by Pedgerow » Wed Dec 12, 2018 2:49 am
Hang on! I also have an actual rant to share! It stems from various good things that have happened to me and which I am now immediately ungrateful for, just like all the best rants.
About a year ago, I celebrated my 30th birthday by buying myself a bottle of whiskey from the year of my birth, 1987. There are plenty of expensive 30-year-old single malts available for the true connoisseur, but there are also online auction sites where you can buy whiskey from 1987 for just a tiny bit more than anyone else is willing to pay, so that's where I looked. And lo, I wound up paying £140 (so about $200, maybe?) for a bottle of 20-year-old fine Scotch whisky that came in a beautiful-looking bottle, fabulously presented, and unopened for a decade but that's okay because it's not like it goes off or anything. And it's lucky that whiskey doesn't go off, because I plan to take this bottle with me to my grave. I will drink some only to celebrate the absolutely most monumental triumphs of the rest of my life. I'm a fairly tightfisted skinflint most of the time; I'm going to make my £140 purchase last.
The problem, of course, is that I then had no occasion to ever open it, and it has just been sitting in my kitchen ever since. Bah.
But! My work sent me on an IT training course in March of 2017, 21 months ago. It was funded by the government as some scheme to get bottom-rung hopeless IT guys like me more qualified. For those of you with IT jobs, I was studying for a CCNA. But alas, giving me something to study at home in my free time is not a good idea. I can't do it. I really can't. I would get home from work every single say, swear to myself that this evening was going to be different, and order myself to study it, and force myself in every conceivable way, and I'd be lucky to learn CCNA stuff for 20 minutes before I went to bed. It was my white whale, dominating my every waking moment, with me never actually learning anything but feeling racked with shame and self-hatred, all the time. On a few occasions I would refuse to go out with friends because I wanted to stay home and learn some more IT networking stuff, and some of those times, I refused and then I didn't even look at it. And there's a lot to learn, too: out of eight people attending the classroom sessions when we started, five dropped out, two did the final certification exam months ago, and only one of them passed it. Since then, the classroom has been just me, milking this free government scheme for all it's worth, easily a year and a half beyond when the government stopped offering it.
Anyway. Last night, I finished all the reading materials. It's done; it's behind me. I have one more classroom session next week, because there are a couple of exams I still need to do, and then there's the final certification exam to see if I've wasted two years of my life or not (I will have; there's no way I'm passing), and then I have vanquished the demon forever. If you need a motivational speech, this whole experience has taught me that you don't need to crush your obstacles; you just need to outlast them. They defeat themselves if you can just keep plodding on averagely for long enough. Persistence is unbeatable. Don't give up, and you've already won; continuing is just a formality, a victory lap to the eventual end. I did it; you can too.
So why am I ranting? Well, doesn't this sound like the perfect time to bust open the expensive whiskey, and celebrate like a king? Compared to what I normally drink, this will make me feel like if Jay-Z was a feudal lord; there should be servants fanning me with giant leaves while I drink this stuff. After all, fabulous life triumphs don't come along every day. I probably won't get another chance till I buy myself a house, unless I somehow do actually pass the certification exam and get to add "CCNA" after my name on my long-abandoned LinkedIn profile.
I do like drinking neat spirits, so I drank a couple of other whiskeys that I own to prepare my palate for the experience. Oh, how good it will be. Oh, just think of the subtle flavours, the sly interplay of delicate tastes, like drinking memories. It's going to be soooooooo nice.
The moment of truth arrived. I took the bottle out of its tin cylinder that it came in, because when you pay £140 for a drink that you only bought to reward yourself for no longer being the embarrassing travesty of a human that you were in your 20s, all your bottles should come in metal containers. You're a better class of people than the plebs with their cardboard presentation boxes and their- snort- ten-year-old whiskies. Special whiskey glass at the ready, I grabbed the top on the bottle and twisted it off.
And the ABSOLUTE PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT BROKE IN TWO AND LEFT HALF THE CORK STUCK IN THE BOTTLE! I couldn't open it! I paid £140 for a bottle that might as well have contained a giant steaming shit-stained severed dick for all I'm going to get to drink of it. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! You could buy a laptop for this money, and instead, all I have is a Pretentious Dickhead Licence for passing strangers to point and laugh at. You total fucking bastards. All of you. Every last one of you on the planet, go eat shit and choke on it. Fuck everyone and fuck everything. The whiskey is right there, and the only way to get it is to smash the cork and let it all fall into the bottle, and be stuck with an uncorked bottle of whiskey that I paid £140 for. Fuck.
(Epilogue: a couple of people suggested I try to remove it with a corkscrew. I tried, and I failed. So I have now drunk some poseur whiskey, with chunks of cork floating in it, and I have temporarily closed the bottle back up with a stopper from another bottle. I have also made a mental note to purchase a sieve, and possibly also a whiskey decanter, at my next available opportunity. The experience is absolutely ruined by crumbs of cork and rubber floating in the drink you have reserved for your life's greatest achievements, but other than that, yeah, it tastes okay. Not as good as Highland Park Viking Honour, which I recommend to any who likes whiskey, but certainly very big and bombastic and aggressively flavoursome nonetheless. I'm just so, so mad that it has chunks of cork floating in it. I didn't even know whiskey stoppers were made from cork).