Be Excellent To Each Other

I don't know why I thought of this today but I did, and here's the story.

Around the time I was 20ish, I was seeing a girl who I met in a club that my friends and I regularly attended. She was nice but there was a problem in that her ex boyfriend also went to the same club as us all.

I was on the dance floor with her one night when she excused herself to go to the ladies. As she walked out of the room I noticed her ex also darted out of the room after her. Sensing trouble, I grabbed one of my friends and went after them both. When we got in the corridor he was talking to her and I could tell she was uncomfortable. I positioned myself next to her and gave him the dead eye! Upon seeing me he said "Oh.. Er... I've got to go. I think I left the gas on"

Without hesitation I pointed my finger and said "Yeah, I thought I could smell something!"

If there was an audience watching this live, they would have gone wild with applause.

So, tell me about a time when you nailed it. When did you do or say something that you were pleased with that ruled the situation?

Was it gas you could smell? They probably should've evacuated the club.

Yeah, don't mess around with gas safety dude.
One of the hobs in my flat doesn't work, and I almost failed my gas safety certificate, but luckily it could be isolated, so the whole hob didn't need to be condemned.

As hard as it may be to believe, I am not particularly cool, thus I have trouble with this challenge.

The only incident that really springs to mind is when I was at a student nightclub type thing in Manchester, specifically 'The Stomp' which was a sort of indie/rock style affair.

I was trying to get in the knickers of a lass and it seemed to be going alright, she commented that my eyebrows joined in the middle and drew a line on them with her finger, 'You're like a werewolf', she said, to which I replied, 'That's right, I only come at night'.

To my substantial surprise this actually worked and we finished up having sex. (And ended up going out together for a while.)

However, it turns out the lass had, erm, 'been around' a bit the previous term, a different lad (or more) a week style of 'been around', so I wouldn't put too much weight behind my amazing coolness in the scenario. But even this worked to my advantage as she told the other lasses on her floor that I had the biggest dick out of all of them.

In terms of gossip to have going on about you on a mostly-female floor of a student halls of residence, that's about up there with the best you can hope for, especially when you totally fancy the arse off one of the residents of said floor. (Who remains as Mrs Hearthly to this day, she told me about the 'biggest dick' thing on an early date. I replied I couldn't personally verify the accuracy of said information as I had not encountered all the dicks myself, but that it sounded like the sort of thing I could well imagine to be true.)

BOOM!

You might feel cool, but she knows that Hearthly has a bigger dick.

https://youtu.be/iuJDhFRDx9M

Craster photobomb

Has this thread gone as well as you'd hoped, Vision?

If it's taught me nothing else, and let's face it... It hasn't... It's that Hearthly is well endowed and I'm still the coolest guy here.

It would be really interesting to learn about any occasions when OTHER people thought you were cool, particularly if you had no idea about it.

I remember thinking some of the trainers were super cool, on the many, many courses I attended during my 38 year civil service career, although some of them were absolute dorks. But the cool ones always seemed to attract attention in the breaks and at lunch time, or during the evenings on residential courses. Some trainees would hang on their every word and would always make a bee line for them out of class. In the 11 years I worked as a trainer, both in and out of the civil service I got a different perspective on this, as I was usually hoping that what I was doing was actually of interest to my trainees and that I didn’t fuck up my delivery, but as I gained experience and confidence there were definitely occasions when I realised I had some fans in my audience...... which was nice. Then again, I had a couple of major fuck ups, usually with material that wasn’t my own but that I HAD to deliver, when it would have been nice if the ground had opened up and swallowed me, and I felt anything BUT cool.

I also thought that IT guys were often cool (this was in the days when the height of office computing was a Commodore Pet running VisiCalc on green screens) as IT was new technology and people were only just beginning to get the idea that computers were things they’d actually be able to use within the foreseeable future, and computer guys were cool, ate pizza and drank coke while they wrote programmes that would change the future. It was a clique that I wanted to be in, and when I first started running computer literacy courses (on BBC B computers with COLOUR SCREENS) I felt cool to be educating the masses on simple things like the difference between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ that people had heard of, but had absolutely no idea what they actually were.

But I think the pinnacle of coolness in my professional career was after we’d outsourced IT support to an external supplier and I’d had to move out of IT Support into facilities management. I may have told this story before, somewhere in BETEO, but I had a call from my boss to say that our resilience team, who worked on things like liaison with ministers during terrorist incidents and other crises like the fuel strikes and foot and mouth outbreaks, had ‘lost’ about 4 years worth of files from our IT system and that our contractor had been unable to restore them because the backup system hadn’t been working for some time, but they’d kept quiet about it while they tried to fix it. He wanted to ask me if I was aware of this and how it could have happened. All hell had broken lose and questions were being asked at a very high level in the security services, as to why one of the top three service providers on the planet couldn’t manage to backup our files. I told my boss I’d have a chat with our on-site engineer to see if he could shed any light on the situation, even though his only involvement with backups was changing tapes each day and keeping them locked away securely.

What I didn’t tell him was that I had a pretty good idea what had happened to the files, and despite backups having not been taken, I was pretty confident that I knew how to get them back. We knew the name of the folder for the team, so I asked the on site engineer to run a search in the server for that folder, starting in root, and sure enough he found it inside a folder belonging to a different team. All that had happened was that someone on the resilience team, who also had access rights to the other team’s folder, had accidentally moved his mousecwhen he clicked on the resilience team folder and dragged it in to the other team’s folder. All that was needed was to drag it back one level up the tree. This was really embarrasing for our contractor, as no one had thought of looking elsewhere hor the missing files, they’d assumed that they’d been deleted, not moved.

The director of resilience wrote a very nice email to thank me (and that she thought she loved me, so great was her relief) and I also got thanks from our regional director and the director of security at the Home Office, who also wanted a report from the contractor about their fuck up.

So I guess that was super cool, or maybe what I felt was just supreme smugness.

Oh. It was really cool to be dating the landlord’s daughter when I was in the 6th form.

After me and my gang of fellow lady-killers got this award at school (not that any of us can remember what the award was, sadly), life was like a rapping video on Music TeleVision.

Awesome tie/shirt combos

Years back, I was punting with friends on a lazy summer's afternoon. An acceptable distance from the Cherwell Boathouse is the Victoria Arms, famous for its large garden opening out onto the river and its punt harbour.

The garden was, like the river, extremely busy that day and all bar one space in the punt harbour was full. It would be very tricky to get the punt into that space, especially given the river traffic and the angles required. With one deft manoeuvre I turned the boat at the right angle to fit exactly into this gap, whilst my friends and the crowd gaped in awe.

I then had to ask my friends to disembark whilst I turned the punt around because the mooring rope was at the other end

Silly punt!

Great story though

At a New Year's party a couple of years ago, the conversation turned to children's toys because along with mortgages and pensions plans that what counts as appropriate conversation these days. A friend was describing the contents of the toy Noah's Ark set they had bought for their newborn, and how amongst the various animals in the set the two lions had manes. She thought this was clearly a very enlightened design decision to make young children appreciate same-sex couples.

'You could say,' I added, 'that it's a pride of lions'.

Now every time that guy with cool shades (see Hearthly, you're cool after all:)) pops up on Steam friends list, i know already that he has a big penis. Not that i needed to, but information is power, or so they say.

I'm always cool.

In someones eyes.

From here onwards, apparently:
https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... 48#p529448

What happened to/with fake Grim...? Imitation being the sincerest form of creepiness, and all that, did you ever find out what was going on with it?

The Little Savages dude?

I'm not sure I've ever been cool.

The guy who had a Flickr account, I think, with pictures of him claiming to be you? Have I misremembered something? Here is where I realise you are all just figments of my fever dream...

I remember this, he was leaning out of a truck window.

I thought I'd search the forum for more details, but all I can find is that Mimi has never forgotten about this:
https://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/ ... 77#p504177

Hahahaha.

Maybe I just dreamed it

I did find out, but it was so dull I've actually forgotten.

I think they've taken the pictures down now, or at least taken the tags off.

Turns out no: https://www.flickr.com/photos/philbonnell/2657874201/

Also turns out the answer is right there in the comments. I used to be Internet Famous.

Yeah, that was freaky.

Haha, that’s not dull. See, that was your moment of cool!

I got recognised as "The Savages Guy" in the lift at my old flat once, too. That was weird.

I’ve been recognised at wool fairs (understandable), concerts, cinemas and theatres (less understandable). I don’t like it, it makes me feel weird.

I was recognised from my blog while I was out once, which is weird enough (although it once had a big audience) but I didn't have any pictures of me anywhere online at the time.

Back around 99/2000 odd, I had quite the following of people in Scotland for my website. That were odd now I think about it.

Dave over Scotland

I've never been cool.

Which makes me cool.

That's how it works, right kids?

Oh. Oh I see.

*puts Star Trek pin badge back on*

Not as Internet Famous as The Internet's Famous Richard Gaywood.

Which was pretty much all my fault.

Did you ban him from Xbox Live for an offensive gamertag?

I reported him for having an offensive gamertag, after we had a discussion on COD about what would happen if someone reported him for having an offensive gamertag. To see what would happen. I expected nothing to happen, being that he was on my friends list, and had been for a while.

Cue articles on various websites, official reaponses by Captain Underpants or whatever the fuck his name was, and comments largely taking the piss out of his name.

Whose name?

Shaft.

Someone once described me as cool because I never tried to be cool. That's the only time anyone's ever considered me cool though - I've done nothing remotely cool, ever.

I was kind of cool when the whole grunge thing took off, because I was already a scruffy cunt, so I made it look effortless.

Don't think I've ever been cool, in the "Fonz" style. I'm rarely flustered, though. However, for 11.5 years I was so fucking cool Samuel L Jackson was jealous. I would get stopped in the street at least half a dozen times a day, girls would flock around me in pubs and bars and all because of this handsome beast.
I met him when he was about 4-5 months old at a rescue centre on the Greek island of Skiathos, fell in love and adopted him. When he arrived many months later — he did his quarantine at the centre on the island, he was fully grown. He went everywhere with me, work and play and literally was my shadow. At his fittest, he weighed 67kg, just to give you an idea of how big he was.
Sadly he passed away in May last year from old age. I still miss him enormously, but boy was he fucking cool, and me by proxy.

Aww, I loved him.

Aw, he’s a beauty. And also, you’re stupendously cool.you really are.