Weekend

Well, I didn’t get to sleep overly much, even for a Bank Holiday. The parental visit has been OK, and fairly manic. I can’t deny it, no matter how bad it sounds, but having them here does stress me out. Ah well.

Saturday involved a trip to Imperial War Museum North, mainly for my dad to see the exhibition of Navy shipbuilders by Stanley Spencer. They were spectacular, and of an epic scale – but I found the rest of the IWM North’s displays to be really quite disappointing and not worth the time. However, the building is spectacular. Following the visit to IWM, we crossed the river to The Lowry Centre, and their exhibit of Lowry’s paintings and sketches. Personally, I think that the paintings are hugely over-rated, but the sketches that he did are quite wonderful, and in general don’t reflect the “matchstick men” style of the paintings.

Sunday we headed back into the city centre, as Manchester was holding some more of it’s Festival Europa events, with a Food and Drink event in Albert Square, and a Flower Market in St. Anne’s Square. Both were fun, the Food and Drink event also included a lot of local craftspeople, photographers, glass-artists and so on – which also meant I got to make some more contacts. Always a good sign.

Monday involved a visit to Manchester City Art Gallery, as they wanted to see Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, which is on tour currently.

All in all it’s been a fairly arty and creative weekend, and along the way I’ve also had a few ideas and thoughts about ideas for the future, which I’ll be working on over the next few months. Interesting stuff – and still fairly stressed dealing with the joys of parents. Ah well, it’ll be July before I have to see them again – living 200 miles away has it’s advantages.

Follow-Up

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Visitation Rites

I could really go off Bank Holidays. As well as everything else, I’ve got a visitation by the parents to deal with. All weekend – and with the addition of my brother on Saturday night.

So, don’t expect much in the way of content over the weekend. (I know, you don’t anyway) However, there may be a Scaryduck-esque primal scream at some point. Alternatively, Monday may just be a day of rants and venting. You have been warned.

Petty

Out of interest, is it just me who gets emails from self-important jumped up little twats? Because of the way it was sent (a title line of just “Most Urgent”, and fuck all in the body text, just a word .doc attachment) it fell into my “suspected spam” folder, which didn’t help. Also, despite it being “Most Urgent”, the dull little cock-knocker can’t even set the priority flag on it when sending.

Anyway, this document that was sent isn’t Urgent, let alone “Most Urgent” – it’s a load of guff, but it needs to go online today. Fair enough. However, if it’s that urgent, (and yes, it’s the same cock-knocker as before) then he should attach the document’s photo himself, rather than expecting my telepathic skills to be up to their normal stupendous levels of competence, and know (from the blank body text, remember) that the photo needs to be a) found and copied from another document, and b) attached into the Word doc, so that it can go online.

What I don’t need is for the cretinous budgiesucker to then call me up while I’m looking for the fucking photo and tell me (“Have you received my email?” – cunt can’t even figure out how to get a read receipt. Then again, it wouldn’t help him, as my PC is set to never send such a receipt. *Grin*) how amazingly important it is for the document to be online immediately. The response “Well I’ll put it up without a photo then, as it’s so urgent” doesn’t go down well – but fuck him, I’ve asked for it to be done repeatedly. “Oh no, no, it must have the chief exec’s photo on it” (bearing in mind that this guff is purely for the intranet, and not to be sent out into the real world at all) Fine, send me a copy of the photo, and it’ll be on now.

“Oh, well, I haven’t got a copy of it here. I’d have to get it ordered from Marketing, and I’m off at twelve”.

Ah, so that’s why it’s so urgent – because the pretentious little weasel wants to fuck off early.

“Management” *cough*

Ah, the joys of the workplace. Because it’s the start of a Bank Holiday weekend, a lot of people have taken the day off. Which is fair, except for a small problem that’s going to rear up and bite them on the arse on Tuesday.

Every single IT manager is off. There isn’t a manager in the department. (Mind you, this is almost certain to increase productivity, and lessen frustration) What they’ve forgotten is that there are now 10 or 12 contractors in the department. Who all* need to get their timesheets signed by – you guessed it – a manager in order to get paid next week. It’s not going to happen. So they won’t get their sheets signed ’til Tuesday, which means that they won’t be paid until a week on Monday, at the earliest.

File under : Brewery, Organise, Piss-up.

* = well, all except one, who thought this might be the case, and got his timesheet signed on the Wednesday before his manager stunk off on two days holiday. Can’t think who that might’ve been, can you?

Tossers

May’s a great month, if you travel using public transport. Two bank holidays means that Network Rail (Née Railtrack) have double the opportunities to fuck things up completely, and of course they take every chance they can get.

So yet again this coming bank holiday weekend is going to be a nightmare for a huge number of rail travellers. On the same weekend as the Motor Show in Birmingham, the train service between London and – you guessed it – Birmingham is out of action. This brings back yet more shades of last August, when they decided to take London-Reading out of action on the weekend of the Reading Festival. An utter fuck-up.

Of course, what the wankers will say is

“There are less people travelling on the trains during a Bank Holiday weekend than there are on a normal day”

but what they actually mean is

“Our season-ticket travellers (i.e. businessmen) won’t be travelling on this weekend, so we can fuck up the train system as much as we want, and not have to pay out compensation to the season ticket holders”

Not that I’m cynical or anything…

My Boss is a Twat

Stinky^® is away for the next two days, and has left me to fix some of the stuff on the site. Fair enough, at least it means I’m doing something.

But it also means that – yet again – I have to go through HTML and so on that’s completely bobbins. I swear the man doesn’t have a clue. All the styles that have been set up are faulty, and the pages are about 8 times larger than they need to be. I could cry – or beat the shite out of him when he returns…

Oh yeah, and (this will make more sense to techies) he’s also got formmail.pl being used without fixing the “to” address, so it’s open to abuse by spammers. This is the mark of a true IT fucknugget. Now – do I change it, or do I keep it as evidence of epic twadgedome?