Why do people automatically hide behind regulations and why do we allow them to?

Have you ever read "may contain nuts" on a nut packet, or "prepared in an environement that handles milk products" on a toilet roll and wondered when it was that the over use of warnings and provisos got to the point that they became useless? "Make sure product is piping hot before serving" - on a bag of lettuce.

In the new world of electronic booking, I've just been trying to find out from lastminute.com what "re-confirming flight bookings" means. I never understood that anyway, but you used to ring the number on your ticket or some such. I don't have a ticket and no obvious number to ring or website to visit, so I sent them a customer care enquiry. Whilst I was at it, I asked what I was meant to do about the note that said I need to take the credit card with me which was used to pay for the flights - given that the flights are for a work trip and were bought centrally. The response was addressed to the person whose name is on the card and simply said that for security reasons I had to email them from the email account that was used to make the booking - therefore introducing a whole new problem that I didn't have before - yet in such a way that you just wonder if some evil comedy genius is behind it.

The worst of it is that the questions I was asking didn't need to refer to specific or personal information in any way - they were simply queries about procedure and should have been aswerable the dullest of dipwits. Instead, somebody who is probably actually quite intelligent is forced to behave like a fool because of their company's attitude to the regulations binding it.

Well, that wasn't exactly "daily" was it?

I realise that knowing when to vent one's rant is harder than I originally thought.

Alcohol and a willing audience

It's just occurred to me that (probably) the main purpose of alcohol is to make it possible to create an audience when you want to say something but there's nobody willing to listen. "No, no, no, listen, no, listen ... I love you ... listen ..." - I'm sure you get the picture. Anyway, that means that alcohol was invented a long time before the net - and specifically before blogging software.

Of course, nobody *is* "listening", but if you choose to be suitably deluded, then you can kid yourself that somebody is and therefore feel entitled to express yourself.

I'm just thinking that the person who first suggested that the first sign of madness was talking to yourself was a mean sod with little to say. Just imagine the world with people contenting themselves with chatting to themselves instead of blogging, tweeting, facebooking or whatever else they're actually doing.

Anyway ...