The Saturday before last I worked my last McShift.

It’s very depressing because it’s a clear sign I’m getting older. Not that the fact that many of my work colleagues were 6-7 years younger than me wasn’t a constant reminder of my aging but somehow getting up and moving on with my life really drives the message home.

I’ll miss the place, I’ll miss the people. The people really were fun. I like most of my work colleagues but there is something about the fun and the energy of all been stuck in a crap dead on job (not that I was stuck there, essentially working for laughs but anyway) and making the best of it.

Still, onwards and upwards. I have exciting new work commitments now and new challenges ahead with my charity. This chapter may be over but the book has just begun.

I ended up back at Ikea on Monday to pick up some more stuff.

I have to say I really don’t like the place though. Aside from the main reason which I will come on to, they charge £30 for home delivery which seems crazy, Tesco are delivering my bed – on a Saturday – for like £6 and a lot of the stuff they currently have in the show room isn’t even available to buy anymore.

The main reason I don’t like Ikea however is how smug they are about how awful their customer service is. As if it is something to be proud of. They have big boards up saying “we aim to serve you within 8 minutes.”

8 minutes? Are you having a laugh? Even if you hit those targets, that wouldn’t be something to be proud of. It’s not like they even really have a Total Experience Time, that 8 minutes is just the time you spend in the queue just to get your stuff scanned through a till.

I know McDonald’s is a world leader in such areas but do you know what the target time for a customer queuing before they get to the till is? 0 seconds. A lot of the time they hit it as well, and most of the time a customer will be served within the target Total Experience Time target of 3 minutes – and that is to provide a full meal, not just to take payment for a few boxes.

It’s not like they can’t cope with the demand either, they have had 3-4 tills open despite having over 20 tills they could potentially open, both of the times I have been there recently.

Not impressed.

I went round Oakwood drive-thru on the way home to grab some food last night and noticed this notice in the window.

If you can’t read the notice it says…

For the Safety & Security of both our customers and staff this restaurant is remotely monitored with a direct contact to the Police.

This means that they have a security office somewhere monitoring the cameras to make sure there isn’t someone up to no good. My question is though, what is a “direct contact to the Police”? I mean, that implies to me they can contact the police directly.

But, I can do that. The Police gave me their phone number too. I would imagine most people have it actually, it’s quite easy to remember, it’s only three digits.

Last week was No Vices Week which was a week (well, 5 days lol) in which we avoided takeaway and alcohol and donated the money we saved to Rationalist Week. There wasn’t a huge uptake but some of us actually managed most of it.

It almost killed me to be honest. Day after day I was like “aww, I can just get McDonald’s on the way home” and then remembering I couldn’t. I drove Norm to work on Tuesday morning thinking I could just go for breakfast to fill the gap before I started work and then realised I couldn’t so I headed for “non-takeaway” breakfast – which was closed! Needless to say, I was not amused.

The other worry of course was that with me and Lil not eating McDonald’s we would put on a lot of weight (we are of course living proof that McDonald’s keeps you thin). Luckily Lil came up with the answer in us just sugaring our bread and eating a loaf a day. Seems to have worked.

Having already gotten up at 5am yesterday only to discover I didn’t have to be up quite that early I headed off to get some breakfast as I figured a 20-30 minute powe nap would leave me feeling worse than I already did.

We headed down to Heckmondwike which is somewhere near Birstall, Batley, Cleckheaton, etc to drop my car off for repair and ended up getting back to Leeds with loads of time to spare. At which point Damien suggested we get some breakfast from McDonald’s.

I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? . Bit of a breakfast overload in the end then, I didn’t need to eat again until late afternoon, maybe it really is the way to start the day.

We headed over to Oakwood McDonald’s for dinner this evening.

As I pulled in I found a BMW parked across the pedestrian crossing which then started to reverse and almost went straight into me. I presumed he was just picking someone up and was about to leave so I thought nothing of it.

However as we walked back round we saw the guy in the car talking to some youths and hand them a small bag of something.

We headed inside and having been asked what I wanted I replied, “you know, there is someone selling drugs outside.” The shift manager then disappears off and doesn’t return for 10 minutes. I went out to see if something bad had actually happened – no sign of the shift manager but the car was still sat there and greeted me with a

what the fuck you looking at?

Luckily, having gone back inside the shift manager re-appeared 5 minutes later so I don’t really know what happened there. Maybe he actually did get killed and replaced with some kind of evil clone. Who knows. The important thing is I didn’t get stabbed, which I think is a line I’m going to end most of my stories on from now on .

Just when you’re down enough there is always something to give you that little extra kick.

Went round drive-thru this evening to find that meals have gone up £0.30 as well as having gone up £0.50 on breakfast!