Electoral Services: I know they're only doing thier job, but...

[miss_s_b]

I have had something of a frustrating morning, and I have missed my body conditioning class because of it. I'm sure you all recall last year me saying that we'd get our forms in for the council elections in plenty of time and we wouldn't have the stress of being minutes before the deadline again... Yeah. The deadline was at noon today, and at half past nine I was queueing up at the electoral services desk in Westgate house congratulating myself on being two and a half hours early; given my Douglas Adams approach to deadlines I thought this was pretty impressive.

Except that one of the signatures on one of the consent to nomination forms hadn't been properly witnessed, and I couldn't witness it there and then even though I'd been there when he signed it, so the whole form was useless and had to be redone. And then it turned out that one of the people who had signed Mat's nomination form had already signed somebody else's. So I had to get Mat to come in to Halifax and re-fill in his Consent form and get his signature witnessed, and THEN run around madly trying to get a replacement for the duplicate signature (thankfully we had a couple of back-up signers on tap in case of emergency) and then go BACK to the Electoral services department and get everything checked AGAIN... We ended up with it all sorted out and dealt with and a massive three minutes to spare, but it was not a fun morning.

Anyway, after all that, and missing body con, and the Tory who was sotto voce muttering at the nice electoral services lady in stage whispers about Mat's form being illegal - would it have been rude to shout YES I KNOW THAT'S WHY I'M TAKING IT AWAY TO BE REDONE AND ANYWAY WASN'T IT YOU WHO *potentially libellous statement redacted from rant* AND THAT'S THE LAST TIME I COMPLIMENT YOU ON YOUR NAILS YOU PETTY BAG? - and despite the best efforts of the very nice ladies at electoral services who were only doing their jobs and doing it very well from what I could see, I was pretty narked off by the time I got back to Brighouse. So I employed the most dangerous phrase in the English language:

Sod this, I'm off to the pub.

One of the Old Ship Inn's special baguettes and two pints later and I'm feeling slightly more mellow and able to see the funny side. But...

NEXT YEAR I AM GOING TO LEAVE MYSELF DAYS NOT HOURS. Witness this, my peeps, and remind me of it.

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Three minutes. Loads of time :-)

Hywel

[miss_s_b]

If Nick Yates hadn't been prepared to be a taxi service we wouldn't have done it in time, so props to him.

[leoniedelt]

consider thyself duly reminded.

[matgb]

Heh, headlines, always the best way to be #1
http://www.libdemvoice.org/top-of-the-blogs-the-lib-dem-golden-dozen-216-23771.html