Things to remember early in the morning…

Namely -

1. Your laptop power cable
2. Your mouse
3. Your pile of receipts for various expenses
4. A tie

All of these are especially important if you are going to be in your office in Bournemouth all day and have a very important meeting needing three out of those four items and then your book keeper coming in to pick up your receipts for your latest set of end of year accounts.

Oh well, it looks like I’ll be stopping at a Maplins for the laptop stuff, my book keeper will moan at me (again) and my meeting with be slightly more casual than I’d have liked.

I knew not going to bed until 1am was a mistake last night, but in my defence I only got in from work at 10.30pm and then two large rum and cokes kept me awake for quite some time, so naturally at 6am this morning I wasn’t functioning at my best.

The blind leading the blind

I am redecorating the house at the moment, virtually every room with the exception of the kitchen is going to get a fresh coat of paint, new carpet / flooring and a general refresh over the next couple of months.

At the moment I am half way through doing the ensuite and so this weekend I also repainted my main bedroom. Firstly I forgot how much gloss work there was and that took ages, in comparison the walls were done really quickly. It was the first time I had used Farrow & Ball paint, and whilst I was apprehensive about the cost, the quality is simply amazing and the finish now that the walls have dried is amazing.

I decided to change the blind as the old one was looking a little beaten up. Off I went to the shops where I bought a five foot long blind with wooden slats that I thought would nicely match the picture frames on the walls. Upon getting home and after unpacking the blind, it transpired that whilst the window was a five foot one, the blind was six inches too short. So I repacked it and drove back to the shops (having measured the window to make sure I had the right measurements). I swapped the blind for the size I needed, paid the difference and came back home. I unpacked the new one and with a sinking feeling in my stomach, realised that it was still too sort. The measurement on the box compared to the actual measurement of the blind was different. So, off back to the shop I went, where I had the same conversation with the same woman on the customer service desk.

After swapping the blind for the largest one that they had, which according to the measurements would just fit into the recess it needed to go into, I came back home, had a well earned cup of tea and then unpacked the third blind of the day.

Would you believe it, it was too fcuking big for the recess!!!

Rather than go all the way back to the shop and get my money back, I got my hacksaw out and cut it down to size, trimming the wooden slats with a very sharp pair of snips. It looks very good indeed, if I ever see another blind however I will scream.

Expensively free money

For many years I have been diligently collecting Shell Plus Points every time I have filled up with petrol. I started using Shell because my cars have usually preferred the higher octane Shell fuels so it made sense to collect the points at the same time.

Over a few years I found that I had amassed almost 30,000 points, so it was with some trepidation that I logged onto their rewards site to see what magical bounty awaited me. Being inquisitive I furiously bashed a calculator to work out that my points had cost approximately £18,000 in fuel. I knew that over the years it was a fair chunk of change, but it still shocked me seeing a figure like that.

Now there are a myriad of different types of award available from carbon offsetting donations (I don’t think so), charitable donations (I prefer to donate to friends doing such things as Race for Life etc), Air Miles (I don’t collect them) and Ferrari merchandise (um, no thanks). I eventually settled for money off vouchers at B&Q / Comet / Woolworths. My 30,000 points, lovingly collected over the past few years are worth a grand total of £150 of vouchers.

I couldn’t believe it, all that money for so little return. So I claimed my vouchers and then cut up my reward card in disgust. I knew you had to spend a lot of money to get anything, but it suddenly seemed so fruitless after so long earning points.

I’m not sure whether to be sensible and use the money in B&Q towards the bits I need to refit my en suite bathroom, or whether t go blow it in Comet on something I don’t need.

Schizophrenic Voices?

Last weekend I headed up to Manchester very early, stopping to fill the car up with fuel at my local petrol station. It was just past 7.15am and I was the only person on the forecourt.

As I was stood there filling the car, I swore that I could hear voices in my mind. I even turned round at one point to see who was there, only to find nobody there at all. I went back to filling the car, watching in horror as the total went up alarmingly, whilst the litres dawdled slowly upwards. Again, I could hear voices behind me, chatting away. At this point I has started to get a little concerned. Had I not actually woken up, but was dreaming instead? Had I crossed into some sort of twilight zone? Was I on the verge of some kind of breakdown? I then realised that the garage had inadvertently left their tannoy on and I was hearing a conversation that the two staff members were having inside the garage.

I wandered in to pay and pointed out that their tannoy was on. We had a laugh that they were only talking about mundane garage chatter, rather then their conquests in the pub last night or something equally embarrassing

Professional porn

I had to take part in a conference call this afternoon. Sometimes it is easier to get people together on the phone for a discussion rather than schedule diaries for a meeting. Whilst a phone call doesn’t allow you to read people’s expressions and reactions, it does mean you can decide whether a meeting is worthwhile.

Back in January / February I did some work for a company and put together a technical specification regarding a new service they wanted to bring to market. As is often the case, these things then go a little quiet and then all of a sudden deadlines change and things pick up pace.

So, I find myself on a phone and web conference this afternoon, where the host has the ability to share what they see on their own desktop with the other participants. After about 40 minutes talking about merchant service accounts, HTTP interfaces and all manner of clever things to make quite a good service even better, I was given the ability talk through a Visio diagram (drawn by yours truly) that the host had on his own desktop.

As he was then trying to find something else, he was flicking through the various programs he had open at the time. Bear in mind there was myself representing my business and his web developer / pseudo distributor for this product and all three of us could see what was going on on his computer.

He then flicked through his open programs to Internet Explorer, which had a somewhat graphic porn site on display. Suddenly my web conference had gone from Visio diagram to hard core porn.

The sound of this guy backtracking and making excuses reverberated down the phone, and I swear that for about 10 seconds, time stood still and a tumble weed rolled through my office.

Tomorrow I am putting his price up. Somehow I think he’ll be good for it.