» Bedroom Disasters

In between school and heading off to university,
I worked weekends at a nearby bakery. It was only part time work, and the long and short of my duties was simply to serve customers, keep the place clean at the beginning and end of my shift, and to occasionally assist in re-stocking/counting stock. Standard dogsbody work, but it gave me money to go out and get twatted with my friends of an evening, so it did me just fine.

Anyway, anyone who has ever worked in a 'proper' bakery before will know that baking bread is a 24/7 business; the actual bakehouse ran all night in order to have stock for the following day, and this is common practise for a busy bakery.

Ordinarily, the proprietor and head baker Nick managed to fulfil the daily quota of stock each evening; however, on this occasion he had (foolishly) agreed to supply bread for a friend's wedding the very next day, so I was called in to help, despite not having the foggiest notion of what I was doing.

The evening wore on and gradually (very gradually) I began to pick up the practice of mixing and kneading dough, and we were making exceptionally good time. Quite a few hours in, and with some bravado at the pace of our bread production, Nick stuck a twenty in my hand and ordered me to head down to the nearest all-night offie and get my hands on some beer to, ahem, 'lubricate' the production process. Thirsty from the night's work, we polished off a few too many refreshments and were decidedly merry.

It was at this point, unsurprisingly, that the hunger set in. After a night of hard graft, and with nothing but beer in our tummies, we suddenly realised we were utterly famished. Now exceedingly sleepy and hungry, and with our bread order finally baking away in the ovens, we realised that our only option was the scoff a couple of the spare barely-cooked, doughy loafs from one of the ovens. Scoff we did, and with the night's work done, I slinked off home, went to sleep and thought nothing more of the whole experience.

Until I woke up the next morning.

As I woke, I realised I could barely open my eyes. A thick crust had formed in the corner of my eyelids and I had to pick a fair bit of it off before I could even see clearly. On closer inspection, the eye-crust was actually bread dough that had somehow found it's way into my system after the previous night's drunken feed.

That's what I call a 'bread rheum' disaster.
(Wed 29th Jun 2011, 18:29, More)

» Dumb things you've done

I ate a five pound note once
My reward? Five pounds.
(Thu 20th Dec 2007, 21:48, More)

» Annoying words and phrases

"That's so random!"
This truly annoys me.

One of the best things I ever saw when I was at school occurred when Mr. Barnett, a curmudgeonly yet quite evidently quite intelligent maths teacher overheard a bunch of chavvy, moronic year 8s describing things as 'random'. Cue a group of slack-jawed kids stood around while Mr. Barnett explained the notion of statistical randomness. It was like Einstein trying to explain himself to a handful of ants.

I still take Mr. Barnett's side on this. It's really annoying.
(Thu 8th Apr 2010, 21:55, More)

» Old stuff I still know

The meaning of the latin term 'qua'
Have you ever tried using the word 'qua' in conversation? It either sounds really forced or really pretentious. So it's pretty much useless.
(Fri 1st Jul 2011, 0:22, More)

» Old stuff I still know

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
Even though I haven't played it for 14 years, I still remember that the cheat code to unlock invincibility and all weapons is NTHGHTHDGDCRTDTRK.

Also, the code for unlocking the Naboo fighter in Rogue Squadron was HALIFAX? then !YNGWIE!
(Thu 30th Jun 2011, 18:07, More)