Why is doing the weekly shop such a pain in the feckin arse ?.

I have just completed another "sortie" to the supermarket, I use military terms because I now plan my weekly shopping trip with military precision.

I make a list, I visualise the route I am going to take through the isles, I have a few contingencies in my head just in case something out of the ordinary happens. I now go early in the morning in order to get the feckin thing done and out of the way, and to avoid some of the feckin ejeets that occupy parts of my world.

This becomes a bigger chore when my children are with me due to school holidays, for the constant pleas "Daddy can I have this " or "this is my favourite" despite knowing that the last time we bought that "favourite" it ended up in the bin with a large blue hairy mould attached to it. When I say "no" and I do, just because my six year old decides to throw a hissy fit does'nt mean that everyone has to stop their shopping to have a gawk, I genuinely feel like telling them to "piss off"(not my children, the gawkers).

Another thing I firmly believe that people should be taught how to push a trolley through a supermarket, I love the common practice of simply abandoning the trolley in the middle of the isle whilst the owner peruses the shelves, meanwhile a trolley tailback is now forming behind the offending trolley, and still the perusing continues. Perhaps the trolleys should come with hazard warning lights that can be switched on when stopping. Why can't people simply think?. Just pull your trolley to one side and this will allow other shoppers to pass, you moron.

Couple the above with the trolley pusher that simple bashes their way around the supermarket, you begin to wonder what goes on in peoples heads, if anything at all.

And just when you think that people cant get any ruder(not sure if thats a word,but I'm using it anyway), you find yourself looking for a product, you stand, well I stand, about 2 feet from the shelf and some gobshite squeezes into the 2 foot gap between you and the shelf, whats all that about? you feel like giving him/her a kick up the arse.

When all this is done and your trolley is full to the brim, you finally make it to the check-out, the gateway out of the hell you have just endured. You spot a checkout with another customer almost finished you pull up and begin to unload your shopping, you're half way through the unloading and the checkout person says "I'm closing this position now", "Why did'nt you tell me that when I arrived?" I ask, a shrug of the shoulders is the reply.

You relocate and get unloading again, the first question from the checkout assistant "do you have a loyalty card ?", "No I d'ont" the assistant looks shocked, everyone has a card, the cards are free, she continues in a state of shock.

Beep,beep, beep, your shopping gets scanned and pushed down, so that you can pack them yourself, the checkout assistant makes no feckin effort to help you , and then it happens the person behind "only has a few items" and the checkout assistant starts scanning eventhough you're not finished. I am boiling now, "excuse me can you please display some level of manners and allow me to finish my packing before you attend to other customers" I hiss, you know they think you're a grumpy old fart but I d'ont care manners are free.

So the next time you decide to part with your hard earned cash and do the weekly shop, just be prepared for the gawker, the trolley abandoner, the unhelpful checkout assistant,and the pusher.

Many of us, if not all of us, now carry a mobile phone. We all have different methods of paying for the usage of these phones from "Pay as you go " or "Pay Monthly", I have been a pay monthly customer of Vodafone for a long time.

I decided to carry out a little analysis of my bills to see if I was getting the best value for money from the tarriff that I was on. When I was reviewing the data that I could get my hands on from Vodafones website I noticed that I was calling and continue to call 1890 numbers.

1890 numbers are shown on many advertisements and documentation to be low cost numbers, well they are not if you use your mobile.

My tarriff gives me a monthly allowance of 200 minutes of calls to any network and landlines in Ireland, and I find it hard to meet this on a monthly basis, and usually have minutes carried foward to the next month, yet I still get charged for calls that I have made to 1890 numbers at 25c per minute, which does'nt meet my defination of cheap or low cost.

When I called Vodafone to ask why this is the case, "Its always been like that" was the response, I asked could it be ascertained why 1890 numbers are not part of my monthly commitment? "I'll need to find out and get back to you" I'm still waiting, and have a feeling will be waiting for sometime to come.

Another thing I noticed that Companies and Government Agencies, such as the Revenue Commissioners, print these numbers so that you can contact them cheaply, but they never print an alternative number ie an ordinary landline number, which I can assure you is part of your monthly flat charge and you won't be charged extra.

One would have thought that 1890 would be part of "any network" but it would appear to be apart of "some other network".

When I penned my original blog about iphone, iphone me bollocks ,this piece of technical crap was'nt available in Ireland yet, well come March 14th all that will change.

Please follow the link below as Pat Phelan articulates these points much better than me. If you decide to buy one of these phones after reading his blog God help you.