» Workplace Boredom

Magic wandering cursor
Being sys admin for a non tech company everything pretty much ticks along except for the ocasional dim whit that hides one window behind another window and then I get the call saying their computer is broken. So for the most part I have to amuse myself for a fair proportion of the day.

I have discovered the simple pleasure of remotely messing with one particular 'hotdesk' desktop while watching the users reactions on the CCTV... all from the comfort of a web browser.

I think its time to find a new job...
(Fri 9th Jan 2009, 15:04, More)

» World's Sickest Joke

Thalidomide Porn Star
Did you hear about the Thalidomide porn star?

He has an arm the size of a babys cock!
(Tue 21st Feb 2006, 15:01, More)

» Council Cunts

Cut your own fucking hedge
While my local council were pushing through planning permission for a block of flats next door to me, to which we objected naturally, they took it upon themselves to send me a letter informing me that my hedge was 'impeding public access' and that if I didn't rectify the situation within 7 days they would do it for me and charge me 120 quid for the pleasure.

In reality what they meant was that they were running short on this years budget and as they were in the area they thought they would tout for business and offer in the nice kindly way that local councils do.

The annoying thing was the hedge wasn't in anyone's way unless they were fucking blind (well ok maybe the blind) and even then they would have only been tickled by a few soft shoots... it took me all of 10mins to trim the hedge... 120 pounds!!!!

I seriously contemplated tendering for all the councils hedge trimming work that summer as I think I could probably have under cut them!
(Fri 27th Jul 2007, 19:10, More)

» Child Labour

Posh YTS
As a child of 16 (well technically an adult at 16, but I can say for certain that I was still a kid as at 32 I still haven't grown up...) I got rail roaded into some crazy ass posh YTS scheme in 'electronics', which basically entailed me getting all the shit jobs, getting paid less than anyone else in the whole factory (including the mice and cockroaches), while supposedly getting some sort of vocational training.

My duties included:

Cropping off about 0.5 of a millimetre off the legs of some memory chips so a fucking machine could fit them properly. I shit you not, it was cheaper to pay me to take the chips out of their tubes, crop them and put them back in their tubes for the machine, than it was to fix the fucking machine... (an average run of chips took me 2 weeks to get thru).

Cutting reels of wire into strips of wire, then stripping the ends of the wire, twisting the wire and tinning them. I thought my supervisor was talking the piss when he asked me to do this, kinda like how you would ask the newbie to go to the stores and ask for a long wait etc etc. So I sat around aimlessly for 2 days before he came to check my progress... turns out he wasn't joking... 6 weeks of cutting, stripping etc etc.

Inserting pins into printed circuit boards because it was cheaper to get me to do it than program one of the machines to do it... 3 months of pushing pins into pcbs... I had fucking blisters on my hands!

and many many more...

All the while I was supposed to be filling in a 'log book' to show these training monkeys what I had been doing so they could certify my progress and give me my training certificate.

I started to think I was holding on to the shitty end of a stick when one of the people I had befriended asked me what I got paid... "£2 an hour" says I, "fuck me! I wouldn't even get out of bed for £2 an hour" says she... Still, I thought - these are reasonable people - I'll ask for a pay rise and guess what? I only fucking got one! I went from £2 and hour to £2 and 8 pence an hour.

Shortly after when the weather was nice I took 4 weeks off, I should really have told someone but I figured I deserved something for my trouble - I guess I was asking for it when I put in an appearance one lunch time sat in a friends, girl friends convertible, enjoying the sun, my freedom and the company of my friends girlfriend. The funny thing is they didn't say anything about it when I eventually went back to work, until I asked them to dismiss me on the grounds of unsuitability for employment (a loop hole to get paid job seekers without the 4 or 8 week wait during which point the government hope you become homeless and drop off the employment register because you don't have a permanent address) which they refused (bastards - it wouldn't have cost them anything) - I quit shortly after that, a more cynical and bitter person for the first 3 years of employed life.

I got my certificate after 3 years of hell and no one has ever asked to see it since!
(Tue 21st Feb 2006, 14:44, More)

» I don't understand the attraction

Business speak...
...or 'managment wankisms' are pointless and can we please sideline them going forward?

Besides the obvious stock phrases, people seem to have another mode of speech at work and I find it so distracting that I either miss the point and sit there quietly pissing myself laughing (in my head at least). Or they aren't actually saying anything at all, making me wonder what the fuck it is that everyone is talking about.

Plus I don't get the usual stuff like reality TV, light entertainment, Ant and Dec etc.

Oh and Web 2.0 and cloud computing, fucking marketing spin. Besides I've moved on to Web 3.0 and Nebulus computing.
(Sun 18th Oct 2009, 22:46, More)