Mrs. Underclass has made up and attached to the front window a multi-coloured poster which says:
Private. Google does not have permission to film my House.
Apparently there are reports of a Google Street View car being seen around the town. Mrs. Underclass takes particular exception to Google Street View, with whom she has crossed swords before (I just wonder how it is that they, a foreign company, are allowed to film all the things which we, citizens of the country in question, are not).
Of more concern to the massed tourist-fleecers of the town is the onset of what appears to be a gang of professional thieves.
Yesterday they had £200 in cash off the counter of one of the shops, right under the nose of the kid on the computer. It seems to have taken about three seconds.
Also yesterday I was training a new charity volunteer. The place had got quite busy, and we were trying to close. There was a furtive-looking foreign geezer hanging about in the corner, clearly trying to look inconspicuous. When I looked again, he had gone. When the new volunteer looked a few minutes later, so had his wallet.
Naturally mortified at this start to the poor fellow’s introduction, I was further embarrassed by the arrival of his wife and their three children, all of whose financial resources were in the said wallet.
Eventually they hurried away to see the bank about cancelling cards and so forth. Since they had no cash at all, and apparently rather little in the way of food for the next week or so, I felt obliged to lend the poor fellow our sole surviving £20 note, with which I had been entrusted earlier by Mrs. Underclass, who does not like me going to the town without the B-52 survival kit from ‘Dr. Strangelove’ (“One hundred dollars in roubles. One hundred dollars in gold. One miniature combined Russian phrasebook and Bible.”).
In the inevitable financial emergency meeting later Mrs. Underclass mentioned that a friend of hers, who habitually works as a security guard at those big summer pop festivals, told her that the Eastern European litter-pickers hired en-masse by some festival organisers this year appear to be tea-leaves of the first order, to the extent that everyone else wanted to be off the sites before they arrived, resulting in an unseemly Land-Rover panic and mass exodus in each case.
The obvious conclusion is that, the festivals being long over, this bunch of ne’er-do-wells has now elected to establish itself somewhere round here.
I wonder if any of them speak any English? The point I’d like to get across to them is that for a swift and impressive profit they could hardly do better than to steal the Google Street View car.
I don’t know whether to feel pleased or left-out that google still haven’t sent their car around here…
Did you have fun making your multicoloured poster? Yes? That’s nice then, at least it wasn’t a complete waste of time. In what way are Google filming things we are not allowed to? Anyone is allowed to take photographs on public streets, it’s only Daily Mail readers and PCSOs that think there’s anything suspicious about it. The sad that it takes an American company to actually stand up for our civil liberties, and challenge those who want to limit our rights. And then when they do so-called ‘libertarians’ like yourself whinge and moan. You’re what’s wrong with Britain – shame you can’t see it.
Jonathon:
1. It was not I who made the poster. This should be obvious from the construction of the first sentence in the post. If for some reason it is not, then I would say that we have a use-of-English problem here.
2. It is not I who objects to the practices of Google Street View. As I thought I had also made clear, I am merely struck by the discrepancy between the freedom of GSV to film in this country and the harrassment and persecution meted out by the ‘authorities’ to British photographers. If you look up ‘photography’ on the blog you will find that this position has been consistent.
3.I am not aware that GSV has ever seen fit to ‘challenge’ anything; they have just got on with it, presumably by the methods customary in countries with governments like ours.
4. I very much wish that before posting comments in such an unnecessarily confrontational idiom you would be so good as to read the original posting fully and do what you can to construe it correctly.
At least one of these chaps probably wasn’t too pleased:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eH_5VBG6pv4/SDWGB5DIc_I/AAAAAAAAAQU/Pvx-HHeCOXg/s1600-h/chicago.jpg
Quite.
@ Jonathan…would that be the same American company that collaborates with the Chinese government to block websites that they don’t want their populace to read?