🍿 Watched Paddington (2014) ★★★★
Lovely showery start to the morning, kept it cool with the light patter of rain masking noises from the outside world. Good for laying in bed a bit longer with a book.
🍺 Went for a walk along the river. Now sitting in the beer garden of the local enjoying a cold beer and writing some notes in my notebook. All of these are good for my mental health.
You’re standing on the wrong side of the escalator
You know the person, the one who looks up an escalator and sees everyone standing on the one side but chooses to stand on the opposite side. The side to stand varies from country to country.
There’s a solution to this problem. A sensor in the step detects when you’ve been stationary for too long on the wrong side and a little cattle prod comes out and zaps you. Maybe a disembodied voice which says “move” if the budget stretches to it.
My response to a crank challenge by Deborah.
Some days there’s a lot of loud sighing as I sit down.
🎥 Catching up on writing some Letterboxd reviews. I need to stay up to date or it becomes to much of a chore and then I write none.
The time all three emergency services were called to work
I’ve been accumulating various lists of blog prompts to help me get into a routine and was just looking at the one from Lou Plummer and my eyes landed on “What is your all-time favourite story to tell from all the jobs you've held?”
Without hesitation my brain went “the time all three emergency services were called to work”.
The area I worked in had an annual Christmas party on a Friday night and invited a lot of external stakeholders and ensured the alcohol and food kept coming. My then boss and I, being a bit experienced by then in how these things went, had a conversation around 8pm and agreed it was probably time to depart so we could say “I’d gone home by then” if needed. It was.
Emergency services (1) - the ambulance
Security discovered someone collapsed in a bush. Concerned as they were unable to properly wake them the ambulance was called. Nothing medically wrong, too many drinks. The person came to and proceeded to abuse everyone and insist they were fine.
Ambulance left, security filed an incident report.
Emergency services (2) - the fire brigade
A staff member had too many drinks to safely ride their motorbike home but didn’t want to leave it in the carpark overnight. Another staff member, with a similar number of drinks under their belt, suggested the bike be brought upstairs in the lift and locked in the boardroom. Sounds okay you think. It was until the owner of the bike started it up, spun the wheel, which burnt the carpet, which created smoke, which resulted in the fire alarm triggering and the brigade arriving in two big red trucks.
On arriving, the fire brigade were met by Security who had quickly responded to the alarm given they’d just been nearby dealing with the collapsed person and the ambulance. On entering the area where the alarm had gone off the brigade discovered a motorbike with a warm engine but no rider to be found. The owner and erstwhile assistant had bolted.
Fire brigade left, security filed an incident report.
Emergency services (3) - the police
Security have no idea how the bike made it into the building so they call the police to find the owner of the bike. The police sent a nearby car to investigate and looking up the registration revealed the owner was a staff member. The police tell Security it seems like a problem for them and depart the scene.
Police left, security filed an incident report.
The aftermath
Come Monday, the Security Manager arrives to see my boss in person. There’s a very detailed and lengthy security log from the Friday night. My boss calls me in and we both confirm “I’d gone home by then”. After all three of us had stopped alternating between shaking our heads and laughing, the Security Manager informed us he had to send it up the line. Our boss gets a call from the number two in the organisation, who you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and gets told to investigate, reprimand, and issue formal warnings.
It wasn’t hard to work out who was involved. They all filed one by one into the office to get a verbal reprimand. They were handed a formal written warning on the way out. The executive assistant had used the nice thick paper and the boss had hand signed it. One of the three framed it and hung it on the wall of their office.
If I don’t get started I never will
I’ve been writing some blog posts for the last few months but not crossposting them anywhere. I really just wanted to get some thoughts out of my head but not into a journal.
I’ve been intending to crosspost for some time but as inevitably happens, I was distracted fiddling with the settings rather than actually writing. So enough is enough, time to stop tinkering and pondering is this colour better than the other one, time to write something and hit publish.
I’ve seen others using Pika so decided to look into it and turns out it’s just what I needed. A platform I can write without being distracted by a timeline. Minimal settings to distract me.
To take directly from the About page of this blog:
I had a domain I wasn’t using for its original purpose.
I wanted a place to write longer thoughts where I didn’t see the noise of a timeline to distract me.
I tend to see something happen or read something written by someone else which sparks my thinking.
So here I am on Pika with Nothing Original Here.
Today was to get me started, get one down, and then looking at a sole solitary post will hopefully prompt me to write more and increase the list.
I think I’ve set up crossposting the way I want it using the excellent Echofeed so maybe you’ll see this appear in your timeline somewhere. Fingers crossed it’s not a mangled mess of formatting!
I’ve come down with an annoying head cold so yesterday and today have been short stints of work from home and the rest of the time has been reading on the balcony. It’s been very pleasant and relaxing apart from jumping up every 10 minutes to stop the cat climbing over the rail.