» Conned

Play.com AND WH Smiths
I'm sure retail scamming is the easiest thing to pull off, but it's always hugely satisfying to get one over on big chains (And just a little bit satisfying upsetting sales assistants!)

So there I was a few Christmases ago, ordering Season 4 of Babylon 5 on DVD from Play.com, they were down to £25 a box set and I was still a couple of seasons short. A few days later the box arrives and I sit down to enjoy a few hours of uber-nerd Sci-Fi only to find that there are two Disc 2's and no Disc 1!

A quick phonecall to Play customer services and they tell me they'll send out a replacement as soon as I return the offending item. 'Great' I think, and promptly forget to go to the Post Office... a day or so later, another copy of B5 S4 drops through my door much to my confusion, and on opening I find two Disc 1's this time! Agh! Luckily I'd not returned the first so combined the two into one perfectly formed B5 box...

A plan popped into my head, I still needed season 5, and there was a really dumb sales assistant working in WH Smiths in town, so I figured I'd try the age old 'Xmas present, no reciept' scam.

Naturally I'd 'recieved a duplicate gift' and wished to exchange it for the next season box set... to my suprise Season 5 was selling £10 cheaper than Season 4, so the helpful little sales gnome kindly handed over a £10 gift voucher and a fresh copy of B5 S5... lovely.

And the cherry on the cake, a few weeks later on my bank statement, Play.com had refunded me the non existant *return* postage costs of the original item!

I love it when a completely accidental plan comes together!

(Edited ever so slightly for clarity)
(Tue 23rd Oct 2007, 19:13, More)

» Food sex

Squirty cream
If you plan on using canned squirty cream on your girlfriend's tits, best make sure the can you just grabbed out of the fridge isn't two months out of date...

Short, but not so sweet.
(Mon 10th Aug 2009, 21:16, More)

» Rubbish Towns

Hamilton, Victoria, Australia
Earlier this year myself, a ginger fellow and a Swiss girl were driving through Australia in a bright yellow 1984 Mitsubishi Express 'cuz we could. While this wonderful workhorse eventually made an impressive loop of the entire continent it did have a tendancy to spack up at the worst possible time.

One such moment was on the drive up from the end of the Great Ocean Road up towards The Grampians, a long and tedious drive with little of note between the two points. An ominous rattling noise started up in poor little Tweety's gut, we hoped for the best and kept on driving, praying to the Gods of Backpacking that we didn't get stuck in a Wolf Creek situation. A few kilometers later the rattling had become significantly worse so we pull off to find a mechanic in the ass-end-of-nowhere town of Hamilton.

After a mechanic has tutted at the van a few times and told us that the alternator had almost cracked in half cuz of a shoddy job the mechanic back down in Melbourne had done we're told to make ourselves comfy for a few hours in town while he sorts us out (Great bloke, fitted us in in the middle of the day no fuss, didn't even rip us off like we expected!)

So we trot off into Hamilton and crack open the Backpacker's Bible, or the Lonely Planet Australia Guidebook as it's otherwise known, and set about finding out what there is to do here.

I'll paraphrase the book - "There is no reason to stop in Hamilton unless you really like wool"

That's pretty much it. The self-styled 'Wool Capital of the World's big attraction is the Giant Wool Bales and a Wool Museum, which yes, we did visit!

Oh, also, I'm originally from Holyhead... nuff said...
(Fri 30th Oct 2009, 23:33, More)