Underage

So it’s now news that the majority of pubs serve drinks to under-age customers. Shocker. This has been happening for years – when I was at school it was always well-known which pubs would serve under-age, and it wasn’t a new thing then.

There’s currently a load of media/political hysteria about “binge drinking”. Again, this is nothing new. The UK has always had a “binge” ethos to drink, where Friday and Saturday night were the big events, and the rest of the week was virtually sober. We still have this archaic (and weird) attitude to drinking – one only has to look at the excesses of things like Club 18-30 holidays etc. to prove it. Even if we were to get more “European” licensing laws, it wouldn’t work – there’d still be the trouble, the people drinking underage and fighting at closing time.

The British attitude seems to be more about “drink as much as possible as quickly as possible” – yes, I know that’s the definition of “binge” – and it’ll take generations to change that, not politics.

I don’t know what causes it – perhaps it is the entire “underage” thing. A lot of children never get to try or taste alcohol, so as soon as they appear old enough to buy it, it’s a sign of passage, a “growing up” thing. And of course because it’s illegal, the booze gets drunk as quickly as possible – and there we go, the start of a binge-drinking mind-set.

Quiet

There really hasn’t been much going on today. Stinky’s back, and has been dropped in the shit about leaving things knackered yesterday. Bonus.

And yes, in relation to the comments yesterday on Ranty, he could in theory try going the “Oh, that was the contractor’s fault” route once I’ve gone – but as all three levels of management above him know that I’ve got no access to the system whatsoever, it’s an excuse that won’t hold water.

Ranty

Stinky’s off today. That’s normally a good thing – in this office it’s a novelty to be breathing non-polluted air. However, before the motherfucker left yesterday, it looks like he’s managed to utterly shaft the content management system. So today I’m getting a shedload of calls from people trying to use it, and I can’t fix it because in a fit of glory-seeking, he refuses to give me access to it all at all.

Yes, the CMS was supposed to be what I was hired to sort out and install, but now Stinky has figured out that if that happened, he wouldn’t get the praise and kudos for doing it. The problem with this is that he also hasn’t realised that when he screws it up (as now) he’ll be the one to get all the shite for it, because I can’t even access the system – therefore any fuckups are utterly out of my responsibility. So he’ll carry the can for it. OK, so that’s no bad thing in my book. Still a pain in the sphincter though.

Other than that, I’ve been given a selection of documents by a moron a colleague who’s got less clues than feet. They’re all supposedly important, but the documents have been given names like “Appendix C” – I’ve got three of those – with no correlation to what they should have come from. It’s a nightmare – but it’s also a nightmare I can pass straight back to them, because I’ve no idea, and Stinky is too much of an incompetent tosser to have done anything except pass it on to me.

Oh, and the documents that aren’t named utterly uselessly instead have a whole range of different names such as “document 2_1995.part2.doc” – which is an utter screw-up. Filenaming is something I’m a bit of a fiend about in the first place, but when it comes to idiots who put in extra full-stops, and/or spaces into a filename, I end up turning homicidal. And again, a lot of this problem stems from Stinky, who can’t even organise things so that there’s a standard filename convention, and won’t tell people how to do things properly.

Ah, I’ve had enough of this – thank Christ and his seven holy dwarves that I’m not here permanently. Four months and I’m outta here, then they can take their chances with the cock-knocker.

Photographica

Yes, at long last some of the photos from the Iceland trip are online. From the sheer number I’ve taken, I may add some more – or indeed a second page – in the next couple of days, but for now they’re up in the photos section. Enjoy.

Fotografica

Harping back to last week’s post regarding a variety of things that were happening, yes, it was the Fotografica people to whom I’ve submitted the Cemetery shots. As yet I’ve heard nothing, but we’ll see how it goes.

As for the Redeye meeting, I’m going to be tactful for now and say that I need to go to at least one more before I can formulate a balanced opinion, rather than a decision based on a sample of one. However, I certainly wasn’t impressed with a lot of the experience from that meeting. Time will tell.

Confused

I have NO idea what my co-workers were watching on TV last night, but for some reason “anal leakage” (Hello, Google) seems to be the main theme of conversation between them this morning.

If I’m honest, I don’t think I even want to know what they watched. But it does seem like the ideal conversation for a bunch of arse’oles.

Editing

Making my way through 160+ images from the weekend away, and the page will be uploaded today, promise. Coming back to work’s been a right ballache – loads of useless emails (Some people should be fucking barred from “Reply To All” and sending emails to a group, I’ve had 15 that had no fucking use to me at all) along with one or two that mean I’ve actually got some work to do today. Makes a change.

So anyway, business as usual – stuff to do, pages to edit, posts to write. I’d say it’s good to be back, but well, it’d be a lie. Roll on the Festering Season™.