You are bang on right about how to cook pizzas. Really you want an oven that will get even hotter than an ordinary domestic one, but you're starting to get into specialist equipment there.

Vision Express. “Express”, my arse.

Four weeks ago this coming Thursday, I had an eye test and ordered new glasses. I was told that they would be here in two, maybe three weeks. When I checked at the shop last Monday, they hadn’t arrived and they had been “reordered” for some reason. I put out a miffed Tweet, and have had their customer support people trying to see what’s going on. Apparently, they’ve been taking the labs out of the shops and centralising the process, and they can’t cope. I’ve been told various things last week including that they were “in completion” (which sounds like they were going through some kind of final checking before being sent off). On Thursday the shop called me and said that they aren’t ready yet, and they don’t know when they will be, and their next delivery would be Tuesday (that’s tomorrow). Phone call from their customer service team suggests that I have a while yet to wait. Oh, a query to the lab takes 24 hours to resolve.

It’s all bloody shambolic right now, and while I know that there are more things to worry about than my glasses, it’s annoying.

Don't know about the Express bit but I tried the VE in Peterborough a few years ago for my eye test and based on the sterling service I received I vowed never to darken their door again.
I don't know how other people get on with the eye test where they put a puff of air into your eye to check for pressure changes (think it's for glaucoma). Anywho, any time I've had that test it's been a total farce as I have an involuntary reaction and jerk my head backwards sufficiently to make the test less than reliable. Maybe I'm unusual in that regard but it was not helpful for the guy doing the test to get very visibly irritated because I wasn't getting through the test fast enough for him.
Due an eye test next year so the joy awaits.

Unless the new prescription was dramatically different, I personally wouldn't be worried. I've had great service from Specsavers especially when fitting contact lenses (I think I had about 4-5 sessions of trying to fit them before I finally succeeded; each would have cost £20 but was written off).

The puff of air is an absolute nonsense, and yes, I've experienced the snotty reaction. I'm sitting there with a historical prescription for one eye trying to compensate for the other, and I've previously bought glasses that tint because I'm not even great with glare as a result. How the fcuk do you think I'm gonna react to being blasted in the eyeball with cold air?

It’s a customer service thing now - the problem is being told “a few more days”, and one customer service agent contradicting another, and even contradicting what the shop tells me. I asked in the shop today as I was passing it (when they phone on Thursday they asked me to check today anyway), and the best they could say was “possibly next week”.

I’ve sent a Twitter DM (hooray for the 10000 character limit there) to the person at VE customer service saying that I want a firm date for delivery, not some nebulous ‘next few days” type response.

Oh, they’ve replied - waiting for a reply from the lab (again).

Only in Belfast would your neighbours call at the back door... Quickly eating a bowl of cereal just as something quick to sustain me before sorting a bunch of crap out, I then promptly choke on it when a neighbour batters the back door looking for mother dearest. No doubt wondering why I'm having a bowl of cereal at this time. Go round the fcuking front!

They'd be better building a fcuking bunker round here, privacy is apparently not an option.

Your post reminds me that the estate agent calls the front of our house the back and the back the front.
It confused the hell out of me when that first happened.

Mark

Indeed!

Mark

Why not take a popular site like Imgur and mess it up by removing all the good options just to make the remaining ones so enormous they need dropdown menus!

Can everybody just stop tinkering with sites that don't need it? iPlayer, BBC News, a hundred sites that make you click individual images for a small lump of text, HUDs for all sorts of useless sh1t... Leave sh1t alone!

Ernie earlier today.

I made that video for me!

When I was a kid friends always knocked at the back door, you didn't knock on the front door, unless it was a terrace and it was difficult to get around the back. The front door was reserved for special occasions, special guests and strangers.

Well into my 15th hour of work today.

I wouldn't mind but:

• I don't get paid overtime
• The wife is in a huff
• I seem to be the only silly w*nker apart from the company owner who can actually be arsed