Read your Sale of Goods Act, people. Learn that shit!

I started temping in a new office last week. I'll be keeping the company name secret because I don't want to get sacked, or sued, or sacked then sued then sacked again. They don't sell coffins, but let's just say that they do. So imagine you've bought a coffin from us; it arrives at your house and (bugger!) the varnish is chipped, or the satin lining is torn. Maybe there's a body already in there. Whatever the problem, you're not a happy consumer. You want reparations.

So you call the office and demand your money back, and we do everything within our power to stop you. Firstly, we'll try and convince you to get your coffin repaired, or maybe replaced with a new one. If that doesn't work (and it often doesn't; there are people out there who have had four or five coffins dispatched to them, each one more bickered than the last) we'll grudgingly allow you to swap it for another from our coffin emporium. But maybe that's not enough either. You're sick of our shit, you want a full refund, you are perfectly within your rights to have one and we know it just as well as you do - but the only refund you will receive will come in the form of one extended middle finger. Occasionally someone will call up spitting feathers, quoting chapter and verse from the Sale of Goods Act and invoking the wrath of the Citizen's Advice Bureau. That'll usually do the trick, but they really need to know what they're talking about. There are little old ladies out there who, having shelled out serious fucking cash, are being dicked more thoroughly than a teenage groupie on a Led Zeppelin charter flight.

When the agency was signing me up for this gig they made big noises about how it's 'a small, family owned company', like that somehow ensured that these people were going to be paragons of virtue. Unfortunately, being small and family owned isn't much good when the family is made up of gouging, Bentley-driving shitbirds. Know your right, kids, because no other bugger is going to tell them to you. Personally I can't wait to get back to the warm, comforting bosom of local government, where profit doesn't matter and all you need to worry about is good old fashioned incompetence.