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I'm not sure your nozzle fits my hole.....
Why...
Is there conformity in some things and not in others? It's present in the probable heart attack in-a-sac in mass produced food outlets but not for example in fuel. In a world where a Big Mac tastes the same in Pittsburgh as in Phuket or McNuggets (to my mind) seem always to taste like batter-covered erasers no matter how stoned or drunk I used to be when eating them, gas pump hose size and colours change over a number of countries faster than a floating voter's mind. I recently rented a car in California. I stopped to refill. Because the rental agency decided to remove the manual it took half an hour to find the fuel cap release button (utterly pointless thing). I then noted neither the fuel cap nor flap said what octane of gas was required or whether the car was even diesel. In the UK and Europe (just in case by the time you read this the UK has voted to leave) gas pump hoses are always green and diesel black. Yup, you guessed it… in the US it's the other way round. However I did not know this, so the green pump (which I thought gas) would not fit the fuel hole, whereas the black pump that I thought was diesel would. The car had no sign or indication if it was a diesel model. I would rather put out my hair if on fire with a hammer, than ring a car rental 1-800 line...... but I had no choice. Eventually (now 90 minutes since arriving on the forecourt) a voice down the cell phone said, "We don't never rent diesel. You just put in the hose with gas. That will fit." Then he hung up. I pondered which hose to use. Eventually a fellow tank filler took pity on me. "You Eng-erlish?" A nod. "Black here is gas. Green is diesel." Eureka!
...and another thing
I have already jabbed at the insanity of different sizes of plugs (December 10, 2015 ‘The plug…a license to drain your money’) and clothes (Jan 21, 2016 ‘What size does stupidity come in?’) but another size mind-bender is food, especially chocolate and specifically a Mars Bar. The PC brigade have long killed off the slogan, “A Mars a day helps you work rest and play” because in their opinion it had too many calories.
Doh! The problem is people just did the ‘rest’ bit but ignored the ‘work’ or ‘play’. If they had done the last two, they would have burned off the calories instead of sitting in front of the TV looking like a beached whale. Rumour has it Mars were obliged to firstly change the recipe (I certainly remember the bar was much firmer and could be sliced with a knife like a loaf of bread) to get the calorie count down but it was not sufficient. The bar is also now shorter and thinner (No doubt a concern if the urban legend about a
Police raid, the Rolling Stones Marianne Faithfull and a Mars bar were true…). I understand this shrinkage in the size is also common in nearly all chocolate bars but sadly not reflected in a diet on the price!
...and another thing
Biscuits (Cookies to yanks). A Wagon Wheel was a huge round biscuit when I was a kid, yet now to me it looks more like a Dinky car wheel.
There was no way you could ‘dunk’ the original Wagon Wheel in a cup of tea, whereas you can now. (Cookie or biscuit dunking is a very weird English tradition of taking a perfectly healthy crisp biscuit or cookie and dunking it in a cup of tea till soggy. Go figure)!
So please stop shrinking my bar, not letting things go flaccid when I want them to or confusing the size of my pump and which hole to put it in.
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