» Abusing freebies

Blagging in Amsterdam
I've just recently got back into Satellite Communications, so I got sent over to the IBC (International Broadcasting Conference) in Amsterdam in September. Now, I work for a Dutch company, so I got put up in a nice hotel near the office whilst I was over there, all on the company tab. On the first day at the IBC, I paired up with one of our sales guys. He's a smooth talker and managed to blag some laser pointers from a company that did some thing *not* related in any way to what we do. The laser pointer makes a great cat toy BTW. We got a nice pin badge with the new Sirius satellite on it from the SES-Newskies stand as well. On the second day I hoovered up the usual freebies, pens, sweets etc. However, this is where the biggest blagging starts. I meet up with the bosses on the Intelsat stand, whereupon I immediately get plied with free beer. I then find out that we've been invited to the Intelsat reception, in one of the poshest hotels in the middle of Amsterdam that evening. Result! Cue us piling over there that evening, to a reception room with as much food and booze as you could shovel down your gullet. I 'strategically' parked myself near the bar so that the beers could keep flowing. Not sure how much I drank, but seeing as I wasn't paying, I wasn't keeping count! After we left, our CEO takes us to a topless bar in the red light district with some guys from another satcomms company. When we got there, his company card when behind the bar and the drinking continued! When we left, the other guys were still there and buying the girls 50 Euro bottles of champagne. We didn't see them arrive at the IBC the next day until quite late in the morning!

I also used to work in horseracing, working in conjunction with C4 racing & the BBC, so as a result had Access All Areas passes for most of the racecourses in the country, but I don't know if that'd be considered a freebie or now.

Length? Well, our biggest antenna is 11m across, picks up Sky a treat!
(Sat 10th Nov 2007, 21:07, More)

» Hotel Splendido

Converted Old Peoples Home
I used to work in horseracing, for this mob: www.turftrax.co.uk. A couple of years ago, we were up at Doncaster, getting ready for the St. Ledger. Seeing as it was the St. Ledger, there weren't any rooms to be found in our usual hotel, so we were booked into another hotel, in a small town called Thorne. Now, I'm from the Doncaster/Scunthorpe area, and when I heard that we were staying in Thorne, alarm bells began to ring. Thorne is a mining town, with probably the last coal mine in the area. It is also rougher than a badger's arsehole. But, we were willing to give the place the benefit of the doubt, so off we drove at the end of the day. We got there to find that we were staying in what appeared to be an old peoples home that had closed, and had been converted into a B&B. We could tell, as they'd even left the NHS door hangers on the doors! It was atrocious. The rooms hadn't been cleaned, we had been told that the rooms were all en-suite, which is true if you consider a bog & a sink to be a bathroom! I think that there were two working bathrooms between 40-odd rooms, which was no use at all. In the pub later that evening, we shared our horror stories about the place, and we all decided that we were off in the morning. So, first thing, we're all there trooping out with our bags and there's the manager (complete with apron as he was cooking the breakfast) with a shocked look on his face asking us where we were going! We told him in no uncertain terms that the place was a shithole and they'd fed a load of bullshit to our office when the place was booked, and we were off. We ended up having a fry-up in a nice cafe in one of the parks in Doncaster on our way to the course, as there was no way that we were going to trust the food at that place. We called the office and told them that there was no way on earth that we were going back to the place, so they had better sort some other accomodation out for use. I ended up staying at my parents (and doing some serious damage to my dad's collection of single malt whiskey), and the rest of the guys ended up in a travelodge near Retford.

Apart from that place, all the other places we stayed were Ok, the best had to be the Chichester Gate hotel, with huge rooms and a pool!
(Thu 17th Jan 2008, 22:18, More)

» Cheap Tat

Crappy Bingo Prizes
Mrs. Raystorm loves to go to bingo (it helps get her gran out of the house). One type of bingo is the one where you have a board of numbers and you cover them over with shutters, the sort that you tend to see at the seaside. Anyway, a week or so before Christmas, she won the most incredibly naff and cheap Christmas ornaments in one of these games. Both of them were 'musical box' style ornaments, i.e., you open the lid and it does something. One was wind up and showed a rotating Father Christmas whilst a very tinny rendition of a Christmas carol played. The other one was a fibre-optic scene of the Nativity, and needed batteries. The Father Christmas one worked well enough, as there isn't a lot that could go wrong with it. The Nativity one didn't do *anything*. Tried two sets of batteries, checked the switched, nowt. The build quality was incredibly cheap. I don't know who painted them, but diddy Raystormette could do better, and she's only 2! Figures out of all proportion, and the paint looked like it had been daubed on with a 5" paint brush! The Nativity one got binned with extreme prejudice, but we found that a friend of our's daughter really liked the Father Christmas one (screamed blue murder when we tried to take it off her), so we gave it to her.

Also, when it comes to cheap tools, I won't hear a word against Aldi, most of them are really good quality. I did think about buying a set of combination spanners from a Pound Shop though, but on closer inspection, the lumps of metal bared only the faintest resembleance to spanners, and looked as if they would snap if you looked at them too hard.
(Mon 7th Jan 2008, 22:25, More)