Sunday, May 29, 2005

Dreaming

Now I realise that dreams don't really mean much, and that it is just your brain freewheeling over stuff that it has seen, and all that.

But really. Should I be bothered that I was dreaming last night about having to go and pick up a bloke and drive him somewhere, after he had been to dispose of a body?

I was in my own car as well, and I was only worrying about the blood on his wellies getting on the carpets. I had an argument with him, and made him take them off and put them in a plastic bag in the boot. I mean, what the fuck was I thinking? He'd just chopped a fucking body up! Now is not the time to start a fight about getting your carpets dirty...

I really have no idea what that was all about. I think my brain was starting to fight against the surrealism of it, as from that point it started to turn into more of a film role (where everyone else was an actor, and I just had to 'be myself' in it. Weird). I then remember spending a few minutes (while driving the bloke with the bloodstains and tattos) wondering if the blood was real or not, and if fake blood stained as much, so maybe I had been making a fuss for the sake of it.

How freaky. I didn't even eat any weird stuff last night. Although I was rather pissed.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Hire cars

Inspired by a post (and a comment) from Da Goldfish.

In my previous career, I spent a lot of time in hire cars and mini buses. I am also a bit of a hooligan when it comes to cars. I used to work in Motor racing, and so any journey in any vehicle often degenerated into being dangerous/mechanically abusive to the point of tears of laughter. At one stage in the late 80's to the early 90's it became almost a competition to see who could hand a hire car back with the most damage. It sadly didn't take long for the various hire companies to suss, and for the team managers to decide that some sort of responsibility should preside, damn them. But for those that have seen the famous "Days of Thunder" hire car scene, it isn't actually that far removed from some of the things I have seen/done/heard about. Although it was usually the mechanics, rather than the drivers, doing the craziness. We had to have some way of letting of steam, you see...

Consequently, I have compiled a list of common hire car practices, so much so that most of them are compulsory upon receipt of the car (I am assuming a manual car for this):

1: Drive away from the rental place flat-chat in first gear until out of sight; make no effort at all to change gear. You must look as relaxed and unconcerned as possible, adopting the driving school position, and shuffling your hands on the wheel accordingly. You can watch them wincing in the rear view mirror, their reflection gently bobbing up and down in time with the car as it bounces off the rev limiter.

2: The needle must be bent against the empty stop of the fuel gauge when returning it. Claim it is broken, and that "You won't get any more fuel in it, honest, I tried". Throw a hissy fit about the "Broken pump" at the nearest garage when inevitably caught out.

3: In moments of boredom I often resort to "exaggerated Learner Driver Mode". This involves such amusing habits as;
3.1: Throw yourself across the car at frequent intervals to check behind you in the mirror.
3.2: Use far too many revs to pull away and slipping the clutch until it smokes. You have to leave enough disengagement though, to allow you to 'pop' the last little bit of clutch travel to get the car to kangaroo up the road till your jaw clacks. Jumping up and down on the throttle (and/or the brake) can help.
3.3: Not only do you resort to shuffling the wheel through your hands (as the fucking idiots teach you to do in the test, despite the fact that it is more dangerous than driving with one hand) you must do it in infinitesimally small movements, so that you have to slide your hands up and down like a frantically masturbating teenager in order to turn the wheel. This will of course mean that you haven't a chance in hell of making any tight corners, but this means that you can stop in the middle of junctions and resort to the ridiculously exaggerated 27-point turn, including the pull away technique in 3.2 You can also use a variation on...
3.3: Make sure you look right down at the floor, as if someone has moved the gear lever since you last used it, every time you change gear. Complete the entire change (slowly and deliberately) whilst staring at the floor, and release the clutch with a bang as you look back up again. For an alternative with added realism, simply run the nearside wheels along the kerb (or just steer left) every time you hold the gear stick.

4: General Hooliganry:
4.1: Handbrake turns (regardless of whether you are driving or not):
Warnings: Technical knowledge - A friend of mine pulled the handbrake on while the race driver was driving the team boss' car. Sadly, he didn't know that in early Subarus, the handbrake works on the front wheels. Instead of the expected amusing pirouette, the car went head first into a church wall and destroyed the front end. Whoops.
Also, don't assume that the owner of the car is any more responsible than you if you are driving. Witnessed by Tin Corner when driving my car back from St Albans one evening in the very wet. I yanked the hand brake on as hard as I could, with a cheery "That'll be all the way on, then". Surprised the shit out of him, I can tell you. He even managed to keep it straight. Fair play, I thought.
Parking with the aid of the handbrake gets extra points if it completes the move. To have to shuffle it in afterwards is frowned upon. Commit or die.
4.2: 'J' turns. Reversing as hard as you can in a straight line, yank the wheel over as hard as you can, select an appropriate forward gear and drop the clutch and drive out of it. Piece of piss manoeuvre in an auto, but needs a bit more skill in a manual.
4.3: Driving into other people's hire cars (usually reserved for people you know, though). It's surprising how hard you can hit a car and not leave a mark when it's bumper to bumper. When queuing to get into the circuits, it is most amusing to drive into the back of the car in front every time you shuffle forward in the queue. Particularly if you know that the cars occupants have hangovers because you were pouring whiskey down their necks until three the previous morning. Picking the wrong car can result in legal action/a good kicking, so caution is advised.
4.4: On the move driver changes: Long journeys need too many stops, so we like to reduce these to fuel stops. Consequently, it should be possible to drop the seat back down, and the passenger keep his foot on the throttle long enough for the driver to slide into the back to be replaced by someone else. An interesting twist on this is for the driver to lie flat on his back for long periods, with the passenger steering as unobtrusively as possible and calling out "Brake!" or "Power" at appropriate intervals. It freaks out people driving past something chronic, although the police in general don't find it funny. Although I can only vouch for Kent Constabulary as definitely being particularly un-amused by it...

5: Various permutations of car surfing. The only pictorial evidence is here:
Me on the bonnet of the Granada
There are many forms of this, however.

6: "5 to 1". The immortal cry of the True Hire Car Animal. Find a nice straight bit of road, get up to a decent speed (70mph is good). When in fifth gear, grab the lever firmly and jam it into first as hard as you can. You may want to hang on to the wheel quite hard. You may well smell a bit of tyre smoke and hear a couple of bangs. It is also a good idea to be somewhere near the end of the hire period when you do this.

Ah, happy times.

There are many more, and this has brought a few of my many anecdotes to mind, but this is already probably the longest post in all history, so I'll leave it for now.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Fuel

For the second time in two days, one of our test cells has shat its pants and filled the cell with fuel.

This smells bad. Really bad.

And because we are short staffed at the moment, and that getting these £80,000 things up and running has been (another) of my jobs (along with the entire rest of the factory, from scratch - seriously), I have been running the initial tests with the engines, to make sure that they work ok, myself.

So when they don't, and piss fuel everywhere, I have to clean it up. Despite the extraction fans that we have that mean it is actually difficult to stand in the doorway, such is the air flow when they are on full flow, that with only 40 minutes with dustpans and mops and sand and shovels and brooms and and and and.... gives Brock a bit of a headache, and a distinct downturn to the mouth.

I stank when I came home from work. I even took a change of clothing in today as I knew I had a load of cleaning up to do after a spill (150 litres or so...) last night, but about an hour after I changed, the bloody thing shat itself when my back was turned and I opened the door and walked in onto an inch of fuel sloshing around on the floor.

Nice. If you like things that are as irritating and as smelly as FUCK.

I miss the days when I could just look through the door at the carnage, suck my teeth and shake my head and say:

"Well. Looks like you have some cleaning up to do."

Damn my professional attitude that means I need to keep them busy elsewhere, and so I don't get to sit at my nice comfy desk and direct them all from up high.

Did I mention that I have a headache?

Monday, May 23, 2005

Blind - like Rutger Hauer

Although without the Ninja skills, admittedly.

I woke up this morning. This in itself is hardly worthy of note, it being not an unusual occurrence as I wake up most mornings. In fact the mornings that I generally put off waking up in - preferring instead to procrastinate with my eyes firmly shut and mouth gently oozing drool until the afternoon - have generally been the ones that I have been awake in for a reasonable period at the start of it. There has often been alcohol involved on these occasions, but that is hardly unusual either. Anyway, I digress.

Now there's a thing. What are the chances, eh?

Anyway (that sounds strangely familiar) I woke up this morning (oooh, so does that!), a bit groggy and not exactly with it - again not an unusual feeling. I looked across to the bedside table for my glasses, and saw that they weren't there. I started to grumble to myself along the lines of "Oh, for fucks sake. What the fuck did I do with those last night".

I have a filthy mouth, even when I am talking to myself.

Then it occurred to me. Slowly, admittedly. I saw that they weren't there. I didn't do the usual 'pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake' crap amongst the keys, watch, mobile and other assorted detritus that I usually have to search through to try and locate them every morning because they aren't sufficiently distinct against the red (seriously) wood of my bedside table. I'm not joking here, if I put my glasses down on a mottled surface (like a duvet, for instance) and don't pay attention where they fall, I have to run my hands across the bed to find them again unless the sun catches them. Let's not forget that I live in England, just to put that last statement into perspective. A dark and gloomy perspective with lots of rain, admittedly, but you get the point.

I don't know if I have mentioned this to my loyal readership (or to any of the other nosey tossers that happen upon here from time to time) but I have very bad eyesight. I wear contact lenses and have had, since being diagnosed at the age of 5, eyesight that has been classified - if I may use technical parlance for a moment - as 'shit'. Seriously. I make bats look like Hawkeye. Mr Magoo is at an optical level that I aspire to, possibly after about £30K's worth of laser surgery. This means that I am somewhat at the mercy of my surroundings until I have ocular correction to hand.

Now, it was as I was looking at the bedside table and being able to assess that my glasses were absent that it occurred to me (See how slow it was? It started occurring to me at the beginning of the paragraph before last...):

"This is probably bad"

Immediately after this, the devil dashed into my bedroom, grabbed me by what little remains of my hair and pulled my head back to tip a combination of acid, his piss, and sand that had been soaked in (dry) vinegar, into my eyes. He may even have let rip with a manic cackle not unlike glass breaking, but I am unsure as I was shouting "Gahhhh!!" and "Fuck!!!" at the time and may have drowned the twat out.

That's right, kids! Fuckwit boy had gone to sleep in his lenses!

Fuck, it was painful. I sat there for a few seconds frantically trying to pull my eyelid across my eyes with my fingers so that I could approximate a blink, but to no avail. I staggered into the bathroom to splash water onto my face and attempt to re-hydrate my eyes.

Ouch. With bells on.

I then had to spend 4 minutes alternately either trying to pull my eye out of the socket or swearing and kicking at the sink until - with a mighty pop - I got the lenses free. And I thought I was blind before...

I have no idea what happened. I wasn't drunk (surprisingly enough) the night before, and I have been wearing contacts for 14 years. I am, you would have to say, 'used' to the idea of taking them out at night. I just appear to have tootled off to bed and just gone to sleep being perfectly able to see. For the first time in my life. You'd think it would have been a sufficiently odd thing that my brain would have warned me that something was amiss, but it would appear not.

It was all a bit hairy this morning, mind. It took until about 9 o'clock for my eyes to focus properly, so driving for 20 minutes to be at work for 8 was more than a little, *ahem*, 'iffy'. I must have looked a right freak to the people going the other way:

"Did you see that, dear?"

"What's that?"

"That strange young (It's my fucking blog, I can lie) man driving the other way."

"No, what did he look like?"

"Fairly normal, if you discount the blood pouring from his eyes, the shouting and the frantic, strobe-like blinking"

"No, dear. I didn't see him".

"Oh, well. Where shall we take the dog for a walk tonight?"

Monday, May 16, 2005

More hilarity

If you don't like goats, try this little News story. Even if you do like goats, it's still funny.

I watched it three times and still cracked up...

[edit: I fixed the linky]

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Shopping hilarity

I've just had the most entertaining little expedition to Sainsbury's. I went to do my weekly (or so) shopping, and to get a load of stuff to clean the flat with as I appear to have run out all at once. Cheers for that, life.

First of all, I got glared at for grinning at a young lady in there. She was quite young (probably 17/18) but very pretty, nubile and smiley. All the bumps in the right places, with tight jeans and a thin T shirt. Oh, don't start me off...

Someone tripped over their trolley and I was sniggering to myself when I caught the young lady in question's eye, and we shared a little smile about it, as you do. Then as we passed each other at the end of the aisle, I gave her a mildly (well, kind of) flirtatious grin, and she smiled back and went bright red, just as her mum turned to ask her something. Her Mum whipped her head around to see this unshaven 6ft or so older bloke grinning at her daughter. It may have even looked like a leer from that angle, but I can hardly be held responsible for that, can I?

She was less than impressed. I didn't help the situation by finding it funny that she got uppity, but being of sound English stock she didn't say anything, merely glared with the force of a thousand icy daggers.

Hehehe.

Then, as I was shopping, I heard the crash of a bottle hitting the floor, to be followed a couple of minutes later by the inevitable tannoy call for a cleaner to go and clean it up. I happened to round the end of the aisle on which the incident had occurred just before the cleaner got there. I watched her as she bustled up self-importantly to 'take charge' over the staff member already standing there keeping customers from slipping on the red wine on the floor. They didn't have a mop, you see, so were clearly sub-ordinate. This left me in pole position to watch the cleaner wield her mop with gusto, and in the process neatly swipe a litre bottle of olive oil straight off the shelf behind her... Hell of a mess red wine and olive oil makes, you know.

I was already giggling at the performance she was putting in - really milking the idea that she was 'fixing an emergency' - and this spectacular disaster just made me laugh more. Out loud and right next to her, as it transpired. For Amanda's sake, as she will no doubt wonder when she reads this, I didn't point at her at the same time. I felt that some random bloke laughing in her face was enough and besides, I was so close that if I had straightened out my arm to point I'd have taken her eye out, and that was perhaps a touch over the top. She had enough problems already from where I was standing.

They were busy too, the cleaners, I saw a case of wine hit the floor about 5 minutes later, followed almost immediately for a cleaner in the coffee shop, too. Must have been a day trip for the Butterfingers Shopping Club (Fuckwits division).

A hugely enjoyable shopping trip, full of the bizarre and obscure, gently sprinkled with dithering idiots. Without all the light relief, I may have stabbed someone such was the massive quantity of idiots bimbling around getting in my way. Fortunately, this only added to the amusement of such a random shopping experience. Even the doddering old twat that nearly got himself run over twice in the car park (both times by my car, as it happens) didn't make me shout out the window to see if I could make him keel over. I just drove home shaking my head at the whole experience.

Election fallout


Election fallout
Originally uploaded by Brock.

Someone was trying to make a point.

I did feel a bit of a tit taking a picture of a bin, though. Ho hum.

Monday, May 09, 2005

This hurt.

Genuinely hurt my sides.

Someone got to this site by the fact that this Blog comes (so to speak) 9th in a Yahoo search for virgin gets cherry popped....

Fuckola, that made me laugh sooo much. I actually have tears in my eyes.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Onomatopoeia

"Ker-flumpfk, Ker-flumpfk"

The sound one makes when walking in Wellington boots that are either a half-size too big for you, or when you haven't got your thick socks on.

Don't know where that came from. It just popped into my head.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

What fantastic parking


What fantastic parking
Originally uploaded by Brock.

Unbelievably, the dithering old woman trying to park this car was failing miserably to back into a perfectly usable space (behind it where it is now) when I turned into the car park. I had time to park my car, get the shopping out, walk inside, put the shopping down and walk to the window before she had finished.

And she was in roughly this place when she started. And she was there for at least 5 minutes while I was there!

Astonishing.

She gave up (she had been looking a little harassed when I walked past her to come in) and I am astounded that someone can take so long to fuck about and not park a car in the slightest. I had been looking incredulously at her when I walked past because she was driving backwards and forwards about 2 foot, swinging the car from lock to lock and jumping up and down and obviously struggling. She kept looking over her shoulder and eyeing up the space with a cross between optimism and utter stupidity.

If people are completely incapable of driving a car, why the fuck do they buy one? It might be something to do with the parking space in front of her, though. The woman (another one...) that usually parks in the one that the Astra is pointing into fairly regularly drives in and slams straight into the wall. She puts her hand to her mouth every time, too, like it's some sort of fucking surprise. Not that can be, because I see her coming now and go and watch to see if she does it again. She usually does. Needless to say her car is a bit tattier than this one, and needless to say I laugh...

Monday, May 02, 2005

Best TV title in the world

There is a political satire programme to cover the aspects of the general election in the UK on later this week. The title made me laugh out loud:

BREMNER, BIRD AND FORTUNE: A BUNCH OF COUNTS

hehehe.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Genius

Really, you'd think I'd bloody learn.

I'm the only one in my flat. I live alone. There's only me here. Everything that happens in my flat is therefore down to me, and any ensuing consequences should be apparent.

I am a qualified Engineer, a fairly bright person and someone who makes an effort to understand how things work, their causes and their affects. I know about stuff, basically. Not all stuff admittedly, but if I use or have something, I usually have more than a fair idea how it works. I'm also 32 years old, and if I'm not a grown up by now, there's no hope for me, let's be perfectly honest.

So you'd think, given some or all of the above, that I would have learnt over the years NOT to put some washing in the machine, turn it on, and then jump in the shower 15 minutes later, wouldn't you?

Chalk up another scalded back and red arse to Brock.

And, just to prove that the Devil can shit in my lunchbox any time he sees fit, I did (of course) have shampoo in what remains of my hair, so that I had the (oh so amusing) choice of either leaping blindly to the far end of the bath to stand there like a muppet with my eyes shut until the water calmed down, or to blindly try and find the taps and risk turning the wrong one.

I stubbed my finger on the tap, in case you were wondering. Rather painfully. Oh, how I laughed.

Ha.

For fucks sake.