I'm a baggage handler and I'm OK

In the course of dealing with the frankly abysmal Argentina Airlines (don't use them folks, the suck) in search of my lost luggage, I have found out the following about the life of a lost luggage agent:

• They get in to work after 10am
  
• They leave before 4.30pm
  
• They take lunch between noon and 3pm
  
• They are absolutely fucking useless at actually finding your lost bags
  

Sounds like not a bad job really -- all you have to do in the few scant hours that you are at work is to answer phone calls from irate customers, and explain that they haven't found your bags, and in some way intimate that it is the customers fault that the bags got lost, rather than the airlines. Also express surprise that anything of value was stored in the bags, as if to entrust anything more valuable than a set of old handkerchiefs to the baggage handlers was an act of supreme idiocy.

Anyway, this rant on the subject of lazy indolent and incompetent people is distracting me from my intending rant on the subject of toilets that flush. I don't know if you are familiar with this phenomenon, but there is a growing trend to fit toilets in public places with automatic flushing devices. That is, they have some sort of infrared device that detects when you aren't there any more, and they flush the device. This works fine on most urinals, but for some reason, they are also attached to water closets.

This is incredibly stupid and incredibly annoying. Picture the scene. You sit down, make yourself comfortable, lean forward a little in order to... and SWOOSH! the thing flushes itself. You tense up and jump up to avoid being soaked. This would be fine if this was a bidet, but this is a toilet. You settle back down again, but the whole experience has ruined your concentration and you are unable to, um, go about your business. And this happens every time. What is so wrong about letting the user indicate when they are done with the toilet? If you want to go all high-tech, then you could attach the control to the toilet door, so that it automatically flushes when the door is unlocked. But this stupid infra-red thing is broken, and doesn't work. I have taken to covering over the sensor with toilet roll before settling down, but this is no solution.

I'm also annoyed because it's taken me nearly a month to get an invite to Gmail, and I thought I was well connected to the interweb world. Dammit, I even host this thing on blogspot, what more do they want? I don't even need another email account (1 measly gigabyte? This machine has quarter of a terabyte of storage on it), it's just the prestige thing. The only reason for using it is that I can take up a prime piece of namespace by hogging a desirable account name (my first name followed by my initial, which has been my user id at a couple of other places), and thus deny this to any other google fanboys. I probably won't even look at the account except to see how much spam it starts getting without being advertised. Doesn't even work in my browser, the piece of trash... even yahoo mail works in my browser. Even hotmail works in my browser! Even AOL... actually, don't be stupid, of couse I wouldn't use AOL, and I would not let anyone who uses AOL use my computer, in case they drool on the keyboard.