» Work Experience

Backstage hijinks
My first "Real" job was working backstage at a touring venue in Essex & in my few years there I saw my share of work experience nimrods. Jobs doled out by myself and others included:

Handing one kid a big box of cut gels that had accumulated over half a year of shows, a grease pencil and a swatch book & telling her to sort them out into a filing system.

Asking another kid to call StageTec and get the current price on a Long Weight (Yes, this is in the StageTec catalogue - call for pricing). About 2 hours later he came in fuming "They put me on hold for 20 minutes and hung up!" "Did you call them back?" "Yeah, for 3 hours!"... I don't think he ever did get the joke.

And the coup de grace...

Putting a nimrod up the Tallescope (telescopic ladder) with a comedy feather duster & telling him he was to clean the lighting rig without jogging any of the lamps.... Which he dutifully did, then we took them all down and re-rigged.

Yeah, we were rotters but I remain unrepentant.
(Thu 10th May 2007, 10:53, More)

» Best Graffiti Ever

York car park art


Seen in a car park in York a few years ago. Thought it was really quite nifty.
(Fri 4th May 2007, 11:12, More)

» Housemates from hell

Roleplayers
I must be a glutton for punishment. In the last 8 years I've shared living space with the terminally-lacking-of-a-social-life and have found the same on all occasions:

Tidiness is a nemesis to be vanquished with the empty fast-food containers of doom +2.

Requests, no matter how polite for any given gamer to get up off of their arse, put down their gaming paraphernalia and do something for the good of themselves or the house (like have a wash) it's met with a grunt, a sigh and "in a minute" I guess it's in the vain hope that the stench of BO will carry them off to be cleaned.

The last house I lived in, I acted like a spiv. The PlayStation II and _my_ laptop got far more attention than the house did, so I washed, cleaned & picked up after two others, only to be told that "You don't do anything around here." They (being a couple) went away to Scotland for a week, left food out, left their clothes all over the lounge (including some unmentionably dirty underwear) and enough washing up to give a hotel a run for it's money. I spent two days tidying up the entire place & making it livable. They get back, tell me that I don't do anything around the place and proceed to dump stuff all over saying "We can't find anything when it's tidy." No lie.

So I move in with my other half and his friend, who turns out to be a hardcore gamer... Sigh. He leaves his dishes for others to do, he lives on microwave chips (fries to the Americans amongst us) and ham sandwiches. He totally blanks me because I vetoed roleplaying in the flat every goddamned night, he slams doors and storms around like a teenager that can't get his own way. He's 20.

... He won't be around for much longer, cos I'm likely to kill him.

Length, Girth, Adequate. Nobody has complained about my lance of merriment +2
(Tue 10th Apr 2007, 16:59, More)

» Mistaken Identity

In the past I have been mistaken for:
Or have been called the following derogative things:

Meat Loaf
Ozzy Osbourne
John Lennon
And to cap it off... Geoffrey Chaucer!

I've made some money on the Ozzy thing though, signing autographs for drunkards in pubs for a fiver a chuck ;) In reality, I'm a 28 year old fat geek with long hair and a trenchcoat.

c'est la vie.
(Fri 1st Jun 2007, 14:09, More)