Wars Have Started For Less

Disenchantment with work is still coursing through my veins like a potent narcotic this morning – and this might very well account for my current state of over reaction.

I am positively fuming.

Now it’s never a good idea to bad mouth one’s work colleagues on a public blog so I’ll keep things as cryptic and anonymous as possible.

Basically I’m doing my damnedest to arrange some Fire Safety training for the staff. No big thing really except trying to get everybody together in one place at the same time is proving difficult. Either our staff can make it or the trainer can’t. However, I’m hoping my perseverance has finally paid off and that a mutually agreeable date has at last been settled upon.

It’s taken weeks to get this far.

Gallingly I come in to work this morning to find an email from a work colleague (who I have obliquely bitched about before) copied in to me and the Boss, expounding the point of view that she her glorious self has successfully organized training for all the staff.

Feathers.

Spitting.

Out of my mouth.

Wasn’t it Bruce Lee who said that any object at all can be a weapon? I’m casting my eyes over my workstation as I type and they are alighting hungrily on the stapler, a hole punch, a Vlad The Impaler collection of assorted Biros, a Rolodex – even the Tipp-ex.

Dark fantasies are forming in my mind.

I need help.

Can someone either supply me with valium or an alibi?

A Frank Spencer Moment

It’s never been my intention to have this blog evolve into a year long catalogue of my many accidents and near death experiences but all I seem to talk about lately are the many mishaps and scrapes that I seem to drop myself into. Maybe I should just post my medical records and have done with it?

Today’s bone crunching event, however, has been a real humdinger.

Picture this. An electrician turns up on site today to attend to the many electrical failures that the building has incurred over the recent weeks – blown light bulbs, that kind of thing. Picture three particularly troublesome bulbs that stretch out over a flat ceiling right above a run of very high steep stairs. Ladders are not an option as the walls around the stair case are all lined with plate glass windows at just the point where a ladder would ideally rest.

The furthest bulb is a good 12ft above the bottom step.

Now the sane, even the corporate thing to do would be to hire a stair tower (at extra cost) to access the bulbs safely.

Not this electrician. He’s confident he can climb up the wall – which remember has windows inset into it and hence ledges – and can reach the blown bulbs with the power of his inhuman sparky agility. I’m not so sure about this but the electrician is already hoisting himself up using the banister as his first foot-hold.

The first two bulbs are swapped out easily enough – and I’m impressed the guy can do this one-handed given that his other hand is pinching hold of a ledge while his legs straddle a 12ft drop. The third and final bulb requires a manoeuvre that even Peter Parker would baulk at but Mr Sparks manages it. He must be clinging on with his teeth at this point I swear.

Meanwhile I’m halfway up the stairs having kittens. And they ain’t purring.

But there’s no going back at this point and... oh my God.... he’s done it. Mission accomplished. Great! Cue cheesy smiles.

So. Bulbs all changed. Just the problem of how to get down. And I bet we’ve all done this. Taken what looks like a simple route up a cliff face, a mountain side, a sheer office wall and then when it’s come time to head down again the route suddenly isn’t as simple. Or just doesn’t present itself at all.

Cue much swearing and foul language all round. Which of course always helps.

In the end we decide on the traditional (and probably most unhelpful) solution. I will “guide” his foot back to the banister allowing for his “safe disembarkation”.

Yeah right. Like guiding someone’s foot somehow diminishes both distance and gravity. A gap of 5ft suddenly becomes a mere 2 just because I’m guiding someone’s foot down through it.

Not sure how it happened because it all happened so fast. I guess Mr Sparks could hang on no longer. Suddenly I had 15 stone of tooled up electrician collapsing onto my right shoulder... somehow my right arm ended up hooked between his legs in an attempt to stop him falling any further.

What should have happened at this point is this: my shoulder dislocates and my arm breaks and I fall face forwards onto the sharp end of the stairs. The electrician continues his descent and cracks his skull open on the metal runs of a chairlift that awaits the impact of the rest of his body at the foot of the stairs. Mr Sparks get a broken neck and several cracked ribs. I get a face full of metal edging and a pension.

What actually happens is that Mr Sparks emerges unscathed because he manages to get a foot onto the banister (see guiding did help) and thus prevents the full weight of his body from crushing my spine into chalk dust (that ball was in God-damn-it). My arm isn’t dislocated – although it feels like it – just bruised and benumbed by 15 stone of electrician’s arse collapsing onto it. Thankfully a bit of arm wind-milling seems to get it moving again and despite a continued soreness and an ache that just won’t stop I’m in pretty good nick all things considered.

Mr Sparks and me agree that we never do anything that stupid ever, ever again. Next time we hire the stair tower and save ourselves a rather large laundry bill.

Final irony: tomorrow afternoon I am attending a meeting at council HQ to discuss Health & Safety and the compiling of Risk Assessments.

You know, I just might keep my gob shut...

Teabags

I’m going to lift the lid a little on the neat(ish) four-walled container that is my domestic life in this post... nothing too saucy though: I honestly don’t think you’d be able to cope with the enormous, pulsating levels of un-depravity that occur beneath the roof of my house on a regular basis...

Instead I’m going to talk to you about the Blake Tea Ceremony which generally occurs once every 2 or 3 weeks and though it lasts barely ten minutes seems to impinge on my consciousness for an amount totally disproportionate to its importance in the bigger scheme of things.

Karen and I like a drop of Earl Grey. I’ll spare you the aromatic descriptions – we just like the stuff so drink it a lot. Now whether it’s a specific property of Earl Grey or a property of tea in general, I don’t know, but within 10 days the tea mugs are not just stained but are coated on the inside. A thick layer of tannin that no ordinary dishcloth will ever shift. The build up is phenomenal. If left for 2 weeks the volume of tea that the mugs can contain actually diminishes.

If left unchecked the mugs eventually come to resemble cross sections of one of John Prescott’s arteries or two very short, incredibly thick straws.

It’s at this point that I have to act. I just can’t bear it. The only thing that can cleanse the mugs back to their sparkling pristine state is a wire scourer. The result of all the subsequent scrubbing is that the dishwater ends up looking like a flood in a clay pit. Revolting. But suddenly the amount of tea that the mugs can accommodate nearly doubles. It’s amazing.

My only concern is what the hell the tea is doing to my insides? We’ve all heard about the acidic effects if coke... do I need to up my cola intake to ensure my oesophagus and my stomach don’t become congested with tea residue? Swallow the occasional wire brush to chip away at the internal build-up (not good for piles surely)?

It’s a small thing, I know. But it bothers me.

However, my psychiatrist says it’s healthy to air these things...

Ne’er Be Well

I had to accompany the council’s Health & Safety Officer on a Health & Safety Inspection of the building yesterday.

It’s one of the many joys of my job.

2 whole hours of looking for trip hazards, checking for correct fire safety signage, electrical service conformity to various regulatory bodies, recommended lighting levels and ergonomic workstation risk assessments... oh bliss.

As you can imagine, I could barely contain myself.

Why is it that all H&S officers are not so much devoid of a sense of humour but lumbered with one so socially inept that they refuse to laugh at anybody else’s jokes while making determined efforts to constantly crack their own?

And why is it that I feel obliged to play along with it?

Anyway, I had to give up faking my laughter about half way round. The cold / virus / bug thing that has plagued me for the last 5 weeks has now plummeted down to my chest and is forcing me to cough and hack up my lungs like an asthmatic coal miner. There was so much sputum flying around the H&S guy ended up looking like Dan Aykroyd from Ghostbusters.

However, inspection-wise we did ok. The guy had to find something to pick us up on – naturally – but it was all minor stuff; easily sorted. Generally though we passed muster.

Good-oh.

I on the hand, handkerchief pressed to my mouth like a consumptive, was condemned as a H&S hazard. If I don’t get better soon I just might find myself Risk Assessed out of a job.

Hmm. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Stick Witch

Feeling in a malevolent mood I deliberately watched Gillian McKeith’s new show – Three Fat Brides One Thin Dress – yesterday evening with the sole intention of taking it to task on my blog today.

Am I a sad git or what?

Anyway, as always Ms McKeith didn’t disappoint…

The thing with Gillian is… she might do health food. She might do dieting. She might do nutrition. But she sure as hell doesn’t do people. Not unless it’s to do over somebody’s already crumbling self-esteem that is.

Gillian’s emotional blitzkrieg approach gets my goat right on it’s belligerently hairy nelly. I honestly think she is rude, nasty and bitchy for the sheer hell of it. “Being cruel to be kind” is really no kind of excuse at all. Not when you are attacking someone on such a personal level in front of the entire nation. There is no need for it. It is unjustifiable. I bet Gok Wan pulls out his carefully dyed two-tone hair in absolute horror at Gillian’s Cruella antics.

I know that at the end of the day these women have agreed to appear on the programme but I’m sure a lot of their willingness to be televised is down to transient gratitude and inordinate relief when, at the end of Gillian’s 8-week regime, they find they are at last 2 stone and (more importantly) one sabre-toothed Scottish battleaxe lighter. When Gillian disappears back up her drainpipe they must all cheer and break out the stotty cakes in celebration. Awful woman!

She dares to tell them off for not loving themselves enough right after she’s landed the mother of all guilt trips upon them! I need her to see the full horror of what she’s doing to herself, says Gillian, as she presents one of the women with a coffin freshly engraved with her name. Into this she pours trifles, take-away curries and a host of other victual-based crimes that the poor woman has committed. How classy. Next she’s presenting the terrified women with beautifully wrapped mock wedding presents which, when opened, turn out to be diseased livers and clotted up hearts, etc… manky offal fresh from the butcher’s shop. Cue much heaving and gagging. But it’s all for their own good of course…

Surely there are better ways of getting someone to change their way of life than by scaring them and brow beating them into it? Gillian plainly sees herself as a God and these poor overweight women as her unworthy acolytes with which she may do anything in order to achieve the end result. What I see is a megalomaniacal dictator stomping over everybody’s feelings just to score points and ensure that her programme achieves its only selling point…

Weight loss.

Pure and simple.

It’s not about the women accepting themselves or undergoing counselling to deal with the issues that have possibly lead to their unhealthy eating. The goal is weight loss. Nothing more nothing less. Oh look. They’ve all lost 5 inches from their waists in a mere 8 weeks. Job done. Mission achieved. And off Gillian trots like one of those freaky automatons from Bladerunner… onto the next fat target that needs taking down a peg or two as well as a dress size.

What annoys me most about Gillian’s programmes is that the over weight people featured on them stand no chance whatsoever. They’re set up to look fat, gormless, contemptible and infantile. Last night saw three overweight brides-in-waiting struggling to get into wedding dresses that were deliberately chosen to be too small for them. Of course they looked awful. They looked dreadful and were naturally mortified. But if I tried to get into an outfit three sizes too small for me I’d look pretty horrible too! As my wife, Karen, pointed out: if these women had been put into dresses that actually fitted them every one of them would have looked gorgeous. But that, of course, is the Gok Wan approach.

Unfortunately this was Gillian’s show. So instead of beautiful Buddha we got bombastic Beelzebub.

One last thing. Gillian smugly pointed out that obese people live 9 years less than their thinner counterparts. Hmm. But if I have to look like Gillian McKeith to gain an extra 9 years on my lifespan then I’m breaking open the lardy cakes right now…

What’s the difference between Gillian McKeith and a walking corpse?

No. I couldn’t think of anything either.

Sling Yer Hook

I’ve been in the wars again.

Sadly nothing glamorous. No last stand against the howling hordes of evil. No fight to the death with a foe both despicable and admirable.

Tripping over my own feet after a midnight visit to the bathroom saw me earthing myself fingers first and then crunching down hard onto my right shoulder. For a few seconds I’d feared I’d broken some bones and experienced that awful pain that, rather than loosen your vocal chords, actually constricts them fully closed. Thus I was flapping about in silent agony like a freshly caught fish until the pain subsided.

Thankfully no broken bones (that I can tell) and my wife has sent me to work this morning with my arm expertly enfolded in the supporting embrace of a sling.

I’m striking as many heroic gestures as I can and learning to pee with one hand.

Though not at the same time obviously.

Gut Rot

I’m mystified by the Government’s / Industry’s sudden decision to put health warning labels onto bottles and cans of alcohol. I mean, it’s not as if people aren’t aware of how dangerous alcohol can be when it’s abused. For most people that’s part of the attraction.

Alcohol when abused is a poison. As is nicotine. As is heroin, cocaine, paracetymol, chip fat, petrol, Lego, dog turds, windmills, Victoria Beckham and a great many other things... I just can’t be bothered to compile the complete list.

If people already know all this and still go out binge drinking – still go out on the razz with the full intention of vomiting up both kidneys, their liver and their sphincter muscles in a hot sorbet of assorted lagers, beers and spirits – what good are warning labels going to do? Aside from being a point of comic interest somewhere along the lines of approaching inebriation?

Let’s face it if we’re going to start putting health warnings onto things to warn people of their potentially dangerous properties I can think of a hundred and one other items that warrant health warnings far more urgently that a bottle of Drambuie.

What about cars? What about carving knives. What about salt?

What about humanity per se?