» Booze Related Disasters

Some guys in my kitchen at uni had been drinking....
And when they got back, we decided it would be fun to create a new religion based around worshipping a guy from the next kitchen. So firstly we built an effigy of him out of butter.

Then we decided to break away from the UK and create out own Utopia. So we fortified half of the kitchen using tables and chairs. Then we ate a load of food from people's cuprboards - aided by a small fire we lit, which was a pizza box. This went on for a while, we even devised a national anthem, and 'bloodened' outselves with Bovril. Eventually we got bored and left, leaving our fortified kitchen, with the remains of a small fire on the floor, for the early risers to enjoy (who had just spent the previous day cleaning the kitchen).

And that was just 2 days ago...
(Fri 19th Mar 2004, 2:41, More)

» The Boss

Where to start
I worked in sales at a small computer software design company last year, which was really the pits. Everyone in the office was good fun, had a good time, got lots of work done... until the manager turned up.

He was only there before 9 and after 5 so he never saw what went on during the day.

Because he owned the company and had studied IT briefly back in the 1970s, he assumed he still knew more than the highly trained technical staff he hired, so whenever one of them had problem with the software, he would try and 'help'. This usually meant coming into the office with a 'solution' that made no sense and was usually for completely the wrong problem. But he would insist that the staff stop the work they were doing and try out his solution. Of course it didn't work, so he would say that they were incompetent.

Economics was certainly not his strong point. He genuinely believed that not putting prices on the company website was a good thing, even though all our competitors had their prices listed. He would happily charge considerably more than rivals for products that did a lot less - in one wonderful example, he decided that we should design our own GPS software for handheld PCs, but with only the functionality that you could see your location on a basic map, none of the actual routing etc. that people expect. He wanted to charge double the price that the other firms in the market were charging, saying that 'we would have to establish the product in the market first' before lowering the price to compete - I created a fully detailed sales report for this product that had a total annual sales figure of 0 based on talking to some potential customers - he sent it back with 500 scrawled on. Other times I sent him reports about software products and how improvements had to be made to keep up (many were five years old, with manuals making no reference to XP for example), they would be sent back with grammar and spelling corrected but obviously no notice taken. I think he thought I just wrote them to amuse myself...

He turned up one evening with a plan to create an incredibly elaborate piece of software for the vehicle routing industry - an enormous market, dominated by big firms with dozens of developers. We had two. Needless to say, after 6 months development, at the cost of all other projects, it was barely off the ground and was abandoned.

Advertising, the key to business development. Not here it seemed, a few poorly targeted googleads were the only things I was allowed to spend money on. Apparently their previous print adverts had not been profitable. I later found out that although the company was B2B, the adverts had been placed in a tiny readership academic journal (I think the boss knew the editor).

Ultimately sales figures were my downfall - he presented me with a number of annual sales targets for the various products, all of which were wildly more than any previous sales figures (seriously, I had to sell 500 copies of a piece of software that had sold 1 in the two years it had been on sale) - at the end of the year he said that the failure to reach these was completely due to my incompetence and fired me. Apparently I should have been cold calling companies from the phone book - I tried to explain that this was not only illegal but a complete waste of time because the software was so specialised that only one in a thousand firms would have any use for it (and when did you ever hear of people buying £10,000 bespoke computer software from cold callers?)

Phew, got that off my chest!
(Fri 19th Jun 2009, 14:21, More)

» Useless Information

I don't usually post replies on this thread....
But that Leviticus thread was so insanely wrong that I had to reply.

Leviticus is far from a business document. It is in fact a public health guide.

Recommendations not to touch the skin of a pig are related to the unsanitary conditions in which pigs live - and the likelyhood of infection as a result - the same reasons that the Jews originally did not eat pork.

The advice about Shellfish was the same, when not properly prepared, Shellfish can be dangerous and lead to food poisoning - and the people at the time had only limited knowledge of how to prepare Shellfish properly.

Wearing garments made of cotton and wool is actually bad for you - a mixed element garment is more absorbant - and thus will absorb sweat far more than a single element garment. Since sweat includes many bacteria etc. this leads to unhealthy clothing.

The various sexual regulations are also there for health reasons - most of the chapter is warning about incest, which many ordinary people back then would not have been aware of.


Therefore one should not see the passage as misplaced religious ideology, but as a 3000 year old public health guide.
(Fri 18th Mar 2005, 9:47, More)

» Premonitions

Premoniting....
I have had some incredible Deja Vu moments, which I can't discribe. They usually stem from very odd dreams, and are usually totally irrelevant things. I remember having one the other day that made me just stand still shocked for a minute, it was really odd - but I can't remember what it was.

I did once have a dream about going out with this random girl, then a week later a girl just like her came to my school. Although we never went out.
(Thu 18th Nov 2004, 23:32, More)

» Things you've done when you've had no money.

Its terrible
Recently I've been forced to transfer some of the money from my savings accounts, and use that to pay my living expenses.

Its so horrible I tell you.

Plus, we havn't had a thunderstorm in a while, so I've been forced to syphon off the house electricity to try and bring my creations to life. The bills are getting suspiciously large...
(Fri 8th Oct 2004, 10:52, More)