Clichéd Christmas Carping: Part 32(b)

I've heard it stated that Christmas is a cruel joke perpetrated upon the broke, the lonely, and the depressed. A plausible, but maudlin and slightly pretentious statement. Granted, it's a right old pain in the crotch, but since it's 'but once a year', it's one I can live with. Anyway, top things about Christmas: Christmas market in Argyll Street with it's neat little wooden stalls and amusing tat. (obviously stolen from Lapland New Forest...) German sausage sellers. Without them, I'd have died of hunger on many of my abortive Christmas shopping trips. The lights on the trees in Sauchiehall Street. Lovely! In fact, the plethora of Christmas lighting strung up over various bits of greenery at St Georges Cross and Cowcaddens. Beats the cack in George Square. Not that you'd know it was fucking christmas in my current place of work. Half-day on Christmas eve? Ha! Don't be so fucking silly! No, if you want to leave early, you need to make up the time apparently. How about I turn up at 4pm tomorrow and take 45 minute lunches for the next two months? If we're going to play silly buggers, I want to be the king of the castle! Buncha Crotch Pheasants! On top of this indignity, the cretins decide to pay us on the 23rd. Every other fucker on the planet seems to get their Christmas wage a good week before the 25th, you know, so that they can go and do their Christmas shopping........... Not the employees of the company I work for! Instead I have to fight the clock as well as the crowds in an insane after work dash, two days before the day we all celebrate the birth of the little babby Jimmy Christ, usually by getting wasted and buying each other the finest consumer durables China has to offer. Stereotypical Christmas bitches in no particular order: Endless queues? Check! Doddering fools? Check! Pile upon pile of worthless tat? Check! Pissy weather? Check! Shakin Bastard Stevens and Paul Fucking McCartney on the PA? Check! (x100000) Do my shopping earlier? Fuck off! I have neither the time nor the inclination to think about the annual orgy until I need to, it's just that a three mile trolley dash in the dark is about as much fun as listening to the Catholic church whingeing about a childrens party song. Next year, I do it all on-line................ All malignance aside, have yourselves a safe, sane and gently innebriated Christmas.

Low- Just Like Christmas

How To Disappear Completely

None of you will be surprised to know that I both crave attention and like nothing more than being left alone. It's a real fucker, I tell thee. Oddly enough, I generally tend to have my requests for peace and quiet granted to me. In fact I rarely have to ask, which is nice..... It's a bit harder when I want everyone to look my way, so I suppose that's why I blog. Then I can combine the two disciplines. I can act the arse to a small group of people AND be left in peace to listen to music, tend to my plants, wash the dishes and play old Spectrum games on my PC.

Anyway, it came to my notice recently that the Inland Revenue have no idea that I'm working.

Woohoo!

Recently, the company I worked for was taken over* and since the tax bods were doing a wee audit on me anyway with regard to unpaid taxes (easy Duff, I'm still PAYE, I won't be sharing a cell with Lester Pigot and Ken Dodd just yet), it came to their notice that I was no longer working for Solicitor 'X' and for whatever reason, my new employers hadn't updated them on the chaos that they were about to unleash. You do realise it would have been months or years before they caught up with me had my dear old Ma not been residing at my previous address........

This leads me to my other disappearing act. Over the past few weeks, the whole Glasgow operation has been having it's email/operating systems changed over to those used by the new company. Quite apart from realising that we've actually gone back to the dark ages with regard to how Windows works (I swear, my old Commodore 64 was more user friendly), they've also been kind enough to fuck up my email so that all emails sent to the Glasgow offices in general avoid me, and me alone. 'Im also unable get in touch with anyone else, unless they happen to know my new email address. To all intents and purposes, I might as well not exist.........

So, there you have it, I'm 'The Man With No Name', 'The Outlaw', 'The Fugitive', 'The Black Rider'.............I shall bring the company to it's knees from within! The Silent Assasin will strike without mercy!

..........as long as it doesn't affect my holiday allocation of course.........

*Technically speaking, it was 'merged', but then technically speaking Guido Fawkes is a journalist.........

Spinny wind vane thingy at North Berwick.

Body Language Was Never My Strong Suit

'The Bedouin' gets a lick of paint. I wanted him to hire me as his cabin boy, but he just gave me a funny look and threatened to call the police.

You know that moment? The one where you suddenly realise the person you're talking to has glazed over and is no longer listening to a word you're saying.........

I do that a dozen times a day. Maybe it's because I'm not interested in what anyones got to say. That could be it. I could just be a rude and supercillious cunt. I don't know, people are fucking boring, they bang on relentlessly, humourlessly, they talk unbidden about things you couldn't possibly care about, and they do it at gratuitous fucking length. Do I do it? Hell, sure I do, but you see, I have this awesome weapon in my armoury which makes me superior. heavens, you dear reader might have this ability too, for it is by no means unique to me. It's called self awareness. I know when I've gone off the deep end, when I'm heading into those dark woods of incoherence, I see the dimming of the lights, the barely visible nods as my victim tries to make it obvious they'd rather eat their own entrails than hear any more, but at the same time trying not to make it too obvious so they don't offend me. I see the signs and I stop. In fact, if you completely fucking ignore me, I stop even quicker , I check myself and realise that yes, nobody gives a damn. You get good at it after a while and learn the art of keeping it short and sweet.

Sadly, the two people I sit with have no such ability. The guy opposite me, whilst he's a nice enough chap, and sometimes quite funny, seems to think I'm interested in what the increasingly paranoid mouth breathers on the Follow Follow Rangers Fan Forum have to say. I couldn't give a flying fuck for the opinions of the average Partick Thistle fan, so why in the name of all that's Holy does he think I care about the delusional, petty rantings of Big Shuggy McPopehater from Larkhall? Answers on a postcard.

The other menace sits next to me, and again she's actually alright in many ways, but fuck me!, once she warms to her subject, there is absolutely no fucking stopping her. Just when you think it's come to an end, she starts up again. Finally, you think you've ridden it out, but no, theres more. Sometimes it feels like you have to physically leave the desk to stop her in her tracks. I deserve all I get I suppose, I engage her in conversation sometimes and nobody should have any sympathy for me in those situations............It's not always like that though and many's the time it's taken me the best part of two minutes to escape the gravitational pull of my desk, just so I don't have to listen to her prattling, usually in an exaggerated fashion that resembles someone doing a very laboured and not terribly funny stand up routine.

The thing I wonder is why they don't read the signals. Is it just that they have no knowledge of what a very bored man looks like? Is it deliberate? Are they just trying to drive me mad? If so, then that's alright, because I'm a man half way to fucking delirium anyway, one more little shove won't do any harm. It's the other option that scares me.. If neither of them know that zero eye contact, grunted responses and veiled hints that they might be talking about something I couldn't give two fucks about don't work, then frankly, I might as well run bollock naked through the office, photocopy my balls and staple the results to the department managers forehead for all the difference it'll make.

Sorry, you were saying..................?

View From My Desk At Work/Economic Models Explained With Cows

On a good day, the blue sky and the jet trails and the cloud forms and the sunlight on the glass buildings all seem to bring a little more energy to my movement. The traffic and the motorway and the noise can all go fuck themselves......

If it's chucking it down, if it's grey and foreboding, then it's no better than any other view in the office and I have to turn to double heaps of Nescafe to stop me crashing out on the keyboard.....

Guess what I'm more used to doing? Just have me potted and have done with it.

In other news....

That's Bock The Robber away over to Wordpress. Hell mend him.........I never seem to go a week without someone grumbling about leaving Blogger....Am I the only one who's not had problems with Blogger since it changed? People who were on Blogger pre-Beta will tell you how awful it could be. The amount of times I almost lost my mind with rage just because the stupid fucker wouldn't upload a photo or two..........Seven Days would be impossible without the beta version. That said, as long as everything works, I'm easy pleased. I'm led to believe that an 'all singing, all dancing' Wordpress site is vastly superior.

Anyway, I'm just bitchin because I have to to re-link. Och!

Someone sent me this at work today. It's probably fairly old to a lot of you, but it made my day.

Economic Models explained with Cows- 2007 update

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the
milk away...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.

You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of
credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a
debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all
four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.

The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a
Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who
sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The
annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one
more.

You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving
youwith nine cows.

No balance sheet provided with the release.

The public then buys your bull.


THE ANDERSEN MODEL
You have two cows.
You shred them.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want
three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.

You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and
produce twenty times the milk.

You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market
it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and
milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.


AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the **** out of you and invade your
country.

You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy....

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

More suggestions welcomed.............

I Wanna Sweep the Streets!!!!

Anything but what I'm doing now! *

Work has finally ground me down. It's a wonder it hasn't happened sooner, I must have a bigger masochistic streak than I thought. The idea of having to alternate between long, grinding, endless days of tedious mouse clicking and being up to my ears in paperwork that's been barely explained to me by the worlds most unapproachable man has finally taken it's toll on me. It's either the job or me........

The CV is being dusted down as I speak, references shall be sought and I fully expect to be in a similarly infuriating and soul crushing job in two months time. It's just that from here even the most threadbare and yellowing of lawns looks more appealing.

I admit to being an ill-educated peasant with serious issues regarding self application. I will tell you I don't have limited horizons but others may inform you otherwise. I'll break the cycle eventually, probably when I'm least expecting to, but until then the merry-go-round of crap office jobs looks like continuing......



*I hear they get paid as well as I do, if not better.....