Failed project!
Met a guy online, just from a website we both frequent. He seemed (and is) a really, really nice bloke. Everyone else on the website thought we were meant for each other, and as there was a distance of oooh, 6,000 miles, 2 guys started a fund so he could fly out to see me.

The fucker stood me up ;)

For those that haven't been on here that long, just ask an old school b3ta member about the Koit/Workboresme fund

Sorry Koit! Had to be done ;)
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 18:57, 7 replies)

Not my project, but my family's.
I live in a country which is arid, sand-filled and full of neanterthaal types -- and, to make matters worse, we have no oil.
Thankfully, through the use of Indian slaves and medieval-style laws my family have made this land green and even enticed rich foreigners to partake of the magical delights.
Well, that was until recently. Now, thanks to the fact the country uses the money of the moronic wealthy to control its slave army of builders, and also thanks to dumb bankers, the country is struggling.
If things continue we may have to stop advertising cheap holidays in broadsheets and go after the Ibiza crowd. Sensible Western buisnesses are pulling out and our future is looking bad.
Thankfully, The governments of the US and the UK still deal with our neighbours for oil -- so perhaps our palms will be crossed with silver and our world gilded once again.
Yours, with contempt,
Hamadan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 18:24, 2 replies)

Many years ago,
I was doing my military training and we had all been discussing ideas on how to pull off a stunt to be remembered. Our drill instructor, who was also the highest ranking officer in barracks at that time was finally given a new Land Rover after months and months of whinging. There it was, shiny new, royal blue 110.

About a day or two later, under the cover of darkness, two of us decided to nick it. So what to do with it? Obvious really, we took it to the motor pool and sprayed it bright pink, then took it back where we found it.

We were all awoken rather earlier than usual and made to go outside as we were, and it was winter. We all went out to the playground where a rather irritated and somewhat annoyed c/o was shouting and demanding answers.
Nobody said a word and the vehicle was sent back to the motor pool to be restored to it's former colour and we all lost a weekend leave so or best laid plans had sort of backfired on us a bit.

Turned out fine in the end though. Two days later we were playing games on Dartmoor. After a nice ramble in the countryside we got back to our rv and there it was. The 110 and our c/o just getting out. While he was having a little chat with us the heavens opened and it pissed down. What he hadn't realised was when it was taken back for re-spray, it was coated in a water based royal blue paint and slowly began to run revealing firstly a nice pink roof before looking like a zebra which had been for a swim in strawberry yogurt.
We lost another 2 weekend passes for that. Tits up or what?
(chb3 Read my lips. See my profile. See me talk., Tue 8 Dec 2009, 17:06, 5 replies)

Being a mechanical engineering student
They love to give us group design projects, we have had all sorts from trying to fix broken tibias together with plates and screws (harder than it sounds), to a proposal for a cross atlantic train tunnel (as silly as it sounds) to a portable wind turbine to be carried by mountaineers as an energy source (more plausible than it sounds).

We have just been set a new one however, and it's a royal pain in the ass. Each year we have a design module, and this year we have been tasked with designing a full microlight using a 3-D software program (called solidworks if anyone cares), and I really can't get it started. To be honest, out of all the projects I have done this one really is the hardest to get off the ground.
(xerophytic has no idea, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 14:54, 7 replies)

 
(zebby wasting irony here on, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 13:41, 6 replies)

Boring Boring Boring change the qotw
Who really want's to listen to a bunch of IT nerds pissing and moaning about shit that nobody understands or cares about...do one
(goatchoker, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 13:23, 20 replies)

Hmmm...
Failed project just last night: trying to persuade a nice. well spoken girl who was moving into London from the country that our flat, despite being on an ex-council estate, was a haven of calm and a perfectly civil place to live.

Just as two ten-year olds shot past on the footpath outside the kitchen window on a motorbike.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 12:49, 4 replies)

wii... wet myself more like...
so on thu night i have client christmas drinks, hosted by the team of the obscenely hot colleague (nb: the colleage/car dilemma is still not resolved, as nothing further has been said… i have no idea if he is just being a boy and thinks it's a done deal so why on earth would we discuss it further until it's time for the loan, or if he just doesn't want to tell me that he's changed his mind... and i also have no idea if i should be asking him if he still wants it or not, argh, what do i do???) .

anyway. it's a bloody team wii competition. i do not do computers, or computer games, or technology in any form. i can't even upload digital photos online. the last time i played a computer game it was the original form of "street fighter ii" on the snes, and even then bison kept kicking my/chun li's little arse all the way back to china. i am going to be leaping around like a blind drunk in stilettos trying to swat a wasp in front of all the clients and the illegally fit boy. what is a wii, and how do i do it, and how do i not make a monumental tit out of myself please?!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 12:39, 18 replies)

Dead Space on 360...
...is kicking my arse at the same point, again and again and a-fucking-gain. Fuckerofathing.

Probably not on-topic though, as I will not let it beat me. I may give it a rest for awhile but at some point over the holidays I'm gonna crack that bastard, even if it takes me days.
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 12:08, 7 replies)

I have just completed a jigsaw puzzle
It was rather difficult and took me nearly eighteen months to finish. Which is great, as it said 3 - 4 years on the box.
(marcooosa has no idea what a board sig is, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 10:02, 4 replies)

There's a flipside to this question.
Everyone kept telling George Lucas he should get off his arse and finish the Star Wars series...
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 4:57, 4 replies)

So many things
All in my childhood. I had many grand plans. None of them ever came to fruition, because I have a very short attention span. I had ideas, and I wanted the end result, but I couldn't be bothered with the effort part of it. There's one in particular I'm not able to forget, however.

A treehouse. Me and my friend, who lived just down the road from me, decided to build a treehouse. It would be awesome. We would have a fridge full of cola. Crisps piled to the ceiling. A playstation, and television. Entire nights spent playing doom and eating snacks. The fact that we'd require electricity didn't even cross my mind, nor did we get anywhere near this stage, so I guess that's a moot point. What actually happened was two small boys dragging a single plank of wood through the tiny copse in front of my house, failing to climb a tree, or even push the plank up onto a branch. We were, however, confronted by my next-door neighbour, who to us children was the cliche evil old woman figure. She told us to stop dumping wood and littering. I replied with a line which, 15 years later, I still get mocked for by my brother. The most polite of all rebellions; 'Shut up. ...please.'
(Pavlov'sDog is all out of pavlova, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 3:01, Reply)

Not once, but TWICE.
It was my greatest desire to be the biggest bad-ass in the neighborhood. I knew there was only one way to do it- so I built the biggest, most perfect fort ever seen. It was ace! No way for anyone to get in without permission, and from there my friends could go terrorize the neighborhood with impunity. My best friend usually led these attacks, so I could stay behind and safe.

Only thing was, someone leaked out to the other kids in the neighborhood how to get in there, and they trashed the thing. I never found out who it was.

Undaunted I began rebuilding. It took me ages, but finally my fort was up to snuff and I sent out my friends once again. Loads of success- but the same bastards who trashed my last fort were determined to do destroy this one as well. Somehow they got inside and were going about to start, but my best friend and I caught the leader of the bunch. I was just getting ready to take care of him once and for all when my best friend pushed me down a hole and let the kid blow the place all to shit!

Fuck. Shows that you can't even trust your closest friends. I should have let Anakin fry in that lava.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 8 Dec 2009, 2:42, 3 replies)

I was going to write a big long post
about how lack of motivation has led to me making a huge fail of everything I've ever tried, but I can't be arsed.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 1:50, 2 replies)

DIY gone mental.
Everyone at some point in their lives will have the urge to fix something or build something or invent something...... sort of like the time our sink fell off the wall and I tried to repair it by plastering the screws back in.

Well, my dad was never one for DIY when I was young. We've always been a proper working class family and had to "make do" with stuff until it was falling apart, but if it wasn't electrical, he had no idea how to fix it, so broken things had to be replaced (but only when they were basically destroyed).

Then I got married and moved out and became used to having things that, well, things that worked properly. After that little project of my own failed, I moved back in "for a little while" (another fail) and found to my growing horror that my dad had discovered the wonders of DIY. This house and everything in it hs become his own personal chamber of horrors as he glues, saws and hammers everything in the house to an inch of it's life and then some.

It all began when he converted the loft. He did it himself, a pretty big task, and he hasn't made a bad job of it.... not amazing but better than I could have done. A heating pipe got knocked loose in the process though and the water came through the ceiling into my room. He nailed a piece of board over it "just to hold it" until he could repair it properly. That was four years ago. It's still there.

One of the hinges on the fridge door broke. He replaced the hinge with the hinge from the freezer door. So now, we have a freezer door that almost falls off whenever you open it and a fridge which doesn't close properly becasue the hinge is fitted wrongly.

You have to pull the bathroom door handle upwards because it's broken. Ditto with the flush on the toilet.

Every *single* piece of furniture I have ever owned which I thought had long been thrown out has been amalgamated into some sort of huge storage monster up in the loft.

My mum, God rest her, put up with it in silence and so did I. I endured being hit on the foot with the freezer door and trapped in the bathroom (he neglected to mention the handle's antipodean nature), but when the shower broke and he proclaimed he would "repair" it, I felt enough was enough and told him to stop being an arse and go and get a new one.

The base has a huge crack in it (steady!) and the water was pouring down through the floor into the kitchen. We need a new base. I told him, we need a new base, I said. And so did my auntie. And anyone else I mention this to. "Get a new base" they say. But when I said it, I was argued to a standstill because I didn't know what I was talking about, all the modern bases have the holes in a different place (!) and the pipes wouldn't fit under them because they're so small and you would have to dig into the floor (it's a wooden floor, I got a bit scared he was going mental when he said that). Any further argument led to massive huffs and he said that he would "make a good job of it" and it wouldn't look "home made".

He super glued over the crack.

Yes.

I know.

Well, when the water started pouring through the now even larger crack I thought he'd relent. He glued it again. Then he glued a sheet of plastic over it. I resisted the urge to pry it up myself, knowing it would come free by itself soon enough, and about 2 showers later, it did.


When that failed he went to work. Like a one man A-Team, he constructed his little contraption, a wooden.... erm, sort of platform with a bath mat stuck to it, built to fit inside the base and spread the weight all around the edges instead of in the middle where it's cracked. It's razor sharp edges are about as comfortable as standing on Kate Moss, but it does what it's supposed to. He then sealed the crack with plastic sealant and glued another sheet of plastic over it, finishing it all off with a lovely duct tape trim. "Won't look home made" seems to have been flung out the window, but I am assured he will sort out the hideousness of the thing by simply glossing the duct tape.

I can only assume that this madness will finally end when he turns around while making dinner one day to discover me and the entire shower cabinet have came down into the kitchen. I have to get my own place soon before I go mental or, heaven forbid, his crackpot notions start making sense.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Tue 8 Dec 2009, 1:42, 3 replies)

Complete and utter FAIL! (for the company)
I was working for a hotel chain at the time, not anymore, when "The List" came down to me on a fax sheet.

Can you organise, within 48 hours, a complete re-fit of the banqueting suite for a major star who wants to hold a private function.

Little did they know that it was my last day working for them and nothing got done.

That Fax went straight in the bin and then I had a load of angry calls from my successor for the next week.

Ha, not my fail but the fucking companies for not realising that I could not give a shit about an "A-list" celeb.

names have been withheld because I hated the A-list twunt and my successor
(ToMeToYou is bumming a Unicorn on, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 23:59, 1 reply)

Well there was this time I started telling a joke.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
(Miraclefish How appropriate, you fight like a cow, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 19:40, 10 replies)

A million followers on Twitter by Christmas...
...and not being a self-promoting link-pimp. Fail. Oh well.

twitter.com/ofquack
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 19:35, Reply)

I forgot to fit these:


And it fucked me up big time.

Signed

Seth Brundle.
(Spaff_Quaffer Wise fwom your gwave., Mon 7 Dec 2009, 18:17, 1 reply)

Unfinished Album.
I started it a while ago (along with various novels that never got past chapter one).

The album started out better than the novels though, as I actually did get some songs finished.

The Album was a themed album, a kind of 'concept' album; it was called:

"To the Manor Porn" (with a subtext of "Porn to Rule" as I couldn't decide on the best title of the two)

...and was basically a load of songs about politicians/royals' sleazy activities sung over 70's porno-style-music with plenty of auto-wah.

So far the track's protagonists (without titles) include:

Robin Cook.
Bill Clinton.
David Mellor.
The Egg Woman.

...and that's as far as I got.

I was going to do a Michael Jackson style 'Thriller' thing for Michael Howard (something of the night about him), but it's hard to make 70's porno music sound even remotely scary.

Still, it's a start, but to give you some idea of how long ago it was started, the Robin Cook and Clinton songs were recorded on my Tascam 4-track recorder that I have since misplaced.

...at least there wasn't a John Profumo song on there.
(dchurch bah, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 17:24, 2 replies)

It took me five years but I finally finished my novel
All I have to do now is decide what to read next.
( SpankyHanky, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 17:15, 6 replies)

Compost and The Heap Thereof
Confession time: I'm a bit of an eco-cunt. Well, sort of. I'm not a hippie. And I eat meat. Lots of meat, possibly to the extent that I'd be tempted to move to France if it meant I could eat blue-cooked steak and drink fine red wine everyday (if only it were that simple). And due to the excessive consumption of ale, I probably blast more methane out of my bowels than most cattle. But on the other hand, I am one of those pro-recycling, anti-waste types. I really hate to see perfectly recyclable packaging* or perfectly good food thrown into an oversize plastic black condom that is ultimately destined to become a couple more kilograms of landfill.

So when I first moved into a place in that delightful corner of London that is the Elephant and Castle, I was very excited to find it had a garden...or, to be more accurate, a few square feet between the house and the street which were full of soil rather than concrete. It was time, I decided, to start a compost heap.

I turned a plastic bin upside down and cut the top off. I designated a little plastic bucket in the kitchen and told my flatmates to put all their kitchen waste into it, and when it filled up I wandered down into the 'garden' and dumped it in the upside down bin. The initial results were marvellous: our kitchen waste had been halved. And I had stuff rotting in a little plastic box outside which would hopefully fertilise the few square feet of soil we used to grow plants.

Then came the rats. It became apparent fairly early on that we had a rat, as one of my flatmates managed to tread on it, getting out of the shower one morning. Apparently it went "crunch," then "squeak" and then scurried out of the bathroom. Unfortunately the little bleeders were digging in my compost heap as well - that is to say, they were able to nudge under my dismembered plastic bin and eat the stuff inside it. No wonder it had been "rotting down" so fast.

Not to be defeated, I went outside with a spade and a saw. Reasoning that this was not the best way to catch the rat, I set about digging a hole, and cut some wood to fit the bottom of it. I set the bin down in that and buried it, such the bottom of my heap was set firmly in the soil, and hopefully the wood would discourage them from digging.

It did. Alas, they were also able to knock the lid off the top and get in that way. When I put bricks on the lid, they started chewing through the plastic to get in. I'm sure at one point they were trying to nest in there, before a concerted campaign of rat poison got rid of at least one of them.

The other thing, of course, which seemed to discourage them was urine. I was one step ahead of the National Trust here - piss on the heap to provide nitrogen to encourage breakdown of the contents. I think it might also have frightened the rats away: I was advised that if you visit the heap regularly, the rats are less likely to come near it, so the sight of a large, drunken man, reeking of alcohol, lumbering over to the bucket, popping the lid off and releasing a volume of foul-smelling liquid over it would surely have put off the most determined of rodents. (I also found out that one of my flatmates had overdone it one night, realised there wasn't time to get his keys out and hurry to the bathroom, and decided the best course of action was to vomit in there, which must have terrifying for them.)

Still, after the rats had been scared off and it just became a box full of rotting crap, I had my doubts as to whether this stuff was actually becoming usable compost. And in the weeks leading up to us moving out of the house, I decided it was time to bury all evidence of this heap. I would pull the box up and break it up to go in the bin, and bury all the decomposing kitchen waste, urine, vomit and god-only-knows-what-else.

I lifted the box, fully expecting to find evidence of meals we'd eaten 18 months prior. Instead, beneath the top six inches of fresh stuff, I found a neatly compacted cuboid of rich, brown, worm-riddled compost. VICTORY WAS MINE!

I buried it all and have since attempted to start up a new one at my new abode. It's an exciting life I lead.

*_{A little part of me dies inside every time I have to throw a Tetra-Pak in the bin.}
(LongJohnBaldry, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 15:30, 7 replies)

I'm doing an album too
There's a lot of posts here about people who've been writing their album for a long time and haven't got very far. Mine was started in 1998. I have 21 tracks, and I hate all of them.

Perhaps if we all got together we could fail to create a procrastination supergroup?
(yesyesyes, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 15:03, 4 replies)

Pre-Compost Re-Post
I intend to tell the story of my compost heap shortly, but beforehand I thought I'd whet your appetite with a classic* from Pointless Experiments
*_{May not be a classic.}
Solar Cooker: Budget Edition
A couple of years ago, I was living in a flat which was basically a loft conversion at the top of a house. The only upside to this claustrophobic, 4-bedroom dump was that we had access to the roof via a skylight and a ladder.

Now when the sun shone on this (flat) roof, it got very hot - far too hot to stand on barefoot. This gave me a daft idea.

I'd heard about third-world countries being given "solar cookers" - basically a big round mirror, into the centre of which you put your food and point the whole thing at the sun. The sun's rays are thus focussed on the food and this heats it up.

Now I obviously didn't have access to such a mirror, so I took the opposite approach - if I want to focus this solar energy, why not use a lens?

Well, I didn't have a lens, either. What I did have was some tin foil, a pint glass and a sausage.

Result: after 30 minutes of sitting on this piece of tin foil and under an upturned pint glass, the sausage hadn't cooked at all. It had begun to sweat a bit, but that was the limit of my solar-powered culinary achievement.

I abandoned this experiment and put the grill on instead. Oh, well.
(LongJohnBaldry, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 14:58, Reply)

Hair
Now, I understand women have to go through the incredible pain of childbirth, bleeding out of their front bottoms on a monthly basis, and the peculiar – no, damn right fucking odd - notion of having sex without achieving an orgasm, but this is nothing compared to what your average man has to put up with. Yes, the terrible ordeal of having to shave every morning. Ladies, you really don’t know you’re born, believe me.*

Spurred on by boredom one Sunday afternoon I started rummaging through my girlfriend at the times beauty shit. She’d somehow managed to populate our small bathroom with various sized bottles of gloop, tubes of weird coloured crap, and little containers with flowers on that contained stuff that smelt like and had the texture of dandelion yogurt. I wasn’t sure whether to put this shit on my face or spread a bit of it on a piece of fucking toast, to be honest. And I swear these containers were breeding at night. I couldn’t recall my girlfriend ever purchasing any of this shit. It just appeared. As if from thin fucking air.

We were going out later to a play, One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest with that bloke out of Heathers down in that posh, fancy West End. I wasn’t really too bothered, but my girlfriend at the time wanted to do the dirty with this fella, Christian Slater, and I recall acquiring tickets in the vague hope this would get her hot and she’d hump my brains out with abandon when we got back home. Didn’t really give a fuck if she called me Christian while we were doing it, fuck, she could call me ‘Dad’, I really didn’t mind. Anyway, this meant I needed a shave. I hadn’t had one for a couple of days and was looking like a particularly scruffy twat. And that’s when I found the little string bag containing a jar of incredibly sticky crap along with a few scraper things that resembled lolly sticks and a shitload of little strips of waxy paper…

Moments later I had the incredibly sticky stuff smeared across my beard. This shouldn’t hurt too much, I reasoned. My girlfriend used this shit on her bikini area. She didn’t cry. In fact I’d watched her do it a fair few times and it looked, well, it looked easy… Far easier than going through the hassle of having a shave. I mean, that’s two minutes I’m never gonna get back.

With the shit smeared over my face, looking a little bit like Father Christmas after he’d gone down on Mrs Christmas while she’s got a particularly nasty yeast infection, I affixed a strip of the wax paper to my sticky chin and throat, patted it firmly into place, and then ripped it off nonchalantly.

Pain. Pain? Like nothing on this fucking Earth pain. It was like someone had just napalmed my fucking face.

I actually bent over double, tears in my eyes, and head butted the bathroom mirror hard in one fluid motion. By the time I’d gained my composure and stared in the mirror I realized something wasn’t quite right… I washed the rest of the crap off – took fucking ages, had a normal (though incredibly painful) shave, put all the lady-shit back where I’d found it and went and played Final Fantasy ‘til my girlfriend came home.

Even before she’d put her handbag down she caught sight of me: “Have you been at my hair removal wax? Well, you can fuck off if you think I’m going anywhere with you looking like that. I’ll go and see Cuckoo’s nest with Gemma instead. You tit, why can’t you just leave my stuff ALONE!?!”

I sat there for a while, fuming. Bang goes my night out. Bang goes my chances of a late night fumble. And bang goes a hundred quid on the fucking tickets…

Fair play though, when I went and had a look at myself in the mirror a little later I did look fucking weird…. I had managed, somehow, to aquire a nice neat, rectangular and angry as fuck red graze from my chin all the way down my throat where it finished painfully at my Adam’s apple. It looked like I’d attempted a DIY skin graft.

Don’t piss about with the lady stuff, gents… It’s not big, it’s not clever, and quite frankly it's incredibly fucking dangerous.


*OK, maybe having to tackle a can of Gillette shave gel and a razor every morning isn’t quite as bad as all the lady stuff. I’ll concede that. And technically there are some females out there who need to shave more often than I do anyway. I mean, I used to go out with a Greek girl at Uni my mates nicknamed Chewbacca. Whenever I went down on her I’d need a compass and a stout pair of hiking boots to find my way back out of that dense pube jungle. I swear once or twice I may have encountered the emaciated skeleton of a former boyfriend of hers who was less fortunate and died of starvation or exposure before the rescue services could locate him….
( SpankyHanky, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 14:27, 18 replies)

When I was a nipper
My cousins and I were playing in their garden. We were jumping off the climbing frame, maybe 5 feet high, and, with the aid of an umbrella, we were floating happily down to earth.

Having been scientifically proved a success, the method of parachuting with an umbrella needed to go through some more clinical trials before we could go about releasing this information on the unsuspecting world, and making our millions.

The one fly in the ointment, was when we were caught on our way up to the fourth floor, umbrellas in hand, by my aunt.

She probably was in league with the parachute manufacturers, and the big multinational companies were able to pay her off, to suppress our findings.

Not so much a failed project, as a sabotaged project...
(The Kwyjibo A big, dumb, balding North American ape., Mon 7 Dec 2009, 12:31, 1 reply)

painting the ceiling
I just can't bring myself to do it, it brings close to tears when i think about it but if I get a pro in it would mean the last scrap of my manhood would be dished away like so musch rotting cornbeef.
(Agent Dale Pooper k in the p, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 12:19, 12 replies)

I've got a new project.
www.johnmoynes.com

How long do you reckon until it fails?
( Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 12:16, 4 replies)

Home improvement
A friend of mine’s dad purchased a full top of the range bathroom suite for the house. Almost 20 years later it’s still all boxed-up in the shed.
(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Mon 7 Dec 2009, 11:21, 6 replies)