From: steveb@cernvax.cern.ch (Steve Bougerolle)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Lazing on a peevish afternoon
Date: 10 Apr 92 14:45:24 GMT
Organization: CERN, Geneva, Switzerland


Ok, I've had my big anti-peeve for the week (getting my ticket home), now
all the related peeves are starting to pile up.

Sitting around last night, I was drinking a pint of beer and telling a friend
here how I planned to get my luggage home.  Then I picked up my ticket and
looked at it.  Under the "allowance" header it said "23K."

This took a bit of time to filter through, but finally it dawned on me:
"23K - that's twenty-three kilograms!!"

Since I'm moving, the total weight of all my shit is about 80 kg, way over
23.

So this morning I check at the Wagon-Lits office to make sure there's no
mistake.  Nope, there's no mistake.  What's the excess charge?  1% of full
first class fare per kg = 50 Francs per kg!!  So to ship my stuff home would
cost about 3000 Francs, or 2.5 times what my ticket did.

This is clearly insane.  So I went down to the airport and asked at the desk
there.  The woman looked at the ticket and said yep, it's 23 kg.

Anti-peeve:  Knowing a bit about how these things work I then went to the
cashier and he said "No, the limit is two pieces and the excess cost is
230 SFr per piece.  It says 23 kg?  Then the ticket is wrong.  Go tell her
I said so and get her to write "PC" on it.  So I went and told her and
she didn't write PC on it, but it doesn't matter because as she said "He's
the one you'd have to pay, anyway."

If the clerk at check-in dares to tell me I'm over my limit I will roast
him like an annoying Swiss chestnut.

Anyway, even with a reasonable piece limit I still had excess luggage and
decided there was now no chance I could slip it on without paying (I was
originally willing to gamble on that but now I would obviously lose the
first time I had to argue the matter).  Since I only got my ticket yesterday
and I'm leaving Monday morning (early), I had to scramble today to ship my
excess stuff as freight.

Another anti-peeve:  It turns out I can ship my junk all the way back to
Alberta for only 15 Francs more than the cost to Vancouver, which will then
save me the cost of shipping it from Vancouver to Alberta.

After sorting all this, I get back and read the news.  What do I see?  Some
amazingly peevesome asshole named Reid Whitlock has continued with his
message in soc.misc looking for good ways to kill dogs & cats that wander
across his yard.

Now, having read my messages about shooting gophers and the best way to
prepare beef, presumably nobody here will think I'm a bunny hugger.  Although
I was a bit put out at this guy's disregard for these unfortunate animals,
I could handle that by itself.  But then he started blathering about how
he couldn't just sue his neighbour because that would ruin his reputation
as a model neighbour.  At this point I decided I'd had enough of this
clown.  It doesn't bother him to be a lousy neighbour and make all his
neighbours miserable, it only bothers him to be caught at it???  Clearly
the man is a dangerous contemptible amoral slug.  Who knows, maybe he's a
pederast as well.  Obviously he would hide such things, since they would
ruin his reputation as an upstanding professor and model citizen-type.

Double peeve:  Yes, this guy is a professor.  Worse, he's a professor of
business at (I gather) one of the more pregious business schools in the
U.S.  How does it make you feel to know that guys like this are running
your country?

Anti-Peeve:  I flamed him publicly in a normal-type group, and suggested
quite loudly that I'd appreciate some volunteer in his area looking up his
address and notifying all his neighbours of what he had been saying.

It's like I've been saying for a long time; you've got to keep an eye on
some of these academics.  A good many of them aren't right in the head.

-- 
_|\ |V| /|_  Steve Bougerolle, U. of British Columbia Physics Dept.
\  \| |/  /   and the OPAL experiment, CERN, Geneva CH
 >_______<    STEVEB@CERNVAX.UUCP  STEVEB@CERNVM.CERN.CH
     !        STEVEB@CERNVM.BITNET  45397::STEVEB (HEPnet)