maybe Blur were right
I'm not one to go on about how outsourcing is a bad thing, stealing our jobs etc etc, but in the office I work in now, I'm pretty sure they've taken the idea one step too far.They've outsourced the light switch.
Honestly. I was working late and, come seven thirty or so, all the lights get turned out.
No problem, think I, I shall turn them back on.
I go looking for a switch.
No switch.
No problem, think I, I shall go down to security on reception and have them do it.
"We can't help you," they say with a shrug, and give me a number to phone.
And so it was that I ended up calling an office in gawd knows where to 'log an engineer request' to get the lights turned on.
And lo! After a mere 20 minutes or so working in a peculiarly modern version of the Dickensian workplace, squinting to read documents in the ghostly light of a laptop screen, there once again was light.
Brilliant.
In other news, I've written this awful, Northern-based joke.
Did you hear that the people of Yorkshire have set up a website where you can order Wrigleys extra online? It's called "e-buy gum."
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
posted by Peter The Great @ 3:06 PM
9 Comments:
That is appalling. As a result, I love it.
Can't understand why you haven't got your own BBC1 show on the strength of this.
Arguably, the worst joke I've heard in some months. And the worst one before that was one of yours as well!
Last night, I was rummaging through one of the vans on my dodgy knee and I found a copy of the “Sun”. In itself this is odd, because neither of the two lads I employ who use that vehicle can read or write. As I opened the pages, it was like the “Lost Ark”. The paper came alive with golden light and a rustle of wind and a world hitherto hidden to me opened up like a… huge, suppurating abscess.
If you read the stories (sandwiched between pictures of dead-eyed girls with large, wobbly melons), there is an unimaginable vein of comedy. Most of it revolves around the horror that is the British white underclass and it ties up nicely with the Croydon thing. Give it a read; I promise you won’t be disappointed.
In other news, one of my lessees (who also has a poorly-controlled chest) asked me if I’d like to go for a drink. I just couldn’t… all the time I’d be thinking about the service charge account and the state of her bathroom. There’s a mushroom by the extractor fan.
More posts, please, from the vortex of human misery that is the Halifax office.
By the way, does anyone remember me burying a VW Beetle in a swimming pool some years ago? I had disturbing news this morning...
I was just coming here to voice the same concerns as Barry. More about the lack of posts than about the VW Beetle though. If I have to keep you updated on my employment status (and how close you are to the 007 flat), you have to entertain me. Deal?
Are you going to be an astronaut or a football manager, Child Bride?
When sifting through UCAS entries (as it pains me to do on an annual basis) that box on the UCAS form can tell you a lot about a person. For example, "human toilet" and "killing machine" tend to set the alarm bells ringing.
I'm going to be a goldfish. I think they get the best deal around, and their lives are constantly exciting. Either that or a human toilet-killing machine.
Indulge us with the disturbing VW news? We may as well use the blog as a forum of sorts if it isn't getting updated...
About eight years ago, the swimming pool at one of my properties became… well, redundant. The building is in Norwood and, looking at the original plans for conversion in the Eighties, the concept of the pool started as a rather grand affair with delicate mosaics and sweeping collonades. The sort of thing one might see in “Footballers' Wives”.
Life being what it is, and the developer having an eye to the future and his profit, the final construction had all the charm of a Nissen hut with a leaky roof. The electrics were not all they might have been and, shortly before the end, the layabout I employed to clean the pool scarpered with the pumping equipment. I didn’t begrudge it; he was a tattooed simpleton whose chief pleasure seemed to be watching, goggle-eyed, as twenty-two grown men kicked a pig’s bladder around the park. The turd.
The building had terrible subsidence and it was always hard to tell whether it was the proximity of the pool or the adjacent Lawson Cypress. On one occasion, my surveyor commented that the cracks in the building may have been a blessing in disguise, as at least they let the damp out.
And so, with a heavy heart and an excavator, we decided to fill the pool in. We started by demolishing the walls and the roof straight into the hole and then felled the adjacent trees, also directly into the pool. It was around this point that we appeared to be a little short of backfill material. One of the lessees was in prison (for setting fire to a school, as I recall) and, given that he owed us a good deal of money and had a temperament that I found unappealing, it seemed only natural to hurl in his Beetle restoration project. In it went, and we covered over the evidence with sixty-odd tonnes of topsoil to make a lawn. It’s made a nice space in the locality for people to shoot up and beat their girlfriends.
Over the weekend, one of the present lessees called to say that, mysteriously and in the dead of night, a large hole has opened up in the lawn. Sure enough, there is the beginnings of “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. It’s a schoolboy error, and I now feel rather embarrassed about the whole thing. I’ve let myself down. We should have cut the roof off the car first, because it has now collapsed and we are missing, in soil, the cubic metreage of the interior of a Beetle. I won’t be making that mistake again, I can tell you.
Make him post more, Child Bride. Make him post more.
My colleague has countered, somewhat belatedly, with the revelation that Sir Simon Rattle likes to do his housework in the dead of night, giving rise to the headline Orchestral Man Hoovers in the Dark.
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