My First Time

I like to try and do something I've never done before as often as possible. Last night, I drove down a road in Westbury On Trym which I'd never been down before. Tomorrow night, I'm going 10 Pin Bowling - amazingly I've never been before - and today, I was sellotaped to my desk by a temp.

Wheelie Bins and Couriers

For this story, I need to give you two important pieces of information:

Important Fact #1: South Gloucestershire County Council operate a rubbish collection pregramme that consists of two wheelie bins, one black for general domestic rubbish and one green for recyclable rubbish such as card and garden waste. These bins are emptied by the nice bin-men on alternate Thursdays - one week the black bin is emptied, the next the green bin. Tomorrow morning, at around 7.30 am, my green bin will be emptied.

Important fact #2: I ordered some stuff from Amazon.

You can probably already see where this is going.

Following some terribly interesting stuff post-work activities today, I arrived home at about 10.30pm, to find, amongst the junk mail that had accumulated on my doormat* a card from Securicor Omega Express, a national courier firm.
Of the three boxes that could have been ticked on the card, the courier had chosen to tick the one which bore the statement 'Your package has been left in a sefe place'. This was followed by a box in which the courier had scrawled something about my wheelie bin. I took this to mean that the package was beside it, or behind it or some equally sensible place.

Oh no. Despite searching around the bins in the dark, I was unable to locate the package. 'Oh dear,' I thought to myself. 'This does not bode well. Perhaps it has been pilfered. Nicked, as it were. I've been robbed!'

I rescrutinised the card. It clearly said: 'Fnarglespotsnik alker wheelie bin'.
One last look around the bins uncovered nothing of interest. Resigned to the fact that I would have to contact the couriers to enquire and, more than likely re-order my stuff from Amazon, I headed back down the garden path to my back door.

It was at this moment that my faith in the general common sense of the human race utterly, utterly failed me.

'No,' I thought to myself. 'He wouldn't have. Surely not. Especially not the day before the green bins are collected...'

I will now give you three guesses as to what I found in my green recycling bin that was to be emptied by the nice council bin-men first thing in the morning.



*Actually, I don't have a doormat by my front door. This reference to my doormat is not a lie, but rather what's known as dramatic license to keep the narrative flowing. 'On the floor in front of my front door' just doesn't sound right.

'Thank You' vs 'Congratulations'

So, I bought myself a new remote control thingummy last week (one of those ones you can use on all of your electrical doodahs; it's very cool, lights up blue and I can use it on my Playstation2, woohoo).

Upon opening the manual, I noted that the first thing it said was 'Congratulations for buying...'
'Thanks very much', I thought to myself, 'But it really wasn't that difficult. I went into the shop, took it off the shelf and then paid for it. It's not like I won an Olympic medal or anything'.
The reason I bring this up now is that one of my team just had a new desk phone delivered. the first thing it said in his manual was 'Thank you for buying...'

Now it probably comes as no surprise that, despite the fact that this is a ridiculously trivial semantic discrepancy, I have an opinion on it.

I would rather see the manufacturers of a product thank me for purchasing their product over that of a competitor's, rather than congratulating me on choosing it. In many cases, I will have bought a clearly inferior product for cost reasons - for example a 28" TV instead of the huge 52" plasma screen that I really want or a little 128mb Mp3 player intead of an iPod. The 'Congratulations' kinda implies to me that they believe their product is better than all of the other products on the market when it clearly isn't. I also find it vaguely condescending.

Well, there you go. I've got that terribly inconsequential thing off my chest. Now go and read something more interesting, will ya?

Thursday night in the hospital

I hate hospitals.

Despite my aptitude for avoiding serious illness and injury, I still seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in medical facilities of various types.

Take last night for example. I was required to visit the Stead on his sickbed at Southmead Hospital and endure his moaning and complaining about all the sick people around him. imagine that... sick people in hospital. Still, some of the nurses were quite attractive...

Anyways... following a really nasty headache that came on whilst bench-pressing the best part of 70 kilos and hung around for a few days afterwards, Stead felt it best to get in touch with his doctor, who suggested a CT scan. So I got a text message at around lunchtime from Stead saying 'I've been admitted to hospital...' He followed this up with a naughty, naughty word that I just can't bring myself to post here!

So I found myself driving over there after work to take him a toothbrush and other overnight essentials. We hung around for several hours in the hope that he'd be discharged as the headache has almost completely vanished. In the end the results of the various tests they'd done came back as clear, except the lumbar puncture, which was being delayed as the computers were out of action.

Just as we thought they'd finished with him, one of the nurses (not one of the attractive ones, regrettably) came over and announced that Stead was to be moved to an overnight ward upstairs.

Stead was understandably convcerened about this as he didn't want to stay overnight. Once he was sfaly ensconced in the new ward, he took an instant dislike to the other patients - the old, coughing woman and the itchy man across the way who kept telling people what was wrong with him.

After an hour, he finally decided that he's had enough and announced to the nurse that he was discharging himself. A brief chat to a very pragmatic duty manager later, we were on our way... via the Indian for a curry. Mmmm...

Apparently the Lumbar results came through earlier this morning and were all clear. Which means that they don't know what was wrong with him!

The Wrong Coat

Yeah. This is a dumb one. I'm dumb.

This lunchtime I grabbed my coat and headed out to lunch only to discover...

...that I'd flagrantly stolen someone else's coat!

I only noticed about halfway down the street when I stuck my hands in the pocket and found a pair of woolly gloves inside. Whilst similar to mine (in that it was long and black), it was clearly more expensive, having a patterned gold lining and a generally better fit. My suspicion is that it belonged to one of the senior managers in the office.

Still. I snuck it back on the coat hanger when I got back. Nobody mentioned it, so i think I got away with it.

Next week, I shall try stealing a lady's coat...

The Origin of Love

I've been teaching myself Flash. And now I've created a new blog to show off the results. Go see it on my DazzaMoo blog!

My Exploding Dinner

I had curry for my tea last night. That doesn't seem like an interesting thing to write about, but an odd thing happened while I was preparing it. It exploded.

It was one of those microwave ready meals. I've been pretty lazy on my holiday and have been eating oodles of what can only be descibed as crap. Anyway, I followed the instructions exactly. To the letter. Honest.

Peirce film lid. For minutes on high. Peel back lid. Stir. Recover. 4 more minutes on high.

It was during the '4 more minutes' that I discovered that one of the ingredients that they neglected to tell me about was the 400 punds of TNT that seemed to have been mixed into the madras sauce. I stepped into the other room for a moment and heard a muffled 'poom'. On rushing back into the kitchen, I discovered that about 50% of my dinner was splattered over the inside of the microwave.

I ate the other 50%.

Cats Suck

So it turns out that cats suck. Rochester just hunkered down right next to his freshly cleaned out litter tray and took a wee wee right in front of me. He just couldn't understand why I was less than impressed. I kicked his arse, I did.

Neil

I popped into town today as Neil Gaiman was in Waterstones signing copies of his new book, Anansi Boys. When I first arrived, there was a very long queue of very pale people all dressed in black with interesting peircings, which kinda scared me, so I ran and hid for an hour. The were gone when I returned.

I've met Mr Gaiman a couple of times before and as always he was a very nice man. Sadly Rochester ate the last book he signed for me. When I mentioned this to Neil, he seemed to think that this was right and proper. Not sure I'm quite with him on that one, but I'll let it pass!

Interestingly, Mark Buckingham, a comic artist that has worked a lot with Gaiman, was also loitering around. He wasn't signing anything and Neil agreed that it was most likely that he was hoping that some of Neil's coolness would rub off on him.

Too Many Mugs

One of the peculiarities of staying with my parents is the sheer number of mugs that get used throughout the day. I'm not sure if this is a phenomenon shared by other dishwasher users, but yesterday, they went through 27 mugs. I know, cos I counted 'em. Given that there is a maximum of three of us in the house at any given time (and there certainly weren't any visitors), am I wrong to think that this is unreasonable?

Anyway. The phenomenon is explainable. My parents insist on using a fresh mug every time they have a mug of tea or coffee. Even when they have two in very quick succession, the old mug goes in the dishwasher and a new cup comes out of the cupboard.

Personally, I think it's incredibly wasteful. But I could be wrong. Of course, my point of view is somewhat biased as I often nurse the same mug for 2 or 3 days (obviously it gets rinsed out after every... well most uses) before giving in and washing it properly.