» The most childish thing you've done as an adult

Love Hearts
I had a hankering for Love Hearts while walking round Tesco, doing the weekly shop, so in the basket they went. The missus put them on the conveyor belt first, I think it was so I would eat them and keep out of her way while she bagged the shopping. I was enjoying them so much, and keeping out of the way, I thought that the young lady on the till might enjoy one, especially as the next one out was 'Smile'. She did smile, but didn't want the sweetie, so I ate it and found that the next one was 'You're Lovely', she didn't want that either. We finished packing and I paid, leaving checkout lady with a lovely big grin on her face, chuckling to herself and me and the missus giggling like teenagers. I like to think that this 40yr old brightened her day a little bit. Growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional.
(Thu 17th Sep 2009, 15:37, More)

» IT Support

IT is so much duller, now there's less use of hammers...
I hate working in IT, hate it with a passion, especially since it all became so incredibly dull and mundane. Back when all of this was just fields and the internet was still but a wet dream, real computers needed hammers. My first field service toolkit contained a large rubber headed hammer. It was for fixing the 40MB hard drive of new fangled 286 desktop. The disks were faulty, because the lubricant for the heads would seize up when cold, which happened if people turned the thing off overnight. Solution, switch it on, leave it 5 mins to start warming up a bit and hit the case with the hammer. Head frees up, disk works. You could fix it by dropping the PC a couple of inches to get the same jolt, but the hammer was so much more satisfying.

The other hammer application was on a very old server, a Ferranti Argus, for the nerds. It had teletype terminals instead of screens, Joe 90 reel to reel half-inch tape units on the front, hexadecimal keypads for programming startup registers and lots of flashing lights. This controlled the Command and Control system for a police force, so it was a dual system, with disks controlled by one CPU and the other on hot-standby. The change over was by magnetic relays, which, if they hadn't been tested in a while, would stick, hence the inclusion of a little hook on the rear door of the system with a handy hammer hanging from it to beat the relays until the all clunked over.

The bastard IT Support, got my MCSE from a cornflake packet, 'Engineers', can barely even wield a screwdriver nowadays, let alone a hammer. Pussies.
(Fri 25th Sep 2009, 13:14, More)

» Road Rage

Silly thing to do...
M25, 6:30 on a Thursday morning, riding my bike down to Camberley for a course at a well known hardware manufacturer. I'd been doing the journey on and off for a couple of weeks so have gotten comfortable with the route and with the level of traffic/congestion. Traffic is doing aboout 45mph and I'm happily filtering through between middle and right hand lanes at about 50/55mph. Then I spot her. She's in a typical rep-mobile mondeo/vectra/passat/whatever and apparently not actually paying a great deal of attention to the road. I'm being very careful looking for people changing lanes and she looks like she's going to change lanes for about a mile, keeping moving from middle lane towards outside and then back again after touching the cats-eyes. Eventually I decide to go for the overtake (a Porsche of all cars had pulled over as far as he could to the right to allow me through!). When I drew level, however, I noticed the reason for the vagueness of her driving, she appeared to be reading. On closer inspection, it turned out she was doing a crossword!

Red Mist set in, I decided that I should draw her attention to the fact that someone on a motorbike had drawn alongside and had seen what the hell she was doing. Instead of revving loudly or perhaps beeping the horn, I decided that it would be more effective to tap loudly on her window. She looked up in utter panic and wrenched the steering wheel, blindly swerving the car across her lane.

Fortunately for me, she swerved to the left, rather than to the right. After gaining some composure she then sat with a look of abject horror that someone had seen what she was doing. I, on the other hand, waved two fingers at her in an angry manner before speeding off to find the first exit from motorway where I allowed my heart rate to drop below 250.

It never occurred to me for one second that she would have reacted so violently, and that it was a 50/50 chance of her swerving straight into me and taking me off the bike and under the wheels of several nearby cars and lorries.

Still ride the bike, still filter through traffic, still look out for idiots, no longer attempt to scare them to teach them a lesson.
(Mon 16th Oct 2006, 15:52, More)

» Being told off as an adult

Told off by the kids
At what age does the adult/child relationship change and the adult gets told off by the child? It seems to be when they get into their teens and want to be cool, but the adult, freed of a bit of responsibility, starts to have a bit more fun.

My daughter was always telling me off when she was 14/15, mostly for being embarrassing. This would happen when I was just having a bit of fun. Like, setting off all the 'Bouncing Tiggers' in Toys R Us, at the same time (see also 'Laughing Pooh' and 'Tickle me Elmo'), Superman on the trolleys at the supermarket, or breaking wind silently in shops and quietly telling her that we should move before someone notices. "That's SO childish"
(Thu 20th Sep 2007, 17:48, More)

» Dumb things you've done

Wearing contacts when drunk
Went away for a weekend with friends and decided to leave the specs at home and enjoy the new found freedom of my lovely new contact lenses. Unfortunately one of the lenses fell out after about five pints, so I spent the remainder of the evening wandering around with one squint eye and the other wide open, like a drunken quasimodo. After a few more pints, I even managed the speech impediment and drooling.

Knowing that sleeping with contact lenses in is a bad thing, I dutifully removed the lenses before bed. Unfortunately I was still in plural while forgetting the lens was in the singular.

Remaining lens was popped without a problem. In trying to remve the non existant lens, however, I resorted to pinching the sides of where the lens should have been, with increasing firmness, again and again, for about 10 minutes.

The following morning my eye had glued itself shut, prying it open revealed two large, red fingerprint-shaped, bruises either side of my eyeball.
(Fri 21st Dec 2007, 10:46, More)