office. If I worked in the Post Office I would be very annoyed that these adverts portrayed me as some kind of idiot.
But you still have a few days to make your contribution to the competition and thus increase my workload, so I am forced to endure this Hell for even longer. Don't delay - visit
my justgiving page today. The money goes to charidee but I don't like to talk about that more than three times in any one day.
