almost witty

As you’d expect from spending two nights in the biggest non-capital city in the European Union, traipsing up and down the area where the Beatles honed their gig-playing craft while the city celebrates its’ Harbour birthday, there were one or two interesting moments and observations to be had. To wit:

- The unforgettable sight of a woman. In a wheelchair. Vomiting. If she wasn’t sitting on her arse, I’d say she was drunk off it. At least before dodging the projectile vomit she emitted on the side of the road while slumped over.

- Having a gorgeous two-course Portuguese seafood lunch for just six euros. This is before the drinking started in earnest and I couldn’t taste anything.

- The smell of German sausages. Love it.

- Watching football team St. Pauli playing a key match, and observing that sitting on a wooden bench in the outdoors watching a team you’ve never heard or seen of before, is somehow more atmospheric than sitting with 70,000 Welsh football fans at the Millennium Stadium watching Wales beat Italy. Although both times I missed the instant replay that you at least get on television.

- At one moment, there was a adapted Mexican crowd wave involving some kind of hand gesture. In trying to mimic said hand gesture for practise reasons, I got rather odd looks from the crowd around me before my compatriots told me to sit down. Quite possibly because my hand gesture was somehow being mistaken for a Hitler salute - or maybe they were being all “Don’t Mention the War!” at me.

- Watching The Noisettes playing in a crowded, hot, steamy basement rock club. While I’m sitting on a comfortable bar stool sweating away and wishing I was fifteen years younger and my legs weren’t hurting so much. At this point in the evening, I am well off the taste of beer.

- Ending up in a Filipino karaoke bar at 5am, where the resident German singer knows enough tagalog to sing a few songs. Watching the stag murder a song or two. Video footage on request!

- Walking home with some old school friends, and standing at 5.30am on a street corner having a good-humoured argument on what constitutes a blog, and whether any old diary content could be repurposed into a blog. I say it can.

- The final day, and my body has just given up on me. My entire lower body is screaming. My upper body and head is fine, oddly. At least until we wonder down to the harbour and watch people hanging upside down on a fairground ride.

And yes, Eddie Izzard fans, people from Hamburg are apparently called Hamburgers. And a doughnut does seem to be called a Berliner.

I’ve worked within new media companies for just over a decade, and no office I’ve been in has come close to having as much fun as the staff at Connected Ventures, according to this new video which has apparently sparked yet another entry to the trendy urban lexicon, lip dub.

Maybe it’s because UK new media is just too dour to do things as silly. Maybe it’s because all the new media companies I’ve worked for were based in either way-too-posh rented offices, or just run-of-the-mill offices. Maybe I’m just too old for the onset of true citizen-generated video content. Maybe it’s just me.

Stick with the clip, it does become one of the silliest, joyful and yet easy-to-do videos I’ve seen. Then again, I’m a huge fan of miming. Even has shades of Morecambe & Wise in it.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo

There’s another track I need to add to my iTunes…

In lieu of a personality in my youth, I often took bits and pieces from the people I saw around me ie my television set. So I took the fast-talking speed of Ben Elton, and the talking-gibberish hiding a keen-intellect side from the Doctor. That is, aside from the keen intellect - the Internet has put paid to that methinks.

In other words, I have a tendency to talk fast gibberish. Couple that with the general tendency to say the first funny or quirky thing that comes to my head, and it can lead to a couple of uh-oh moments. Especially in a new environment when people don’t quite yet know what to make of me.

Thus today, when a colleague and I were deciding which door to enter a building with, I just happened to mention my irrational hatred of a particular door. I even said off-hand of how I wish I had an axe so I could shred the door to pieces. This is when my colleague adopted the unmistakable look of “ok… right…” …

He hasn’t talked to me for the rest of the day. Oh dear…

Honestly, when I signed up for a stint as project management, I had visions of being snowed under with pie and GANTT charts, trying to co-ordinate teams from around the world - but all from the comfort of a nice comfy chair in a nice office next to a farm. This hasn’t quite turned out to be the case.

I share my basement office with a few developers, and a collection of old books, desks, bookshelves, office equipment, computer logs, dot matrix printers and magnetic computer tapes dating back to the 1970s. With the arrival of another employee, all this had to go. A task that fell on my shoulders.

So the logs got shredded. The books were recycled or given to the library. The desks went to the big depot in the sky, as did the bookshelves. We all cooed at the office equipment and dot matrix printers, before giving them back to systems. Which left the magnetic computer tapes. My boss told me to get rid of them - so I took the box down to the skip, and threw them in.

Whereupon a breathless analyst (who saw me at said skip - honestly, there’s no privacy when you step outside around here!) ran up to me and told me not to throw them in said skip, since they all contained data that needed to be magnetically erased before being disposed of in a proper recyclable manner. Who knew that magnetic computer tapes could be recycled? Who’d want to?

But this left us with a problem, of about 30 tapes inside a skip. Which would have to be retrieved somehow. My suggestion of simply clambering in was immediately nixed, since apparently the scientists in the office also used the skip to dispose of their test tubes and chemicals. So unless I was prepared to wear a chemical protection suit on a hot summers day, clambering into the skip was out. Thus, I found myself on a hot summers day running around trying to find any kind of rake or spade that might help in retrieving said items from the skip.

For comedy purposes, I would like to say that I eventually had to wear a rubbery yellow suit and dive into the skip to rescue these tapes from a landfilled-death, while sweating inside the suit and smelling nothing but the foul stench of the skip and my own body odour - but fortunately (or unfortunately), after an hour or so of skillful manipulation, the tapes were out. Phew.

Then a week later, I found myself on the roof of the building helping a colleague erect an aerial mast so we could detect signals 40 miles away.

I know the job description offered travel to unique locations, but I’m not sure a skip and a roof is what they had in mind.

For no particular reason, today has brought me three pieces of sheep-related news.

First off, a warning was sent round work that an escaped sheep was roaming the premises car park, peeping through office windows, and that we should take care of using our cars. Not too sure why - can a sheep ramraid a car?

Secondly, a fantastic video (courtesy of Skarlett) that involves French people speaking, Brokeback Mountain and sheep. Might make more sense in French, but even so, it’s comedy gold:

More importantly, Shaun The Sheep gets his own CBBC show! And finally, five Welsh things from Rhys.