I went to get a haircut at lunchtime. This was not irritating.

I listened to the Jeremy Vine show at lunchtime. This is usually irritating in the most comical and easily-satirised of veins. In this particular case they were talking about a child-abduction case in Portugal. They were going into needlessly alarmist detail over international pedophile rings and it was not very nice to listen to. It wasn't irritating, though. It was tragic.

I went to the bank to pay in a cheque. That was irritating. There were two people serving and the two people being served seemed to want a myriad of attentions. One was asking for ludicrous numbers of small services - like a mini statement, and change in 1 pence pieces, and other trivialities. A small bank branch hasn't the capacity to get much throughput. The other guy was trying to pay cash into his son's account without any means of identifying the account of the son, or the son's address so that they could work out what it was. Maybe the bank could have been more helpful. Maybe the guy should have come into the bank with the accurate account number of the account he wished to pay into. He muttered something about it being a waste of his time as he left. Clearly not his fault, then!

Eventually, I was served and the lady was apologetic about my delay. I asked if the cash machine took deposits - I know it doesn't. She said it didn't. I said it might help if it did. She told me where there was one that did. I think she missed the point. Given that the two people most held up in the queue, with the shortest amount of transaction to perform were me and the guy in front of me, who just gave over a deposit slip, maybe she could have realised that I was trying to tell her that a cash machine that did more would allow us normal people to pay in our cheques from the outside, and leave the nutters who want to change their old ha'pennies for twenty pence pieces to go inside without bothering us.

No such luck.

Annoying.

Not as annoying as the light which is glaring in my eyes at work. Health and fucking safety. Seriously, if being blind is what the office wants from me, then they should continue shining lights in my eyes and giving me a wealth of non-commital requirements with no particular focus, so that my caffeine dependency increases to the point where all I can see is a blur which moves with my increased pulse and blood pressure.

Thank you for the money, but is this really necessary?