Still Up It

And yes, four days on, and Blogrolling is still well and truly chuffed. What a joy. I’m really glad I don’t pay for the service, or I’d be even more irritated.

Mileage

I’ve been trying to avoid this set of maths and thoughts, but while sitting on this train I’ve been thinking a bit about the mileage I’ve covered this month. For once I’m going to start with the 12ish mile daily round-trip to work, which amounts to a juicy 240ish miles a month on its own. By the time September comes to a close, I’ll have been to Reading twice, Oxford once, Stanstead once, and a small matter of a trip to Iceland. It’s about a 400-mile round trip to Reading, and not much under that for Oxford when you include the travelling to the parental home. So that’s 1200 miles, and a total of approximately 1500. Oxford to Stanstead is about 100 miles (total : 1700 miles), and Reykjavik is roughly 1100 miles from Stanstead. So all told, that’s just under 4000 miles.

Come the start of 2005, once I’ve moved myself to the Reading area, it’s going to be a massive reduction in my mileage, and probably a corresponding one in my stress levels. In truth, the train service is stressing me out less as I’m a) travelling on it more (again, there’s a logic there, but I’ll be damned if I can find it) and b) knowing that whatever the torture, it’s finite – three months, and I’m done on the huge mileages for a while. Even should I end up commuting to London for a couple of months (and I do hope I don’t have to do that, but I will if I have to) it’ll amount to less mileage. Of course, the Iceland trip skewed the mileage a bit for this month, but it’s still pretty heavy going even without that.

Logical

I swear I’ll never figure out the “logic” on which Virgin Trains runs their service. In fairness the journey on Friday was only cocked up by problems outside Virgin’s control – some fuckwit decided to drive into a bridge that the train tracks went over. So they had to get the bridge checked before sending a train over the bridge. Not much they can do about that – and because it was going to take so long, they decided to re-route the train instead. 75 minutes late in the end, but what the hell, it arrived, and there really wasn’t a lot Virgin could do about it.

Tonight though, it’s (yet again) the 1805 from Reading to Manchester. 6pm on a Sunday – there’s likely to be one or two people on that one, aren’t there? So I know, why don’t we just put four carriages on? That’ll make life so much easier instead of the eight carriages that we have at stupid times like 6am or 9pm. Peak time? Lets ram ’em in like sardines.

I simply don’t understand the logistics of that. Maybe it’s just me, and there really is some great piece of logic at work. Personally, I think it’s just a big cosmic joke, except no-one’s told us the punchline yet.

Up It

On the face of current evidence (i.e. I find it impossible to believe no-one’s updating) it looks like good old Blogrolling is currently well and truly up it.

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.