Gang City: part of my day

I bought a telescope today. A telescope that you plug into your computer and set it to follow the path you want, take photos etc. Sounds good, doesn't. Well, its fucking crap. In fact it's so crappy I took it back to the store and demanded a refund. They couldn't refuse as the 20mm lense had actually fallen apart sometime between the time it was made and the time I bought it. I was so pissed off.

Actually, part of the reason I got pissed off is that I got all worked up and ready for a fight with the shop. I was ready to quote commerce act shit at them if they tried the old "we don't do refunds" or the "don't do refunds you have to spend the value in the shop" bullshit. But they didn't . It took about 5 minutes of waiting while they taught a new assistant how to reverse charges back into the original bank account. Left feeling tense and wound up so I started a fight with the next hoodie boy I saw. That's a lie of course. I just smiled politely at the shop staff and said, "Thank you. I appreciate the good service".

In reality (that stuff called "real life") I left the store and went back to my car. Gave my pay and display with an hour left to a woman struggling with a double pram and then drove very slowly up the heavily trafficed main street holding up all the cars behind me while I let pedestrians cross in front of me and allowed cars to back out of parking spaces, allowed other cars into gaps etc. The main reason for this was the huge number of "boy racer' types who were being absolute arseholes. They piss me off so I piss them off. One guy resorted to waiting for me to get someway ahead and then planting boot and racing up behind me only to have to hit his brakes and slow down to somewhere between 5 and 10km per hour.

One of them had a crappy mitsubishi of some sort and had 'enhanced' it with all sorts of huge dashboard gauges. Some of them were monsters. When I was behind him I could just about read the number of revs his engine was doing etc. I'm sure they made his car faster. His number plate had a wrapper around it which said, "Welcome to New Zealand. Now SPEAK ENGLISH". Jerk. He was Maori which I thought interesting given his views on speaking English. Essentially he was saying that no other languages had any value.