27 Aug 2010
Posted in Life, Rants at 2:18 pm by alby
The flat roof of my place has been a pain in the proverbial for some time. I think it started when some kids found a way to sit on it to natter. Alternatively it could simply have been wear and tear. I’ve been at the place for 8 years or so and the roof hasn’t been maintained at all in that time. So now it leaks – quite a bit.
I spoke to a company to come and estimate me a repair job. They dutifully did and wrote me a detailed plan and costing for the job.
I phone them up and said please do come and sort it.
The woman on the other end of the phone said. “Oh you need to sign the form that came with the letter and send it in.”
Can I find the letter? Well what do you think?
So my roof is still leaking.
Got to R’s place yesterday after work to discover a minor flappage ongoing as water was now dripping into her bedroom. Thankfully small amounts though considering how heavy and persistent the rain was yesterday.
She phoned the landlords who said it wasn’t urgent. Oh really?! Not urgent that there’s potentially a hole in the roof letting in water. I suppose you could argue that it’s unlikely to ever rain in the UK so there’s no hurry.
Oh wait a minute….No you can’t!
Grr.
Permalink
20 Aug 2010
Posted in Work at 2:12 pm by alby
GP referral from this morning:
Thank you for seeing this lady. Unfortunately I haven’t made a note of the reason for my referral so profuse apologies but I wonder if you would be willing to see her on a routine basis.
I have tried to ring her this evening but her phone is switched off and unfortunately I am about to go on holiday.
I will try and get some more information about the referral when I return if she hasn’t been seen. If you would put her on the waiting list, that would be great though.”
Wow.
Permalink
18 Aug 2010
Posted in Rants, Work at 4:28 pm by alby
At work we occasionally (sometimes often) have to use interpreters with our patients.
The commonest languages (Gujurati, Punjabi etc) are supported by a partner organisation. They’re very good.
For those languages that they don’t cover we use the local city council’s interpreting service. The interpreters again are usually very good.
With both sets of staff we have to fill in a form for them to take back to the office. This lets the office know that they turned up on time and did their job well etc.
Now the council staff have a set of questions including this one:
Are you aware of the council’s interpreting service?
This might be a good question if you were asking it to a random person with no need of an interpreting service.
However, I’ve just spent any amount of time up to an hour or so with a patient and one of your interpreters! So what do you think I’m going to answer to that stupid question? It’s one of your interpreters who’s handing me the form with the question on it!
If anyone can think of anything witty and erudite that won’t get me sacked that I can write in answer to that next time I’ll be much obliged.
Permalink
11 Aug 2010
Posted in Travel at 4:15 pm by alby
We went on holiday not so long back. We’d bought loads of camping gear which only just managed to fit in the car – a roof box or trailer (or both) needed next time I reckon.
We’d done a run-through of using the stuff in Derbyshire but this time we headed into the depths of the New Forest in Hampshire. Campsite was called Hollands Wood. Nice place with clear rules and decent facilities (in the main).
We arrived and were told the rules. The main one of note was “no camping closer than 6m from other campers”. Now groups could obviously all gather together but they wanted to give strangers some space. We spent a good while driving around trying to live within the rule. Eventually we found ourselves a pretty nice spot at the furthest end of the site. It was away from the main road, near a huge field and had unfeasibly hard ground.
After setting up and scouting around a bit we headed out to the local village. We were probably away for an hour or 2. On our return there was a tent being put up about 2m away from us. We decided to be nice and let them get on with it.
Later we looked again and their tent had grown immensely. It was huge. And the nearest bit pretty much was up to our guy ropes. Never mind they might still be pleasant enough and it was at the back of us rather than in our face.
Well the night was fun. Woken by fireworks and a “scared of fireworks” child at 9pm (it’d been a long day with an early start ok!) The rest of the late evening was spent listening to the woman in the next tent struggling with her 3 boys and dog. The conversation was the sort you always love to overhear.
“Stop doing that, he doesn’t like it…I said stop doing it…STOP IT NOW OR I’LL %*%&ING SMACK YA!”
Repeat ad absurdum.
The management were on the case sharp enough though and they asked them to shift. They did but only to their 6m limit. I wasn’t expecting a massive change but the extra distance improved things loads.
The field was a godsend for N. Loads of kids around all playing together. Friends were made and lost as people left on different days. Logs crossing ditches were crossed and occasionally fallen off. Generally there were plenty of smiles with occasional tears. Fantastic fun all round. And days were long.
In the week we went to a few places and did the tourist thing.
Highlights were “Bucklers Hard” (snigger) where the ice-cream was gorgeous and I got a free sample which was as large as the ice-cream I eventually bought. A local kids’ theme park was rather good too. Not many scary rides and it cost a lot but did give me a chance to go on some rides with N including her first proper roller-coaster. So scared but yet so determined to stick it out. Grand. And there were horses and cows on site. Wild New Forest (and Shetland) ponies just coming and going as they pleased. And lots of people with dogs but no piles of dog poo anywhere that we saw.
Lowlight was Bournemouth. Actually Boscombe as we failed to get to Bournemouth because of the frankly ludicrous amounts of traffic. Anyway Dorset county council please sort out your road signing.
At one point we saw a sign to somewhere called “Qinetiq”. No idea what it is (and I can’t be bothered to google it neither) but it was an obvious sign. Later we saw a sign to Boscombe beach. 20 mins later after driving for ages we saw a sign to “Qinetiq”. We’d gone in a huge circle with no sign of the sea, no directions to get us there and no hint that they wanted anyone to spend any time out of their cars. Once we ended up there we weren’t in the best of moods so it didn’t end up as a day to celebrate.
We tried again later in the week in the vain hope of finding decent fish and chips. More misery this time as we arrived late after more avoiding traffic jams. There is no fish and chip place in Boscombe (at least not on the beach). This is ludicrous!
There was a kiosk. They do fish and chips! Woo! Actually they heated us up a “cod portion” and some fast food fries. Was horrible food. Made all the worse by the stress of getting there to “enjoy” it.
Oh and part of my plastic fork came off. I think I ate it.
And the weather was excellent. We had about 20mins of rain one day, but it was very light. In fact we thought we’d get through the lot without much disruption. Unfortunately on our last morning we woke to heavy rain. It slackened a bit but then tipped it down more as we neared fully decamped. So we had a sodden tent to cart home. Any other time the rain wouldn’t have been an issue. Ah well.
Photos may well be along at some point.
Permalink
Posted in Life, Self-indulgence at 3:50 pm by alby
I had my toe hacked at yesterday.
Fun fun fun.
I went on a hike way back in Dec 2007 in South Africa. It was excellent but pretty hard work to say the least. The relevant point is that the second half of it was marred by large amounts of toe pain.
Since then my left big toe has played me up with ingrowing nail and random shooting pains. I’ve seen a local podiatrist who’s dealt with it on and off for a while but he strongly advised me to get it properly seen to.
Which needed a nail op.
I had it yesterday. Was great fun. Injections x4 as the first set of local anasthetics didn’t fully work. This has happened to me before at the dentists. Is it possible to be less susceptible to these meds? And then they hacked off a thin strip of my big toe nail before killing that part of the nail bed in the hope that it won’t grow back.
So I couldn’t drive home. And I can’t wear shoes with closed toes. This should be fun as it’s against work policy to have open toed shoes. They say 5-6 weeks healing. And no swimming pools or swimming in the sea. Well that’s one activity for my upcoming hols done in.
At least it’s not so sore this aft.
Permalink
19 Jul 2010
Posted in Grammar!, Life at 8:53 pm by alby
Walking down the street in Derby on Saturday I noticed an Indian restaurant. It was closed but only ‘cos it was the wrong time of day for it to be open. Whilst there I noticed a couple of signs on the door.
The first was a local newspaper review saying how wonderful the place was.
The second said in its entirety:
“This Area Closed Due To Private Party.
Sorry For Any Incontinence”
It really really did. I have a photo on my phone of it (just can’t get bluetooth to work to get it on here grr).
Permalink
13 Jul 2010
Posted in Reviews at 8:22 pm by alby
“This laser works at a frequency of 1.9 microns”
Anyone fancy teaching the writers any basic physics?
Permalink
12 Jul 2010
Posted in Grammar! at 1:22 pm by alby
2 things I’ve seen recently with ace English involved.
First is a set of instructions for an electronic kitchen scale. There are lots of examples but the following impress me:
“After finishing the setting. Press “MODE” then repristination.”
and
“”press “Mode” all the while. The second will twinkle.”
and
“After finishing. No operation within 60 seconds, the system will enter the mode of the time.”
The other thing was a menu posted through our door. A high quality thing in many ways but there are plenty of oddities starting with “Pasta’s” and “Salad’s” (but not “Appetiser’s” oddly – they got that one right).
And they put “paninis” down. But right under there is a lovely bit of blurb:
“Create your own Yimmylicios Panini!”
Marvellous.
Permalink
08 Jul 2010
Posted in Life at 8:21 pm by alby
After sorting out my Windows mess up I now have a further screw up caused by that wondrous seat of all that is good and holy, Apple Inc.
Itunes suggested I update my OS for my iPod. Clicked ok then.
So it downloaded something and now my iPod doesn’t work. At all.
All it gives me is a screen which is a graphic representation of “plug into iTunes”.
I plugged into iTunes. This led to a message saying “You need iTunes 9.2 – please download.”
I did. It didn’t work.
This happened last time I updated iTunes. I got past it by uninstalling it and then reinstalling the newer version. I did this again today.
Apparently there’s a program I’ve never heard of that isn’t there and for some undecipherable reason this means that I can’t install iTunes new. This is something called “Bonjour”. I’ve never heard of it before, it seems to do nothing beyond screwing up installing iTunes, it’s sat in my program list when I try and uninstall it but won’t uninstall. It also doesn’t appear on any searches of my files despite it being sat there in the list of programs. And as it’s nowhere to be seen I can’t even manually delete the thing. Words not suitable for family newspapers are passing my lips.
So I’m left with a useless iPod telling me to plug into iTunes. And an inability to get iTunes installed.
I bloody love computers! Apple and MS have caused me no end of bloody trouble this week. Where they get off on letting us know how bloody helpful their products are and how we can’t live without them I just don’t know.
Pile of shite from both of them and a plague on both their houses.
Permalink
06 Jul 2010
Posted in Life at 8:43 am by alby
Help!
Laptop had 2 updates recently. First was a windows update, second was an iTunes update.
I tried booting it yesterday and got an error. So Windows reverts to a screen with 2 options. 1 is start normally which takes you to the Vista loading screen and never gets anywhere – eventually it brings you back to the options screen IE back where it started.
Option 2 is Windows Repair – which does nothing. Literally it takes you back to the options screen immediately.
This leaves me unable to boot my computer. I have no Vista disk since MS feel that me having a disk to be able to help with this sort of thing would be a bad idea.
I only really need the access to get to my files. I have loads of photos and documents I don’t want to lose.
Can I get a disk of Linux or Windows from somewhere that will give me access to the system to get the files off and onto my external harddrive?
Any hints or advice appreciated.
Cheers.
Oh and while I’m at it does anyone know why my iPod’s iTunes store doesn’t work? Whenever I search for something it switches to the home screen. So at the mo I can’t download podcasts from the iPod or my PC.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »