If shopping online is easy, why do I always end up apoplectic!

Yesterday I had one of those moments where you wish you could reach down the phone and surprise the straining-to-be-nice idiot on the other end of the line by shoving your fist down his throat and yanking on his tonsils.

I’m a calm guy even, as a Yorkshire man, when I am spending money. But nothing pisses me off more than online shopping when the glib, flashy, superfast websites dangle the goods in front of you then refuses to accept payment!

When I recently found myself in need of a high-end piece of digital wizardry, I opened my browser, flexed my credit card and dove in. After four hours of research it was just me and my cash and the girl of my dreams in the form of a sexy new camera.

Then it all went wrong.

It was like my courting days. You and your girl are in the house alone. Mum and dad are out and the lights are low. You’re on the settee inspecting the goods when suddenly mum and dad burst in with a group of friends and before you know it you’re out the door without the goods and more than a droopy credit card.

I’d gone all the way with this (I’m back to online shopping), and given my details, told the company way more about myself than they had a right to know and been assured the deal had gone through. That’s when I received a message that there was a problem and I should phone them. I did, and they were nice, well, at least smooth-talking nice and they promised to call me back.

Then they did the unforgivable. Without my knowledge, they called the person to whom I was shipping the goods and got into it with her.

How dare they?!

My online shopping now involved half the world. Good job I was ordering a camera and not an inflatable doll or load of porno videos!

Fortunately my friend is very understanding and while I was texting rude messages for her to relay to the supplier, whom she was talking to on the phone, she stayed calm. Between us we managed to make the purchase, but without her help and trust, it wouldn’t have happened.

I’m not stupid, well, not really, and I understand the need for online vendors to protect themselves and their customers from fraud. But what’s the point in having a credit card if you can’t use it without involving innocent bystanders?

On a final note: I sent a polite email to the company praising them for their vigilance while pointing out how difficult they had made it for me to deposit a substantial chunk of change into their coffers, how they had inconvenienced so many people, and not to expect me to buy anything from them ever again.

They never replied.

If ever fumfie.com begin selling sex toys online, I suggest you buy your inflatable doll elsewhere.

I don’t know what’s got into me of late LOL and now I have a problem. I have deliberately steered clear of using the text acronyms that I see spattered throughout Facebook and Twitter and instead stuck to the more genteel and polite smiley or sad face to express my thoughts. Why? Well, IHA and own up to not knowing what half of them mean. Knowingly insulting someone is OK, but I wouldn’t want to accidentally insult someone because of my ignorance. It’s alright replying to my online attempt at humor with: LMFFAO. But what if I agree that you, a BAC, have a FFA to LO? Surely that would earn a WTF or two or even lead to a de-friending AFDN.

Damn, I’d have to reply, AYFS?

Just the thought of it has me PIMPL.

Coming from Yorkshire, I am still struggling with the English language but hey, I’m getting it. It’s NBD. Of course, BIND we had our own abbreviations. We couldn’t text them but we could shout them out or write them in chalk on the pavement. I was reminded of this by Mr. Skin, a musician and fellow radio host on Island 92 91.9fm.  His new band is called KINELL. We used to run around the streets as kids shouting KINELL at the top of our voices. I hadn’t thought about it in years but it still makes me laugh. It makes me laugh even more today because BON, 90% of people don’t know what it means!

I tell you, YCMTSU.

One acronym that has sneaked into text messaging goes way back and anyone serving in the military over the last 100 years will know the meaning of SNAFU. If you are intent on learning this stuff then that might be a good place to start. 

Now that I’m out of the closet and admit to knowing some chat acronyms and text message shorthand, I’ll leave you GR&D.

Thanks for reading the blog, GTG.

HITAKS

PLO

Gary

_ When 16-year-old Laura Dekker tied the knot off St. Maarten on Saturday 21st, she became the youngest person to circumnavigate the world alone. It’s a remarkable achievement. As Laura and her now not-so-bright-red 38ft Gin Fizz ketch Guppy entered the Simpson Bay Lagoon, hundreds of spectators went wild. Mega yachts blew their sirens, people cheered, vuvuzelas screeched and drinks flowed at the yacht club bar. Exhibiting the same skills that saw her tackle the oceans of the world, Laura brought Guppy alongside the dock at the St. Maarten Yacht Club and stepped ashore into the arms of her family.

Laura’s voyage wasn’t without problems, but it wasn’t to do with the sea. Officials in Holland tried to prevent her from sailing and at one point even took her away from her parents and placed her in care.  If Laura reads this Blog, and she might because I have interviewed her twice, she will be annoyed that I have brought up the subject of her fight with the authorities. She makes no secret about the fact that what the authorities did now haunts her.

The sailing press is more inclined to focus on Laura’s remarkable achievement; however, much of the media is still banging on about her problems before she set sail. Some go as far as saying the officials were right and the voyage, by someone so young, should not have been allowed.

Hypocritical bastards!

These are the same reporters that every week fill the tabloids with photos of teenagers rampaging through British towns and cities, fueled on cheap booze and ecstasy, puking, pissing on war memorials and lying unconscious in the street. These are the same governments who introduced draconian laws to protect people from themselves, to coddle and control. Who turned kids into namby-pamby wimps whose only exercise is to lift the latest model cell phone to their ear or demand their parents buy them expensive and worthless designer training shoes.

The Nanny-State … you got what you wanted, control. Along the way you gutted a whole generation.

You would never see Laura Dekker lying drunk in the gutter in the freezing rain waving her legs in the air and showing her underwear, or lack of it, while her mates take pictures with their cell phones to later share on YouTube.

Laura Dekker took on the establishment and won. She showed them what can be achieved by someone so young. Teenagers owe her a huge debt of gratitude. Sadly, too many of them are too dumb to know it.

The tension always drains out of my body when the dentist turns off the drill and says “… good.”

I recently needed the services of a dentist and, as my usual driller and filler (not yanker, please note) was on vacation, I had to visit the locum. And very good he was, too.

I still have my own teeth and although they are beat and battered and slightly odd in color, and there are gaps here and there, I plan to hang on to them.

Where I grew up in the industrial north of England, no one cared much about dental hygiene. I remember telling my mum - at 12-years-old - about a couple of holes in my gnashers. Her reply was not to worry because “when you are 21, we'll get you a nice set of dentures on the National Health Service!”

Like most kids of the day, I suffered at the hands of a brutal school dentist—a man who should have been hung, drawn and quartered and his teeth removed with a chisel. I still remember the stink of the gas mask, as he placed it over my face and how mum, half-walking and half-carrying, took me home while I dripped blood on the rain-slicked pavement. We made it about a mile before I fainted and woke up on the floor of the local butchers with a bucket of bloody sawdust between my knees and a pigs head grinning at me from the counter. The butcher was so impressed by my bravery that he gave me a cow’s horn to take home, which my mum promptly threw in the dustbin on reaching the house.

I have had some good toothy experiences. A dentist in my old home town surrounded himself with buxom assistants: one was the receptionist and the other the dental nurse. It was common knowledge that to score a job with the dentist you had to have big boobs and wear tight or low-cut top … I had a lot of my dental work done there.

Another dentist ushered me to the front of a long queue in the Canary Islands when she learned I had lost a filling as I was setting off on a single handed Atlantic crossing.  I told myself that had she not been able to help, I would pack the tooth with car-body filler and extract it at sea with a pair of pliers should it start to hurt. I was younger then and believed that what the old hands could do, I could do much better.

By far the worst are the conmen, the charlatans, and believe me, they are out there. I visited a dentist in St. Martin who told me I needed four thousand dollars worth of work, that really we should start immediately. His list of my problems included two teeth that should be capped, a wisdom tooth that needed to come out, and another that would require surgery to straighten. I had gone in for a small filling and he hit me with the list after he started drilling, without first giving me any anesthetic.  I was sorely tempted to grab him by the balls and run him into the street where, with luck, he might get run over by a truck. Needless to say, I never went back.

A friend of mine was a superb dental hygienist and I went to her every six months to have my pearlies cleaned.  She advised, “If you can’t floss, brush. If you can’t brush, rinse.”

That’s not a bad philosophy for life, either!

Are you poking your teeth with your tongue yet?

How I came to own two camels

Have you ever had to bargain for something? You know, go toe-to-toe with the shopkeeper and battle down the price. Not everyone can do it and some even hate it. It happened to me recently in St. Martin when I bought a coffee maker. I used to hate bargaining but now I’m rather good at it. Mind you, I did learn from the experts in the souqs of Morocco and the Middle East.

It began when I bought a camel.

This wasn’t your ordinary run-of the-mill camel but a wooden camel. I bought it in the souq in Jerusalem as a gift for my mum. It was the first time I had ever bargained for anything and, er … I got way more than I bargained for.

The camel, about four inches high, was one of many on display outside the shop. I was nervous about doing the deal and the old Arab shopkeeper didn’t help when he addressed me in several different languages before he hit on the right one, English. That settled we got down to the bargaining.

“How much for the camel?” I asked.

“How much do you want to give me?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled and opened his arms. “Welcome to my humble emporium,” he said.

The bargaining went on for about half-an-hour. During negotiations strong coffee was served and the price came down from $50 to $10.

Ah-ah, bargain, thinks I, and left the store with my prize.

Outside, I showed the camel to a friend who was looking for a similar gift for his sister. “Your camel’s got a flat head,” he said. And sure enough, it had. The wood carver’s chisel had slipped and the thing was a reject.

The old Arab welcomed me back into his store with open arms but before he could speak, I said, “The camel you sold me has got a flat head.”

“Ah … you mean the camel you bought has a flat head.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “could you exchange it?”

“We don’t do exchange, but I’ll buy it back. How much do you want?”

“Ten dollars,” I said.

He offered me 50 cents.

And that’s how I bought a wooden camel for ten dollars, sold it for five and ended up owning two more for which I paid 14 dollars each. To this day, I don’t know what happened.

_Although I sing the praises of eBooks, not only did I receive a hardback book for Christmas, I gave one to a friend. It was liberating.

The book I received is called The Little Book of Conspiracies –50 of the world’s greatest theories. I know exactly why my friend bought me the book because often, and usually after large amounts of wine, I turn into a conspiracy freak.

The hardback book I gave to the same friend is The Elvis Presley Cook Book, which has convinced me that not only couldn’t Elvis cook, The King was a nutter! How so? Well, searching for a suitable Elvis quote to write in the book along with ‘love from Gary’, I came across some of his words of wisdom. Nuggets like: “Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.”

No shit, Sherlock.

Then there’s the food he liked to eat—fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. What! But the guy could rock and roll, I’ll give him that.

As the editor of All At Sea Magazine, I often receive hardback and paperback books to review. Two of the latest are Street’s Guide to the Cape Verde Islands and The Riddle of the Raven by Jan de Groot. Both of these books are about the sea. One is a straight- forward Pilot Book, so no mystery there. The other, however, is the story of a 140ft gaff-rigged schooner haunted by her original owner, and this one has me intrigued.

An eBook that recently came my way is Buy, Outfit and Sail by Cap’n Fatty Goodlander. Fatty and his wife Carolyn have just completed their second circumnavigation, which sort of ended here in St. Maarten. Over dinner aboard their 38ft boat Wild Card, Fatty told me about his latest book, the tenth he has penned. He then gifted me the book for review and the next day there it was on my Kindle. Wonderful … when we both started out as writers, we used battered typewriters or, heaven forbid, scrawled in longhand. Now, at the press of a button, we can download an entire library.

I enjoy reviewing books even though it adds to my workload. But one thing I don’t understand is why, as a marine writer and editor, people send me books about caring for dogs or heart-rending novels about their abusive childhood at the hand of hillbilly grandparents in North Carolina.

If you would like a book reviewed then at least include the magic words ‘sea’ or ‘sailing’.

Here’s how to pitch to get my attention:

Dear editor,

In my latest book, we follow the thrilling adventures of a group of dog-breeding hillbillies as they sail around the world while beating their children and playing the banjo.

That book would definitely get a review.

____ Why is it so hard to care?

As a writer, I look into dark places. I gaze down alleyways and roam the streets.  You can’t write if you don’t observe and you can’t observe unless you dare to look.

What you see isn’t always pleasant (although it can be tender).

Today, in an alleyway leading to the marina in Marigot where I live, I watched a man light a crack pipe.  He wasn’t old he just appeared that way, wizened and frail. His clothes and his body were unwashed and he had to support himself against the wall while he sucked the flame from a cheap lighter towards the glass bowl of the pipe.

The image of the crack addict stayed with me while I went about my business in town and it so bothered me that later I mentioned it on my Facebook page. Here’s what I wrote: 

Just saw the pathetic sight of a poor kid smoking a crack pipe on the street in Marigot. The scumbag drug dealers have much to answer for.

My post led to this exchange:

Facebook friend: So you also blame the scumbag liquor shops for drunks on the street?

Me: Yes, I would blame a scumbag liquor shop owner if he sold booze to a pathetic half-starved young kid of indeterminate age who is unwashed, dressed in rags and has a known alcohol problem. Don't you think venders have a moral obligation?

While I have lived in the Caribbean, I have lost several friends to liver disease cause by alcohol. In one case the guy who died hung out at his friends bar, and the friend continued to serve him even though he knew the booze was killing him.

I have also lost friends to drugs. Some dead, some addled.

When someone has a known addiction, should the supplier be held responsible? Damn right they should.

Aren’t we supposed to care for each other?

Like most people, I find this easy to say but not that easy to do.

I’m going to stop looking down alleyways.     


                                       

Bars that serve wine in plastic cups should be bulldozed and the earth on which they stood salted.

I refuse to drink wine out of a plastic cup, not even the plonk they serve at many beach bars in St. Martin where I live. I would rather swig wine out of the bottle than bring a squishy plastic cup to my mouth, and in fact have been known to do so.

I would like to say that my dislike for plastic cups stems from seeing them littering the beach where they usual end up in the sea for some poor creature to choke on. I’ve read stories about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the gyre, full of dirt-dwellers plastic, and I am suitably ashamed. But my reasons are not that noble. Wine from a plastic cup tastes crap and seeing as I go out to enjoy myself and I am paying for the content, isn’t it reasonable to expect that said content is served in a glass.

If I find my beach bar of choice is serving drinks in plastic cups, I can always leave, and often do so. It’s either that or switch to beer out of the bottle. There is no hope for bars that also insist on serving beer out of plastic cups. These abominations are to be pitied and avoided like the plague.

I have heard all the arguments for serving wine in plastic cups such as it stops people using the glass as a weapon. This argument can be knocked down by pointing to the number of people drinking from bottles and the scattering of chairs, trays, tables and women with oversized handbags, all of which constitute a better weapon than a wine glass.

Suggesting a bar use safe unbreakable acrylic ‘look-alike’ wine glasses also falls on deaf ears.

Taking your own wine glass isn’t allowed either. Miserable sods.

_ I recently flew from St. Martin to Curaçao and Bonaire to do some research for my next book and met up with some loonies along the way.
Perhaps it happens everywhere, but the Caribbean seems to have the best when it comes to conmen, scammers and the downright loopy.
Over the years, I have learned how to deal with beggars – the ones who stop you in the street and ask for a couple of bucks. Usually, they are harmless; perhaps they are unwashed and look wild, but then why wouldn’t they if they are living rough?
I used to feel intimidated by the down-and-outs, but not anymore. Also, I used to worry that they would spend the money I gave them on booze or drugs instead of food. I no longer do that because the money I give them is no longer mine. Sure, I hope they don’t shove it in their arm or up their nose, but that’s their choice.
On the island where I live there are certain areas where you can expect to meet beggars and I am always ready for them with a couple of dollars set aside in pocket. Usually all they want is a couple of bucks; it isn’t even the price of a beer.
Someone once helped me with more than a couple of bucks, and I always remember that.
Conmen and scammers, now, that’s a different story.
The favorite con in the Caribbean is the “I know you, do you remember me?” scam. And yes, I have fallen for it.
Here’s two attempts that took place while I was in Curaçao (don’t worry; we’re coming to the loony). The first scam involved a guy who stepped in front of my wife and I while we were taking an evening stroll. I saw it coming a mile off. It always begins with eye contact and once they have made eye contact, and you have returned it, then the game is on. After stroking you, it’s time for the sting. This particular guy’s opening line was classic and a dead giveaway: “Hello, you remember who I am?”
Bad. No money from me.
The next encounter took place the following night. Here’s how it went down:
We were sitting on a bench watching the boats go in and out of Curaçao  harbor when suddenly a smartly dressed guy with a neatly trimmed beard squat down in front of us and offered me his hand. If someone offers a hand in friendship, then I feel you should take it. Of course, I knew what was coming next.
“You look like an intelligent man,” he said.
That was a new opening line, so he got points for that. 
His smile vanished when I said, “You’re scamming, hassling us when we just want to be left alone to enjoy the evening,” and he took off … sans money from me.
Later, I overheard a policeman, who obviously knew him, tell him to stop bothering the tourists.
Our ‘loopy’ encounter happened in Bonaire. We were sitting on the deck of a restaurant having dinner when a young guy with a large brindle dog bounded down the road. The guy was shirtless and wearing hacked-off cargo pants over plaid boxer shorts. The cargo pants were down around his knees and he spent the next 15 minutes running backwards and forwards outside the restaurant, stopping opposite the deck to bend over and show his boxer shorts and backside to the diners.  Laughing, he would then call the dog and together they sprinted off down the street. At no time did he expose himself, just his plaid boxer shorts.
Later, he waved as he drove by in his car.
I’d have certainly given him a few dollars but he never asked!