How rude of me. I usually try quite hard not to call Canadians American, too.

(if Piers visits Canada, you have to keep him as well though. Just so long as he never comes back to the UK, the lying, stealing, sanctimonious little gutter press git that he is.)

In Reply To #16

Yeah, make sure you identify my hat properly.

In Reply To #17

How to tell the difference between (North) American & Canadian tourists:

- Wearing Union Jack clothing of any kind American
- Expects American Express credit card to work outside the USA American
- Gets annoyed when British customer service is shit American
- Is polite when British customer service is shit Canadian
- Wearing a beret Probably from Seattle

In Reply To #18

Umm, I have an American Express. It gives me more points, but I have to be careful the store doesn't charge extra for using it beforehand. Not American.

In Reply To #19

Well, they aren't accepted very much in Europe (due in large part to AE's prohibitively expensive retailer fees), which has pissed off quite a lot of American tourists in my experience, who were under the impression that it's accepted "everywhere", and couldn't quite grasp that this was marketing by American Express and not entirely true.

Then again, the most annoyed American tourist I ever had initially came into my shop to complain about the size of the McDonald's milkshakes (not my problem, thankfully - I commiserated), tried to buy something with his AE card (couldn't, explained that the reason nowhere accepted it was because AE were liars), then tried to buy something with his wife's Mastercard - which we would have accepted, but it was declined SO harshly that the Mastercard lady on the end of the phone ordered me to cut it in half in front of the customer.

He was not a happy tourist. Understandable, really.

(happy ending: they had a couple of other cards between them, so they weren't left skint in a foreign country)

In Reply To #19

Also Aussie tourists are easy to spot because they don't have accents that sound either American or Canadian.

Plus they tend to be a lot thinner and better looking. Than either Americans or Brits.

(and more sweary).

FYI I envy you. I've always wanted to cut someone's credit card up right in front of them, squinting, glaring and quite possibly smirking.

In Reply To #22

I've had to do it twice. That time I felt really mean.

The other time it was a gold card, and the bloke actually said "Don't you know who I am?" while I was digging the scissors out of the drawer. That instance was considerably more satisfying.

(He wasn't anyone famous, he just had an overinflated sense of his own importance)

In Reply To #23

"Don't you know who I am?"
"No, but I'm sure you'll remember me :)"

In Reply To #24

I went with "Yes, your name is [read name off his card]"

*snip* *snip* *snip*

"Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

There wasn't.

In Reply To #25

Win

In Reply To #20

Back in the day when we had a restaurant, the fees were the lesser issue we had to hate AE. Our main beef with it is that regular cards would wire us the money from transactions just the next day. AE would take at least a week to pay.

Yup, its official. America is insane. I wonder if the janitors will receive hazard pay? Of course they won't, but I wonder what will happen when these minimum paid armed janitors go postal and snap because they are sick and tired of being abused, teased and disrespected by punk high school kids.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/armed-janitors-approved-school-shootings_n_2458167.html

Fixed that for you. This is why fewer guns are, and have always been, part of the answer. Teachers, janitors, yeah... people who are in schools half their lives... adding more guns there will totally reduce the number of gun incidents.

Really dude? Shit, you really shouldn't make shit up like that. The punishment for misquoting is a mandatory 2 years sentence in an iso-cube. Yup, I'm watching Dredd. Deal with it. Lots of cool guns though I should add.