Farting Etiquette

 

Every year governments around the world bring out hundreds of new laws, literally 1,000’s of pages of new regulations, but there are very few laws about flatulence. My local council did however recently introduce guidelines for queuing for the bus - 

Daisy the dog has absolutely no shame when it comes to farting. After she’s let one slip, she will lay there and stare you straight in the eye. Most people are more modest, but what are the rules when farting in company? Here is the Discussions with My Dog guide to farting etiquette. 

Group situation I

The blame game - When someone in a group unleashes a silent but deadly fart

If you are the culprit, it is perfectly legitimate to blame somebody else. The trick is to wait until someone shrieks “OMG, who just dropped their guts”? Never be first. Jump in and point the blame to the most uptight person present. The second rule of the situation is never to blame the dog. They can’t defend themselves.

Group situation II

The squealer

This starts similar to the first situation. The farter clenches up and attempts to gas in silence, but the fart sneaks through a gap between their buttocks with a high-pitched squeal. No blame game rules this time. This is the rule of natural justice - sneaky bastards deserve to get caught.

Group Situation III

School assembly

Remember school assembly? The hall packed wall to wall with kids. The teachers have enforced silence for the Headmaster to make “a very important” announcement. In the moment of complete hush, a kid breaks wind violently. There is a pause, a shocked silence before the first person lets out a snigger. The teachers glare, daring anyone to laugh out loud.  It’s the funniest thing you’ve heard all year and your body is physically shaking trying to suppress the laughter. You’re holding it back desperately, but 5 minutes later, the fart is still preying on your mind demanding you collapse into a fit of giggles. The lesson is that not everyone finds farting funny. I feel sorry for people with no sense of humour.

Toilet cubicle etiquette

When you let rip in a cubicle and didn’t realise there was another person in the room

Do you wait it out until they leave? Or brazen it out, throw open the cubicle and announce, “If you come down to the engine room you’ve got to expect to witness some damage”. If you are the person outside, I personally recommend acknowledging the event with a polite round of applause and then discretely leave.

The Exhibitionist

It’s true you can set annal gas alight. Most farts generate enough methane to produce a satisfying blue flame. The rule here is safety related - beware of secondary ignition sources, especially guys with hairy arses. Forest fires are known to cause devastation.

Farting in bed

These rules apply to cohabiters. There are no set rules, you should set boundaries you are both comfortable with – OR JUST GO FOR IT.

Alastair and Daisy

The Bodger's Charter

 

In our previous post Home Improvements, we gave some tips on home improvements. This week we’re giving advice on how to avoid DIY mistakes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, employ a qualified tradesman – don’t bodge it. As Daisy says, if you want a squirrel chased off the garden call the dog, a cat just won’t get the job done.

This handy guide will help you recognise when a project is heading for disaster and save you from the Bodger’s Charter.

All the traditional trades have a patron saint, an angel who keeps a watching eye over them, for example; the patron saint of fishermen is St Andrew, the patron saint of brewers is St Oliver (Reed), and the patron saint of bodgers is Thor. Thor is known for his ability to fix any problem, large or small, with a hammer and brute force. The hammer is the bodger’s preferred tool for all occasions. You can’t knock in a nail with a screwdriver, but you can whack in a screw with a hammer.

The experienced bodger is a jack of all trades, and master of none. The bodger has attempted almost every DIY job there is – at least once. His extensive knowledge of how to carry out a task is usually based on “having a mate who knows a bit about this”. Invariably the results don’t turn out as planned. Classic signs of a bodger at work are mini-meltdowns, profuse swearing, and throwing tools or materials he claims are sub-standard quality. The bodger can often be seen at the DIY store on Sunday buying the same products he bought, and then busted, on Saturday. Serial bodgers can often be found in Anger Management class.

Many bodgers have an assistant who is of very little assistance. This is usually a wife or girlfriend who offers useful advice such as “Do you know what you are doing?” or “I don’t think you should have done it like that?” It could also be the dog who has sneaked off with the piece of wood he has been very precisely cutting and shaping for the last hour. The bodger spends the next 30 minutes looking for it, only to find a mess of chewed up splinters.

The bodger dreams of being able to saw perfect mitres – the angled cuts that join up corners of skirting boards of door liners without unsightly gaps. In reality he knows his joints won’t fit, but he can fill up the cracks with glue and dust and hide his shoddy carpentry with a coat of paint.

The pinnacle of the bodger’s career is the mid-life crisis project. Undaunted by his long track record of DIY disasters he decides he is ready for the big one – the full bathroom conversion. Six months after the bathroom conversion began, the family have gotten used to having no running hot water in the sink, a door that won’t close properly, a shower rail that falls off when in use, and a toilet that takes 20 flushes to work. The bodger has promised he’ll fix it all next week.

Alastair and Daisy

Teambuilding

 

One of the unnoticed benefits of Coronavirus and social distancing has been the complete demise of Team Building courses. For those of you lucky enough to never have experienced a team building course, I should explain.

When the management of large corporations realise the business isn’t performing as well as they hoped, and they have no real idea how to fix things, they send the whole work force on a team building course. It’s intended to boost morale and foster team spirit. Attendance is mandatory for employees because “you’re really going to enjoy it and come back a better person”.

Team building courses are an export from America. This country has contributed many wonderful inventions such as rock ‘n’ roll, spaghetti westerns (OK most were made in Europe), the personal computer and spandex. To keep the balance they have also inflicted some monstrous crap on the rest of us, and team building courses are high in the top 10.

The courses are often a 2 – 3-day residential programme, so it intrudes on your personal time. The one possible saving grace of the whole sorry event is that they might have a free bar. If it doesn’t, then you really have been screwed.

So, you get to spend three days in the company of your fellow employees. You already suspect that half of them are dicks and a team building course is the perfect stage for them to prove it.

The course is always run by a team of insanely cheerful idiots. They encourage you to exchange hugs and high fives and bond with your colleagues. They love an inspiring theme song and they probably have a dance routine for you to learn. They repeatedly use annoying buzz-phrases like “positive mental attitude,” “let’s deep dive this,” and “winning is baked into our DNA”. I suspect that most team building organisers eventually end as members of whacky religious cults.

The courses always involve a series of pointless exercises. A favourite is to take turns falling backwards off a chair and a group of colleagues will catch you – this builds trust. What you really want is for the whole team to back up a few paces and let your manager fall flat on the deck. That would also teach a valuable lesson – how to laugh your arse off. Even worse, in the cringe sessions you might get invited to talk about your inner feelings or tell your colleagues why you think they are such a valuable member of the team.

If you really want to know the true meaning of friendship and loyalty – get a dog and take them for long walks on the three days you would have wasted ‘team building’.

Alastair and Daisy