» What nonsense did you believe in as a kid?

Gasholders
A friend of mine was passing a Gasholder (those large cylindrical container things with the roofs that go up and down) and idly commented "They must be out of elephants", which drew a bemused response from us.

Further questioning revealed that years ago her father had told her that they were used to hold excess elephants for when the circus was in town and when the roof was lowered it meant that they had run out of elephants.
(Tue 24th Jan 2012, 2:21, More)

» Pathological Liars

Depressing and long
When I was a teen my older brother was firmly into his skag and was making an effort to get off of it. One of the things he used to substitute his brown was copious amounts of alcohol, including Natch and whisky.

One night I was on my own in the house and discovered a bottle of his whisky. I promptly drunk the whole bottle to myself and ended up being quite ill.

Upon the discovery of his missing alcohol in the morning, my brother was a little cheesed off. My parents weren't exactly pissheads and it's highly unlikely someone broke into the house to nick his whisky, so the blame in his eyes (rightly so) fell on me. Me being a little shit at the time fervently denied drinking his alcohol, claiming he must have done it himself and forgotten. Understandably this pissed him off no end.

Cue the big argument and at this point my parents had heard the ruckus and were defending me.
"There's no possible way he could of drunk all of that bottle, he would of been sick" etc etc

The argument escalated into violence and in the end the police were called to take him into custody. This caused a rift between the family and him and unfortunately a few months later he died of an overdose.

I really, really, really wish I had told the truth and to this day I have incredible difficulty telling even the smallest of lies.

:-(

Apologies for length, tone etc
(Wed 5th Dec 2007, 7:57, More)

» The Dirty Secrets of Your Trade

Tales of Antique Military hardware
I'm not too sure if I should share this but I don't work in the industry anymore so fuck it:

I used to work for a small company that specialised in manufacturing bespoke products for the Air Traffic Control industry. One of our customers was the US military.

The first one is about their 'AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radar' system (google it). Basically, it's shit. These systems are calibrated in the US then sent off to Iraq to blow up innocent people^W^WFilthy Terrorists. Trouble is because of their 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' mentality up until about a year ago they were still using DEC PDP-11's to test their equipment. You know, like the one Richard Pyror uses in Superman III. A 10MB harddrive for a PDP comes on a pallet and weighs about 110Kg's. We quickly replaced them with USB pen drives about 1/1000th the size.

The other one is about the waterfall display that sonar operators use on submarines. Looks great on a CRT, but unfortunately due to technical issues I can't be arsed to go into, looks fucking terrible on a LCD display. Noone has currently sorted out a fix for the problem yet, so they are currently on the run around looking for 10yr old CRT tubes to put into their flashy multi-billion dollar sub's. It makes me chuckle that on the end of their very expensive FFT data processors they are forced to use 2nd hand TV's.

Not that you really want some 10yr old display that's likely to fail any minute when you are sat underneath the polar ice cap at 1400ft.

And don't get me started on how many times I saw aircraft proximity alarms going off in ATC centres and noone batting an eyelid, even going so far as to disconnect the speaker as it was annoying them. I really wish I hadn't worked there now as everytime I get on a plane I have to take two pairs of trousers in case I soil a pair out of fear.

/me shudders
(Thu 27th Sep 2007, 23:25, More)

» Fancy Dress Failures Pt 2

Bad Taste fancy dress party in London, a week after the bombings
Apparently 'Bad Taste' means dressing up in 70's garb, not dressing like a suicide bomber complete with TNT sticks and firing mechanism.
(Fri 1st Nov 2013, 18:15, More)

» Inappropriate crushes

That bird off Buck Rogers
Erin Gray, defo.

Also, Sigourny Weaver as the Gatekeeper/Keymaster. I feel an affinity towards Rick Moranis as I wear glasses, have poor social skills and get raped by demons from the netherworlds everytime I try and throw a house party
(Fri 29th Sep 2006, 15:56, More)