Sometimes people suck

An elderly neighbour of mine is in fear being sued, and it’s ridiculous.

Basically, I’ve got this great old neighbour, who must be sixty-five or so, but he’s still completely all there. He’s one of those neighbours that will just help out, without being asked.

Like on one occasion when my SO and I were unexpectedly out of town for a week – issues with her dad’s health – this neighbour picked up all our mail for us to make sure it didn’t look like no one was there all that time. On another occasion he saved me and a bunch of other people from getting parking tickets when the street was being patrolled by a particularly avid parking inspector. You know how they mark your tires with chalk? Well, one day, after pretty much everyone had been hit with a ticket for one reason or another over the past few months, he waited until the parking inspector had gone around the corner, and went with a bucket of water and a cloth and wiped the chalk marks of each and every tire on our block… on both sides. It was so awesome my SO and I bought him a big fancy new pot planter in the shape of a rustic wooden bucket. I wish I could have seen the look on that ticket inspectors face!

Anyway, he was out this week, and I was talking with him yesterday, and he tells me that he was at an event at the local retirement village where some of his friends are living now, and that on his way home he stopped at some traffic lights as they were turning yellow. Pretty normal. Well apparently a young ‘lady’ was behind him and she didn’t want to stop, apparently she thought they could get through the yellow light before it turned red, and in the course of this thinking, rear ended my old neighbours car.

Bad enough, but apparently then she got out of her car – after they’d both pulled over – and started shouting about claims for compensation because of the ‘car accident’. My neighbour told me about this and I’ve suggested that he see his solicitor just in case, but that this sounds like yet another car insurance fraud in the makings.

The ‘lady’ didn’t have insurance, but thankfully my neighbour does and it’s covering the small amount of damage to the back of his car, but still, it really annoys me to see him concerned about something like this when he did nothing wrong. Wherever you are chav girl driver, I point my finger in admonishment at you and hope you’re ashamed of yourself!

Security issues

I wrote a while back on those full body scanners, and I felt compelled to write on them again.

It’s interesting to see what can happen when these things are ill-used. We’ve had them for a while, but in America they’re only just starting to use them around the country. Two incidents so far have caught my eye, and make me think serious adjustment needs to be made.

In the Miami international airport, the technicians who are to view the images produced by the scanners were being trained to use the machine, and to do that, one of them had to step into the machine for the other’s to view the image. This lead to the supervisor of the fellow who stepped into the scanner made a comment to this fellow’s colleagues about the poor man’s small genitals. This lead to his co-workers griefing him for at least a month, every day, until he took a police baton to one of them in the car park.

Some news articles suggest the poor guy has been sacked, other’s that he’s on suspension pending an investigation, and that an investigation into the co-worker’s actions will also be going ahead. It’s no wonder why he didn’t report the issue when his damn supervisor started the whole trouble.

The other incident is closer to home, with a Manchester security guard telling his fellow female security guard that he ‘loved those gigantic tits’ after she inadvertently walked through one of the scanners. That man’s been issued with a warning by the police, but quite frankly, I don’t think that’s enough.

In both cases we’re seeing people who are entirely far too irresponsible being given access to very private information. The co-workers in Miami and the idiotic security guard in Manchester all give further credence to the idea that these scanners are completely messed up.

The only way that this can work, in my opinion, is if the UK and the US adopt the same scanning software implemented by the Dutch which eradicates the need for human eyes to view the images. The software ‘looks’ for anything that’s suspicious and then alerts those who need to know, but no person is viewing the images.

This is the only fair way in which these scanners can be implemented, in my opinion.