almost witty

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.

- I was walking through Llandudno town centre at lunchtime munching on a pastie, when a seagull literally lands on my shoulder, grabs my pastie from OUT OF MY HAND and flies off with it for a second before dropping it again. Man, those seagulls are the devils’ work.

- Before that, when reversing out of the car park, I thought I’d scraped a 4×4. Stopped, looked at it, got as far as writing a note then I thought to wipe off the marks, then the 4×4 looked fine so I drove off. Come back to my desk to find a company-wide email looking for the evil swine with my car numberplate. Still, at least I thought I was doing the right thing…

- I’d invited my ex-bosses and ex-workcolleagues onto a professional social networking site, mainly to see what they were up to and see whether they actually remembered me or not. One of my line managers graciously declined my invitation, but it’s amazing just how annoyed I am to be dismissed like that. Never mind the fact that said person was one of the key people to make me redundant to begin with, so I don’t know why I’d expect any different.

On the plus side, I got my surprise two-year anniversary present from Miss R last night, and suffice to say that you’d better be watching the (virtual) skies at some point this year! (And before you ask, I whisked her away to Barcelona last week as my surprise anniversary present. Must find the time to blog about that funny disaster!)

I would have thought that in these post Alan-Partidge, post-irony, post Web 2.0, post dotcom boom days that no-one would dare to advertise a business opportunity for a well-known professional social networking site with this god-awful graphic:

I mean, just count the number of ways in which this advert is *so* wrong:

• The facial gesture
• The hand gesture - a second-hand car salesman knows not to do this
• The Bluetooth-esque attachment, clearly meant to signify wealth and success. What it says, of course, is “I am a huge twat of an idiot and deserve to be turned into a Cyberman when the revolution of steel beckons”
• The really bad Photoshopping
• The obvious use of stock photo clipart, and one cheesy actor

I feel very sorry for whichever Photoshop monkey put this together. It’s just sooo terrible. And endemic of all that’s wrong with the web industry. It’s not a quick-grab money-raking opportunity. Well, unless you’re very lucky.

The Internet has been around us now for at least fifteen years. And during my current pro-longed absence from the nitty gritty of webcoding, I’d mistakenly thought that browser inconsistencies on simple webpages that rendered them broken were a thing of the past. Oh no.

Up till yesterday afternoon, I thought my blog looked absolutely fine on Firefox and Internet Explorer. Of course, I’d never actually checked it on Internet Explorer, but that was because I mistakenly thought the two would have sorted themselves out ages ago. At least, until someone casually said in an email that it was all in Big Print (thanks Dylan!).

So after a dinner of pizza and chips - well, what else do you want to eat when you’re about to delve into a night of web-coding? - I set about finding a solution, to find a font-size that’d work on both IE and Firefox within the FastTrack Wordpress theme that I’d had installed. It seemed such a universal thing to want to fix - different browsers with the same font-size that I thought it’d be an easy solution - just look it up on Google, copy the code, job done in time to watch Bonkers’n'Benidorm (heaven knows why I bother though).

Nope. Four hours later, I hadn’t gotten anywhere aside from breaking my website multiple times. None of the offered code on the nets seemed to work, and I couldn’t even figure out how to downgrade my IE7 installation to IE6. I seem to have lost my webcoding mojo - which is a bit of a shame because I was just beginning to enjoy it again.

With the clock fast approaching midnight, there was only one thing for it - go back to an old theme and hope it worked. So welcome back old stalwart Connections Reloaded. So now it works again, but why oh why oh why wasn’t there a simple Google-able solution out there? it’s not like solving the Israel/Palestine conumdrum, is it?

Ever since my enforced leisure time started, I’ve been happily able to indulge in two hours of my secret vice every weekday - repeats of Top Gear on television. For someone who’s constantly preaching to others about car usage and whose ideal dream car is a Toyota Prius, it seems odd - even to me - that I find Top Gear so darned entertaining, but I do. Even if I used to get confused between the two non-Clarksons.

But not any more. I was surprised at the huge amount of press coverage that was given to Richard Hammond’s accident - he was second on the news agenda that day, and there were live broadcasts from outside the hospital he was stationed at. I mean, it’s a terrible accident that didn’t deserve to happen - but he’s only a TV presenter. A loved one, at that.

I guess I’m surprised at the press coverage because I always felt Top Gear was a cult TV programme - one to be enjoyed furtively with the windows closed, and not to be discussed with anyone. Bit like Doctor Who really.

Luckily, he’s now out of intensive care and appears to be on the mend. But in the meantime, you can donate money to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service which ferried him to hospital in the first place, and I leave you with two newspaper headlines. They can’t even agree on one thing…