The Git Wizard

(Mon 25th Feb 2013, 22:23, More)

That'll teach the nosy little bugger

(Fri 7th Sep 2012, 17:46, More)

Hello people

(Sat 25th Aug 2012, 16:53, More)

'Ullo

(Tue 17th Jul 2012, 16:41, More)

Basically,

Edit: Thanks Tragic Monkey ;)
(Sun 15th Jul 2012, 17:36, More)

Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh fuck it what's the point

(Sat 25th Feb 2012, 11:33, More)

Evenink b3ta

Edit: Thanks everyone for this glorious array of spangpics *cartoon bump on head appears*
Edit 2: Thanks also to the keepers of the FP.
(Sun 19th Feb 2012, 21:35, More)

:

Edit: Thanks for the FP :)
(Mon 2nd Jan 2012, 21:45, More)

There is no happy ending

(Wed 21st Sep 2011, 18:10, More)

» Corporate Idiocy

The marvels of contracting
Some years ago I was working for an agency that was sending people to Braintree (a small town in North Essex, about twenty miles away) to distribute wheely-bins to homes on behalf of the council. They came back after the first day saying there hadn't been any work for them to do. It turned out that, due to the council sniffing out the cheapest labour it could find, four different companies were involved in getting these bins to the people of Braintree. As a result, it wasn't the most co-ordinated effort going on over there.

Now, you would probably assume, like I did, that wheely-bins and their lids, being made of the same kind of plastic and being part of the same finished product, would be made in the same factory. But no, the bins were made in Birmingham, if I recall correctly, while the lids were being made somewhere in the south of France. On a Friday, the driver with the bins had apparently driven to a town with a similar name in Yorkshire, not realised his mistake until it was too late and only had time to head back to Brum. His error had then not been handed over, and a different driver set out on the Monday and done the exact same thing. The lid delivery men from France on the other hand, despite having to come a lot further and apparently not speaking any English, seemed to have no trouble finding Braintree, and a lorry was turning up every day (including the weekend) full of lids. Meanwhile, there were three blokes from Cornwall who were supposed to be there to attach the lids to the bins. But what with the cock-up, all they had done was spend five days living in a caravan, with nothing to do but stare at an ever-growing pile of wheely-bin lids.
(Sun 26th Feb 2012, 17:02, More)

» First World Problems

Search is broken

(Sun 4th Mar 2012, 19:27, More)

» Bullshit and Bullshitters

The Jack-of-all-trades
About a year ago there was this guy briefly employed at my workplace. I use the word employed in a loose sense: he was turning up and they were paying him money. But besides being completely useless at the job, we pretty quickly sussed out that he was what one of my coworkers called "a Billy Bullshit". He reminded me of that Fast Show character who says "That's a young man's game", because whenever any skill, hobby or profession came up in conversation he would claim to have done it, or at the very least that a close friend or relative had done it. "Oh, you play the piano? I used to play myself you know..." "Oh, your dad was in the army? I'm from a military family myself..." He would generally sound quite convincing, until someone questioned him on some detail, and then he would become very vague and say something like "Oh it was all so long ago, I can't remember now". Despite all these claims, he didn't seem to be an especially worldly man, apparently living at home with his mother (Which I envisaged to be some kind of Norman Bates type situation).

Anyway, here are a few of his greatest fibs:

- One time he was telling me and one of my colleagues about this charity he set up which delivered aid packages to Romania in the early 90s. The story became quite colourful, involving driving a truck through a warzone, having guns pointed at him on checkpoints, a woman dying after putting her baby into his arms, etc, etc, etc. During a lull in this blistering narrative my coworker asked him what the charity had been called. He hesitated for a second, obviously caught out, then came out with the dazzlingly original response: "Romanian Aid".

- Another time, he began telling me how he had fought a court case for the right of his disabled daughter to go to a certain school. He waxed lyrical about all the time, effort and stress involved, the boning up on law so he could meet the lawyers on their own terms, not to mention his personal money he had put towards it. He mentioned several times how as a result of his winning the case, the law had been permanently changed. Were it true this would have actually interested me quite a lot, so I asked him exactly how the law had been changed. Quick as a flash he dropped the courtroom warrior facade and replied "Oh, I can't remember now. It was all legalese anyway".

This is my absolute favourite though:

We were talking about healthy eating, and he began telling me how his sister ran a health food shop. But not just any health food shop. This was a business she had built up from nothing, and it had gone on to become one of the most prestigious and respected health food shops in the country. "It's quite posh stuff she's selling" he said, "You have to be quite well-off to shop there". He even went as far as to rattle off a list of celebrities who were regular customers. This all sounded relatively plausible when compared to his usual material, and I couldn't find a gap in his logic. I was used to him by now though, and just out of curiosity I wanted to see how big a lie he was telling. He had been quite clear that the shop was called "Purity" and that it was in Guildford. I reasoned that such a high profile place would certainly have a website or at least be heavily referenced, so I stuck "purity guildford" into Google. Absolutely no reference to health food. However it appeared there was a very prominent business in called Purity in Guildford... a lap dancing club.
(Sat 15th Jan 2011, 16:25, More)

» Sporting Woe

A load of balls
One of the very unfair things at my primary school is that, while kids were always being called to the front in assembly and given trophies for having long legs or being good at catch, there were never any awards given out just for being clever. One of these humiliation-of-the-unfit rituals was a certificate system where everyone was made to perform various pointless tasks such as running, jumping over things and throwing things, after which we would be graded purely on performance, with none of the nice awards that you're supposed to make for kids like "best effort" or "sportspersonship", nor even a reassuringly patronising segregation between boys and girls. If everyone who got below a certain grade had been been herded into the sports hall and gassed, it would have been entirely in keeping with the tone of the whole thing.

Very few of the events were actually proper sports. One of them was simply "throwing a cricket ball (as far as you can)". I probably made the great achievement of managing to throw the ball further than the end of my feet, but this story isn't about me.

A couple of kids who'd had the foresight to forget their PE kits had been given the task of measuring the distance of each throw, using a trundle wheel. For those for whom trundle wheels were not an essential part of school equipment, this is basically a wheel on a stick that you roll along the ground in front of you. The circumference of the wheel is one metre, and every time it turns it goes "click", so as you walk along you can count out the number of metres. One young lad who was particularly good at throwing things lobbed the ball a fair distance, maybe forty metres or so. At that distance, and with the grass on the school field not having been cut for a while, the ball was now completely invisible from the oche, or whatever it's called in cricket-ball-throwing. The trundle-wheel team set off, but at the wrong angle. Cue a dozen kids yelling "No, not there, over there!" and the trundlers zigzagging all over the shop, all the while dutifully counting the number of clicks, before they eventually found the ball's resting place after four or five changes of course.

Presumably there were no teachers around at the time to realise that this would have given a rather skewed result. Neither can they have really been interested enough in the results to realise that a nine-year-old child had apparently beaten a world record.
(Thu 19th Apr 2012, 15:20, More)

» "Needless to say, I had the last laugh"

I laughed last...
... had to filename to de-RIS.
(Sat 5th Feb 2011, 0:09, More)