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Spending an extra £30 to get 'free delivery': How you shaft yourself shopping online

SHOPPING online is quicker and more convenient than trudging around town. Plus you’ll be able to screw yourself over in these stupid ways.

Incorrect sizes

Even if you measure every contour of your body and triple-check the results, the leather jacket that’s supposedly in your size that you ordered online still won’t fit you. That’s because the site you bought it from based their sizing on a supermodel, not your knackered, bloated physique. It’s at this point you learn they don’t take returns. So that’s £150 up in smoke.

‘Free delivery’

Websites aren’t stupid. They know their free delivery cut-off point is tantalisingly out of reach of what people actually want to buy, forcing them to add more shit into their cart. You’d be better off sucking it up and paying the £2.99 delivery charge instead of spunking an extra £30 on things you don’t need. But you never will.

Shit replacements

Is Sainsbury’s fresh out of the basic groceries you ordered? No problem. A teenager in a warehouse will substitute the onions you asked for with Easy Peeler oranges, and ship out a load of waterproof plasters instead of the condoms you’re after. They know exactly what they’re doing, but it’s not like you’re going to venture into the shop and give them a bollocking for it.

Trapping yourself at home

You don’t have to leave your house to shop online, in fact you’ll suffer the opposite fate: forced to stay at home during a 12-hour-long delivery window. The first couple of hours will be okay, but the longer you wait the harder it will be to endure. You’ll need to go for a shit at some point, and you just know that’s when they’ll drop a ‘sorry we missed you’ card through the letterbox.

Ludicrous shipping times

You accept that global events are f**king up supply chains. That’s to be expected. But how can it take four months for a sofa to be chucked into a van and driven to your front door? You could have learnt the necessary carpentry skills to build your own couch in that time. It probably would’ve been a lot cheaper, too.

Five secrets men only share when they're eight pints deep

MEN are stoic creatures who bottle up their feelings. Unless they have had eight pints, in which case all these secrets come flying out.

How much they love you, man

Not in a gay way, they insist. More in the way they love a distant family member like their cousin or their nephew’s dog. The sort of love that has minimum impact on their day-to-day life but is there nonetheless. It’s the same love their dad had for them before he moved out. Oh shit, now they’re crying.

The size of their cock

Nobody asked. Nobody wants to know. But once the eighth pint is swimming its way through a man’s system, nothing can prevent him from bringing up the size of his penis. Just like all good writers they’ll insist on showing not telling, at which point you’ll realise they’ve rounded up by a good five inches. Spare their blushes by blaming the cold.

How fit they think your girlfriend is

This nugget of information will be shared entirely unprovoked if the conversation goes anywhere near women. You always knew they had the hots for your partner, but now that suspicion has been boiled down to a number out of ten. You’re meant to be flattered by their lechery and look enthralled as they move on to scoring your mum.

Their wildly exaggerated body count

By a drunken man’s estimate the number of women he’s slept with is in triple digits, minimum. First there was his college girlfriend who you didn’t know because she went to a different campus, then there were all those uni birds you never met and legions of dating app hookups. The real total is two and a half.

Dgdsfffh fhgd andsksle ffythm, skrrrklumt!!

Excellent, a conversation with some talking incoherent babble. Is it a secret? Is it a gurgled cry for help? It’s impossible to tell. You’ll laugh off your confusion which will only provoke an angry reaction. Lost in a maze of incomprehensible conversation, your only way out is to offer to get the next round in. Miraculously, they’ll have some sort of second wind and only slightly slur the words ‘the same again, please’.

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