Be Excellent To Each Other

Good stuff mate. We'll have to think of what next cheap FPS to get once we're done too.

This bill's quite interesting. At the risk of going all , the proposal to slash the grant to Scotland and Scottish income tax by a similar amount, allowing Holyrood to raise the shortfall itself is quite extraordinary. It'll mean a greater amount of independence as the parliament will be responsible for deciding whether to maintain current spending, and raise tax accordingly, or go for low taxes and fewer services. Clever.

(Unless I've read this section wrong).

Everytime I visit http://www.creepmachine.com/ I think of Dimrill.

Ooh, look what I found!

So for the last 2 months at work it's been pretty quiet and today I get told I've got to go to a 'the client is panicking because he has no moneyz', which means I have to measure the entire external works on our crazy big site because the PQS hasn't bothered looking at the drawings or been reporting the fact the external works bill might go over by £100k. Dicks.

Scale rulers at dawn!

I was a PQS until very recently.

Some of them are utter gobshites.

Post Quim Slime?

That's exactly it - how did you guess so quickly?

Operation Flashpoint (it's fucking hard mind)? Army of Poo? Gears 3 (at this rate anyway)?

I is clever. Seriously though, what's the 'P'?

PQS = Private Quantity Surveyor (acts on behalf of the client)

CQS = Contractor's Quantity Surveyor (acts on behalf of the contractor)

They've been at each other's throats since the dawn of time as they both sit on opposite sides of a construction contract. Well the shitty, loud mouth ones are, the rest of us just get on with it.

"Hey, almost nobody in your department has any idea how to do these very important things."

"Give me an example!"

Um. Why? Why is that necessary? Surely the fact that every single person around the table confirmed that this is so is enough of a hint that maybe, just maybe, you should listen? But no, unless it comes to you in a colour coded spreadsheet with special tickboxes, it couldn't possibly be a problem. Clearly the fact that absolutely everyone who understands these matters is reporting serious problems means that they are all wrong. I mean, the fact that they don't have time to sit around writing logs about who said what to who for every minute of the day must mean they're... I dunno, lying or something.

You'd think it would be gratifying watching it happen to someone else for a change, but it really isn't.

"Tell me when it happens!"

Why? On ther rare occasions where you actually understand the problem, you don't know anything, and always just fob us off with some irrelevant policy line. If I email Someone Else, things get fixed. What does that tell you?

"You shouldn't email Someone Else."

Oh for....

Gah. Please slap my face.

Don't blame davpaz, he's only doing his job

I am *this* close to including in a report a line about how A Certain Person's input to my work "could be perfectly replaced by a random number generator".

Anybody know how mainline trains into That London are? In particular into Paddington from Wales?

Also, tubes?

Our company booze up is tomorrow in That London and I'm wondering how much of a ball ache it's going to be arriving into Paddington at 4.30 then hacking across to Great Portland Street. There's a free bar waiting for me so levels of determination will be high.

Coming in from the west is pretty OK (looking at Great Western's site, there's no problems with Paddington-bound trains), and the tubes are mostly fine. Coming in from the South is a no-no.

874 Bananas.

I will wave, I am in London for a few pints tomorrow.

Cheers chaps, also Kovacs enjoy your beverages!

I'll be the fat beardy bloke in a Pith helmet

Using my magic screen that lets me see all trains, everything in Paddington is on time right now.

Remember that the Circle Line is no longer a Circle, and so to get to Great Portland Street you want to go up onto the large footbridge at Paddington and go to the Hammersmith & City Line platforms.

So we can expect a marmalade sandwich shit at 4.15?

I've had some shit jobs in my time but fuck me, this is the shittest. Seriously, I hate this place. I've hated it from pretty much week two. It's amazing to think that only three months ago I was all excited about leaving my last place to take on this new challenge, how it looked like it was going to be so thoroughly amazing and it really isn't. It's shit. I actually wish I was still in my last job, and that involved a massive commute and was something I'd grown truly stagnant in.

Grrrr. I really do need to find something else. I think the only thing that's prevented me from taking positive action to find something else so far, other than the general arseache of job hunting, is the idea that this is only a 12-month contract and I should probably see it through and, who knows, maybe it'll get better. I've been here three months. It isn't getting better.

What it has done is put me right off working in IT. Dunno what else I can do now though.

Marmite sandwich! The little hairy bastard sold out, remember?

Is nothing sacred?

I've been an IT Manager, Finance manager and General Manager in the last 15 years. Currently I am getting up at 4:20am in a morning to deliver fruit & veg from 5:00am then working on my self employed stuff in the afternoon.

I can safely say at the moment in these weather conditions this definitely is the shittest job I have ever had.

I hear ya, man.

I have had some bad jobs in my time so I hope you find something else soon.

The thing i love about my job is that I don't have to deal with the public, I can be kept busy all day, I get to solve problems, I am working with my hands, I get to wander about outside, I have no work issues to take home with me (except college work at the moment but I'm not going to be studying forever), and you can see the results of your work when you fix something or get something running better or make something. I get tird very easily and my work can sometimes be quite strenuous but there is a satisfaction in getting home tired because you have been working hard all day rather than sitting staring at a computer all day. Oh, also the whisky

Maybe you should consider a total career change? It isn't something to be done lightly because if you change career you need to start at the bottom and it is tough to go from a decent wage to a really low wage, but the short term pain is more than worth it for the long term gain. The first two years in my job were tough but I'm now back to about what I was used to earning and in a year or two I'll be earning more than I have before with pretty good prospects.

Better do it than to want to and regret not.

Been an OK, if uneventful day inside today. Everything Proper has closed round here, in Southernville, even then darned buses. I've literally in all my years never seen such this deep amount of snow here. I woke up this morning, looked out and thought that my house had been transplanted to Alaska or something.

I really enjoy my current job. I can count the number of things that make it stupid and crap on one manager.

Hand.


I said hand.

I suppose i'd better leave the house and make use of the fully functioning road network to go to the well stocked supermarket on the clear roads now.

Can you get me 20 loaves of bread and 10 gallons of milk?

Ginger, chicken breast, coriander, bok choi, mangetout, limes, beansprouts, tenderstem broccoli, a cow's worth of milk and petty officer's weekly bread ration. Anyone else?

I'm out of port. Please make amends.

Wow, Fifa really are corrupt.

That's just gobsmacking given how good our bid looked when it was presented earlier.

Indeed, but we are short on billionaires willing to throw money and food and wine at the delegates.

Still, I look forward to the racism.

I'm waiting for the first photos or video clips of Vladimir Putin scoring the winning goal of the competition. It'll be along in a minute, I'm sure...

Happy to throw a few designer handbags in the sweetener pot, though.

Indeed. Our problem was that we thought too small.

Hooray! We're not going to have more public money wasted on a bunch of tits running around playing pointless games, and we're not gonig to have to debase our selves by allowing a corrupt organisation to impose itself on our legal system to enforce the sponsorship deals it's done.

Hooray!

It's gobsmacking. Really is. I thought we had no chance but then saw the presentation which promised so much.

Not only did England not get it, it seems like they got knocked out in the first round of voting!

I want to get in on the whole world sport championship scam. I'm utterly non-corruptible, me.

Unlike the Olympics, no new stadia need to be built. So I'm not sure there would be any cost to the taxpayer. In fact the country would probably see a net gain from it.

Our problem, is that the media thinks that anybody actually gives a shit...

Well, other than the one in Bristol if they ever win the planning dispute oer the "common".

There will of course be a cost to the public purse, however. A huge amount of policing if nothing else, but I'm sure there will be all sorts of World Cup committees and projects and practice ground improvements and accommodation and such bollocks.

No more than the equivalent of a couple of normal match weekends.

Which wouldn't otherwise be happening if it weren't for the World Cup, as it's off season, of course.

It's not far from Paddington to GPS, less than 2 miles, so you could walk it in 30 mins if the tube does go tits up.

What the fuck am I going to do with all these Vuvuzelas?

In fairness, a massive amount of people do care. Sky TV over here was built upon the backs of people paying money to watch football, and the reason that players get so much money and they're always talking about cash and millions and billions is precisely because a tremendous amount of people do give a shit.

It'd be a fabulous spectacle, would bring in a ton of money to the country, as well as more tourists, and it would create a great vibe around the country, as we saw with Euro 96.

Naysayers be damned!

I don't recall any great vibe in 1996. I remember trying to find a pub that didn't have the fucking football on, though.