Thread: What I hate about the <insert country>

Yeah, well, possibly not the most PC of threads, but what the hell, I need to get some crap off my chest.

So, What do I hate about the Germans:

1. They think they are great drivers, but they are just as dumb as everyone else, so it makes for more spectacular crashes.
There is a roundabout, a block away from where I live. There is an accident there almost every day. The record is an accident at 3 juctions of the 5 junction roundabout at the same time. Clueless, so clueless the Dutch put kerbs on the lanes to stop Germans being German!

2. Christianity...going to church does not mean you are a good Christian! You need to practice what is preached to you each Sunday, not simply turn up! I see this all the time, hell, sometimes they are fighting for parking spots to get into the church! The meaning of Christianity appears to have gone down the drain with only the mechanical obedience of turning up left. (...and no it is not the same in the UK as I witnessed over Christmas)

3. Smiling: Just do it! There is no need to go about your whole life being a squarehead without any happiness and laughter.

4. Food. So English food is famed as not being the best, but at least you can eat it. Jeez, I've thrown up at the smell of some of the German food put in front of me. Besides, they have very limited meat products that include pork, pork, pork and pork. Thank goodness there are muslim shops where i can get lamB!

5. Supermarkets: sell the cheapest, crapiest food they can find and with the shortest sell by date you can imagine. You have to dig through the "sell by Yesterday" crap to get to the stuff that lasts a week or so every time.


You think Thailand is bad...Hell, I know places worse, much, much worse...

Not to mention their sense of humour and complicated language!

^ Squareheads have a SOH? Your 'aving a laugh.....

I speak Modern German...or English to the rest of us

Germany: "You can't work more than 10 hours a day" It's to protect the workforce from excessive work....

Yeah right, actually they force you to check in and check out and cannot exceed 10 hours so that they don't have to pay you...

...only I'm external so they get upset when I refuse to work outside the "rules"...i.e.without being paid!!

Originally Posted by Troy

Germany: "You can't work more than 10 hours a day" It's to protect the workforce from excessive work....

So a 40hr work week... thats fairly typical around the world.

So, as a consultant, I tried to explain to the German management that if they can't extend their delivery date then they have to extend their working hours. In order to extend their working hours, they will have to compensate the workforce and to afford this they may have to remove some of their "management overhead". Oh dear! That cost me my title...now I am back to "temporary staff"...yeah, right, been there over 20 freaking years and still temporary staff....ha fucking ha...(on freelance rates )

^^ Actually they have people on 35 hour weeks with reduced rates if you work beyond those hours with a max of 10 hour/day (50) even though the EU directive is a 6 day week (6o hours) with a max of 48 over any 6 month period. The point being that you get paid LESS for every hour you work beyond 7 hours/day. Unless you are a complete bastard like me of course, who demands an hourly rate and will only work as an external outside the Union rates. The whole freaking country is rigged, corrupt, and they think it's social engineering. No it's big firm corruption that lacks any innovation. Germany is even more fooked than the UK!!

Hell, they are going freaking bananas because I told them I am leaving and taking my pension. I'm already on a UK pension FFS!!

I should mention I am a "legalised freelancer" in Germany, which basically means I have an agent that takes 1/3 of my wages but has no-one that has the expertise to replace me if I leave...55555

I forgot...

...any Country...

...Includes the UK...run down piece of shit country that my ancestors and I fought for, only to find a bunch of freaking Indians running the show...

(told you this wasn't going to be PC....555555)


shitty country, shitty government, shitty roads...no wonder SA feels at home in freaking Pattaya!

Originally Posted by Troy

The point being that you get paid LESS for every hour you work beyond 7 hours/day.

Meh, any hour I work past 8 each day is not paid.

Originally Posted by Fondles

So a 40hr work week... thats fairly typical around the world.

You don't quite understand the implication of a European 10 Hour day.

You have to clock in and out regardless. If you exceed those 10 hours for whatever reason, you are given a warning. People are sacked for doing more than 10 hours!!!

I maen I have a freaking alarm clock to ensure I clock out on time. I have had the Customer working with me and had to walk out! They are freaking insane with their squarehead rules, no flexibility! I have known people sacked for breaking the rule 3 times in a year!!! ...and yet there are some, like I broke the rules 7 times in 2 weeks, who can get away with it...

No wonder they are called squareheads!!

Originally Posted by Fondles

Meh, any hour I work past 8 each day is not paid.

You either get paid too much or you are being ripped off mate.

I get paid by the hour...and have done for the last 35 years.

Never heard of a consultant more in need of a bj, fine beer lots of calf leberkase schweinhaxe

Have a currywusrst//gyro dunkel and relax and play hide the sausage never fails

Middle England has been betrayed by Britain’s feckless new establishment.


Ordinary, hardworking people no longer expect to be treated fairly by a venal new establishment class

ALLISTER HEATH
10 January 2024 • 6:55pm

The Post Office scandal is a parable of modern Britain, a broken society where all too often the best people are taken advantage of by the worst, aided and abetted by a morally bankrupt officialdom. Shoplifters, car thieves, failed asylum seekers and even preachers of hate are frequently let off, but respectable middle-class families are rarely given the benefit of the doubt. The London-based establishment was uninterested in Horizon, the greatest miscarriage of justice of modern times, because its victims were the “wrong” kind of people, a mostly suburban social class they could not relate to, persecuted by paid-up members of our new elite.

The hundreds of sub-postmasters who were incorrectly convicted of theft and false accounting were self-employed entrepreneurs, white or from an immigrant background, determined to better themselves. They were the lynchpin of Middle England, the toilers who make our high streets tick, the purveyors of services to pensioners, the unsung heroes that are in such short supply in modern Britain. In a sane country, these would be the last people anyone would suspect of criminality; and yet in our warped, morally inverted world, dominated by a “machine knows best” mindset, they were fair game.

They weren’t wrongly signing on for incapacity benefits, or stealing from shops, or chanting violent slogans, so they weren’t protected by the politically correct double-standards that have turned Britain into an increasingly unfair society. Yet what were the statistical odds that – suddenly – hundreds of such overwhelmingly law-abiding people would turn into criminals, just after a new, ultra-complex IT system was put in place? Why did so few people connect the dots, and realise that something else appeared to be at play?

The postmasters’ bad luck is that they, the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations. The most disgusting element of this atrocious tale is that while the sub-postmasters were ruined – and in some cases even took their own lives – many of those responsible for their destruction walked away with honours, money, prestige and good jobs. It is this – the rewards not just for failure but for sabotaging others’ lives – that angers the public. They can’t believe nobody has yet been properly punished.

The scandal exposes the deficiencies of all our institutions. Shockingly, the dreadful Crown Prosecution Service, which does too little to fight real crime, launched prosecutions in several cases, some when Sir Keir Starmer was in charge. But more than 700 cases were brought by the Post Office itself in private prosecutions, in a tragic abuse of an ancient legal practice that used to help uphold English liberty. No large organisation must ever again be allowed to wield such power unchecked. The judges, ordinarily so proud of their independence, are now being overruled in one fell swoop by an act of Parliament. For them and the idiot lawyers responsible, this is a day of shame.

The Post Office is fully state-owned but is an independent body, a quango run by a well-paid board. Captured by its own management, accountable in practice to nobody – not voters, not shareholders and not politicians – guilty of calamitous failings, suffering from absurd technical deficiencies, it epitomises what happens when the state pretends to be a private company: we get the worst of all worlds, overpaid, mercenary mediocrities with an all-consuming sense of entitlement. Quangos should be abolished, run directly by ministers and government departments, or privatised.

The scandal is yet another indictment of bureaucrats’ inability to engage in any kind of sensible procurement, as we saw with HS2, during Covid, other failed IT mega-projects and with the MoD. Billions are wasted and we end up with poor, or even unusable systems or kit in return for an ever larger national debt.

It is hard to believe but the damage wreaked by Horizon could have been even orders of magnitude greater: the original private finance initiative (PFI) contract awarded by John Major’s government to Britain’s ICL (later bought by Japan’s Fujitsu) was not merely to computerise post offices but also to automate the system for paying DSS benefits to 28 million claimants, supposedly to stamp out fraud. This second project was killed off, but why was the Post Office element allowed to go ahead?

Our bureaucrats are exceptionally bad at working with the private sector, are often outwitted, inevitably overpay and choose the wrong contractors. The merry-go-round between Whitehall, regulators and Westminster and many of the big global firms is hardly helpful. The civil servants responsible for incompetent decisions are frequently rewarded with a generous pension, a second career and endless gongs. The whole Northcote-Trevelyan model is broken. Justice will only be done if many more people are forced to give up their honours. In time, the bureaucracy needs to be utterly reformed along Singapore or New Zealand lines.

Failed outsourcers or consultants are rarely meaningfully penalised, either. How on earth can it be that Fujitsu has been awarded a further £4.9 billion in state contracts since the December 2019 High Court ruling that its systems “weren’t remotely robust”? Is the entire British establishment signed up to the idea that failure must be rewarded, and then rewarded again? What a pathetic, rapacious and amoral country we live in – and no, this isn’t real capitalism but a sorry corporatist ersatz.

The buck ultimately stops with the politicians. Some did cover themselves in glory, but most failed to use their great power for the common good. As with the expenses scandal, lockdown and many of the other great blunders of recent decades, this was a cross-party disaster reeking of cowardice, groupthink and excess deference to authority. Sir Ed Davey failed especially catastrophically and must resign as Lib Dem leader. Sir Vince Cable, another overrated mediocrity, proved useless. Sir Keir has serious questions to answer. Why did neither Labour nor the coalition kill off Horizon? Why did it take the Tories so long to act?

Ordinary people no longer expect to be treated fairly by officialdom in Britain in 2024: no wonder they are in such a revolutionary mood.

Originally Posted by Troy

You either get paid too much or you are being ripped off mate.

Its called a salary.

^ Yes, I did send the wife off to Thailand for the winter and won't see her until February. That and the -7C weather is a good reason for being pissed off...

...but it's no excuse for Germany being "big company" "union wages" "socialist" government thet is supressing the very innovation that made the country rise from the destruction of WW2. They are driving themselves into financial ruin at a faster rate than Brexit Britain (if that's even possible)

Originally Posted by Fondles

Its called a salary.

Jeez, how many years have you been ripped off...

...A salary is for the minions of this world...

Originally Posted by Troy

Jeez, how many years have you been ripped off...

...A salary is for the minions of this world...

A temp employee calling a salaried staff member a minion.

I did chuckle.

Temp staff do the shit jobs like sweeping the floor and cleaning the bathrooms.

^ So you are unfamiliar with the new meanings of European "temp staff", That is, the people that refuse to work for union rates and expect a decent salary.
However, I do agree, I am known as the "janitor", the guy that cleans up the shit left by the rest of the workforce...

Note to self, don't drink medoc when you are grumpy

Originally Posted by Troy

^ So you are unfamiliar with the new meanings of European "temp staff", That is, the people that refuse to work for union rates and expect a decent salary.
However, I do agree, I am known as the "janitor", the guy that cleans up the shit left by the rest of the workforce...

Fucks given about Europe = ZERO.

I don't work for union rates, my Salary is decent.

I am salaried as well. Always have been since about mid 30's. Lots of perks being salaried.

As for OT, Its very controlled in the states as well. Have to have approval to work it. No company wants to pay 1.5 rate or double time.

Originally Posted by Troy

The point being that you get paid LESS for every hour you work beyond 7 hours/day.

What ?

Originally Posted by Troy

You don't quite understand the implication of a European 10 Hour day.

Correct.....and I'm a european. Never heard of said thing and have worked in Germany too

Originally Posted by Troy

If you exceed those 10 hours for whatever reason, you are given a warning. People are sacked for doing more than 10 hours!!!

Originally Posted by Troy

They are freaking insane with their squarehead rules, no flexibility!

Isn't that just...'Ordnung muss sein' ?

England:
In the words of Frank Sabotka:

You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.

FIFAland and PC-Wokeland.

Is it this

Originally Posted by Troy

What I hate about the <insert nationality>

Or this

Originally Posted by Troy

What I hate about <insert country>

Makes a difference.