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My vest’s so short that it won’t fit my little brother
And my new Sunday shirt has got a perforated rudder
Mr. Wu, what shall I do
I’m feeling kind of Limehouse Chinese laundry blues
Hopefully next week those blues will disappear we’ve all grown up a little bit more and now have someone to do our ironing…
It had to happen sooner or later.
Covering for more than two people over two weeks it’s been a constant battle against demands, email, phone calls and issues.
Today it started to wash over me, not one thing at a time but a huge deluge of work swirling around like some dark malevolent water threatening to drag me under.
I just made it through today but tomorrow, well I’m not so sure.
For me Friday can’t come too quickly.
Hot stuffy airless night and the beginnings of a summer cold.
Roll on the weekend.
“Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions”. Edward R. Murrow
A Deep Dive is neither deep nor a dive but an excuse to get someone in and tell them how badly you feel they are performing.
It is not a solution to any of the problems.
Lepe beach, a picnic and the Sunday papers.
Just what I need to re-charge.
After a wonderful meal at Skylon K and I went to see Mama Mia.
You sometimes forget just how good Abba were and the quality of the lyrics and music. One of the lesser known songs is Slipping Through My Fingers :
Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while
The feeling that Im losing her forever
And without really entering her world
Im glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl
Go get some Abba and enjoy it with your platform heeled boots on….
End of week one covering for a whole bunch of people.
There’s been some good times and some bad times but the best I can say is that this week is over and I have discovered that cats like Domino’s Garlic Sauce - but just the hint of it served on a thumb…
“Oh what a glorious thing to be,
A healthy grown up busy busy bee,
Whiling away
The passing hours
Pinching all the pollen
From the cauliflow’rs.
I’d like to be a busy little bee,
Being just as busy as a bee can be,
Flying round the garden
Brightest ever seen,
Taking back the honey
To the dear old queen.”The Bee Song Kenneth Blain, 1938
Sitting out tonight the one thing I haven’t seen are bees.
I guess if you sit down tonight and watch your garden you may notice the same thing.
All over the world colonoys of bees are disappearing.
CCD, or colony collapse disorder, is causing litterally thousands of bees to disappear.
No one fully understands why this is happening but some of the possible reasons include the select breaing of bees so that we only use a docile species that doesn’t sting us; the overworking of hives to ensure maximum returns and feeding bees hormones and stimulants to keep them active and start their honey collecting season as early as possible.
What is happening to bees is a small reflection of what is happening to the earth. Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum’s book “A World Without Bees” is a stark warning to us all.
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.” Albert Einstein
Rather like the guests in Agatha Christie’s book, “And Then There Were None”, people have been disappearing recently at work.
This isn’t the result of any foul play but the time of year. People are heading out for their summer holidays. Now, that wouldn’t be bad apart from the fact that I need to be two other people for the next few weeks as well as myself.
Today is day one and already it is has been “interesting” :
Two little Soldier boys were out in the sun;
One got all frizzled up and then there was one.
“If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!”
With me spending more and more time siting at a desk or stuck in a car there’s more and more of my waistline to control.
Perhaps the answer is on One Hundred Pushups ?
There is something very special about seeing a city from it’s river especially if you are en route to see the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb...
“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”
William A Foster
Unfortunately we’d made an unwise choice this evening. I’d wanted to take K out for a meal to celebrate her birthday and I had two places in mind. The country pub I’d eaten in a few times with Karen or our local Italian. We’d decided on the local Italian as that was in walking distance, we had always had a good time and good food there and we wanted to support a local independent business.
Things, unfortunately, went wrong from the moment we set foot in the place. Upstairs they now have a wine bar so people can enjoy a drink before sitting at their table. The problem with it is that you seem to loose your place in the queue for the next available table so the wait goes on and on. That would be OK if upstairs hadn’t been taken over by a party of twenty or so people who had almost every sofa formed in a large circle that excluded everyone else in the bar.
Downstairs on a busy Friday night things got no better. Gone was the feeling of being welcomed - people were seated as fast as possible, the order taken and that was that. Whilst you may want to get as many people through the door as possible on a busy night there is no excuse for ordering white wine and receiving red, the main course arriving before the cutlery or for fish that was so overcooked it was more like chicken and for chicken that could have been used to knock in nails.
I guess it will be a while before we return. In pursuing profit they have lost the edge they had which was the care and quality they demonstrated to their diners. What is left is really no different from the chains in the town and is, perhaps now, the unwisest choice of many alternatives.
At last I have some control on this work.
All the information in a central Sharepoint database which we can all update together and in which documents can be stored and associated with the records.
An Outlook task for every bit of work in which I have the link to the Sharepoint record for that item. In the task I can record what needs to be done, prompts for what I need to do in the next few days. I can set the date for the task to bring it forward, track when I pass the action to someone else and, if I need, defer it for a few days.
Of course, none of that stopped them saying to me when I walked into the office, “drop everything this is critical”, but it did let me pick up the pieces a lot easier when I got home this evening….
Wonder what next year will bring.
Happy birthday K !
Wordle seems to the latest toy sweeping the blogsphere. It lets you create a word cloud from either text that you enter or your blog’s RSS feed.
Fun eh?
Me : “Hi I’m calling to because I don’t have any of my credit cards apart from this one. I need access to some money and I don’t have a PIN for this card”.
Them : “We can issue a new PIN over the phone. Oh, we can’t our systems down but you can do it via our website”.
Time moves on.
Me : “I’ve registered on your site and tried to set my PIN but I can’t - the option doesn’t appear on the site”.
Them : “You need to use the site of X as they run the card”.
Time moves on again.
Me : “I’ve tried to register on the website of X but that goes to the same place that your site does and I still can’t set my PIN”.
Them : “You can in a few days time”.
Some time later I go to the cash dispenser, guess the number, get some money and go shopping.
A fine example of financial security.
“It’s rather like a pub carvery”, said K’s Uncle as we gathered around the table outside to collect each of us armed with a plate.
The vine was too overgrown to sit under so we decided to make the most of the sun and have Sunday lunch outdoors.
It’s been seven weeks since we all sat down together. We were all wondering just when it would happen again.
I should know better than to play I Spy with Joanne. I also need to exfoliate.
A large family gathering to celebrate Fhai’s birthday and to plan for the weekend…
A house with three floors used to be a rare thing. Nowadays thanks to Mr Barratt there’s a lot more of them about.
Jo and Dan own one of them and, by way of thanks for taking their wedding pictures, kindly had us over for an excellent three course meal with just as many courses of wine.
After all that food and drink I began to realise why two floors are better than three.
Sometimes life really just seems unfair.
A very bad hand dealt in the wrong direction …
I’d forgotten just how far you walk in a day when you are in the office.
Many years ago when I used to run a support team I made sure I walked the floor a few times a day with a sheaf of papers in my hand that I’d printed off from the call handling system.
Now it’s a copy of my diary and the 80 odd things I need to do today printed in a list splattered with lines of angry red showing the things that slipped yesterday.
Of course not knowing my way around the place doesn’t help at the moment as I end up on the wrong floor or wrong wing.
At least my waistline is feeling the benefit….
This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. Today, it is kept in Microcosm, the public museum at the Meyrin site of CERN, in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland.
The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of “Information Management: A Proposal,” which was Berners-Lee’s original proposal for the World Wide Web.
The label on the cube itself has the following text: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: “At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server.”
While K was sitting in a very posh tent in the rain in Wimbledon I was driving around sarf London trying to avoid the mini marathon which had closed off my usual route into the City.
Underground and overground today was a very wet, very frustrating day…
It’s been far too long since we caught up with Karen but today we finally got a chance to deliver the presents and enjoy a beer in the sun.
Watching Elizabeth unwrap her lippy and bangles I wonder just what happened to the little girl who rode around the hills of the Lake District on my back and fell asleep in her plate of baked beans….
So, the end of another week.
We could both do with better health, less stress at work and a good night’s sleep.
Laters.
Normally K leaves the house to return some hours later.
Today she left, came home, went out, came home, we went out and we came home.
Over one hundred miles done, eating late and little time together.
This just isn’t fun…
So, Bill Gates has now officially retired.
We shared the same years in IT but he gave up a lot sooner than me.
We grew up with the promise of Gem and the disappointment of Windows 3.1.
Now we have the bloatware of most Microsoft applications, the prevalence of them in the marketplace and the better years ahead with Opensource.
Here’s to your retirement and many successful years of the Gates Foundation.
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