Andy78

NNN - that sounds a great idea, and I'll try to contain my pleasure Zombie - I've already reserved my front row seat I'm going to sit back with a single malt and enjoy the show Dad - Money = good, time in lieu = bad. "Margaret" isn't too bad, it's just my manager has let her get away with too much for too long s to all

MJ - I can only hope, but yeah she's going to have a few difficult questions to answer when she gets back Vic - I think Amazon have just run out, but you might find one on E-Bay Asamvav - a holiday will definitely be what the doctor ordered

Now if the guy didn't earn £130k a week, then the fine might actually mean something.

I think these students have seen Die Hard With A Vengeance once too often. For those who don't recall the line: "Beer is usually taken internally, John." (Connie Kowalski to John McClane)

So as anyone who read my last blog entry knows, I'm currently stuck working every hour God sends thanks to my manager sodding off on holiday. Anyway, today in our team meeting one of the other statisticians (who I'll call Margaret), reminds us all she is away next week on Thursday and Friday. The dumb bitch actually had the nerve to ask if I (yes me, yes Andy, yes this poor dumb sod who is already working 63 hours a week) would cover her work while she is away (after she had actually declined to help me out while I'm putting the database together). She was oddly surprised when I told her not bloody likely! So she runs off and tells the other boss about the bad lazy Andy - after all it's only about four hours work she tells me (as if I don't already know, I do the same job you do Margaret). If it was just the end of month figures, then yeah about four hours sounds right; except of course, it is also the end of quarter figures (another four to five hours work on top). So not content with seeing me working 63 hours next week, Margaret grants me the opportunity to work 72 hours - yeah right, where on my face does it say "feckin' eejit here"! Twenty minutes later, there's a knock-knock on my door, and I get asked why I felt it necessary to tell Margaret where to go and how to get there. So I tell our other boss (who I'll call Suzie) that because my manager has gone off on holiday, I'm stuck setting up the new database on top of my normal workload, so I just don't have the time to spare to help. Suzie then asks me why I'm doing it, when her understanding was that it could wait until my manager got back from holiday. Well it turns out nobody (i.e. my manager) bothered telling Suzie that the project deadline had been brought forward by a month. So I get out my mark-10 super-sized special-edition shit-stirring spoon and set it on maximum. After filling Suzie in on everything, and showing her the minutes from our April team meeting when the new deadline was announced (the minutes that say my manager to advise Suzie of the new deadline date), she is now seriously pissed at my manager for not telling her about the project deadline being brought forward. Suzie is usually only responsible for data QA, she doesn't get involved in the day-to-day data and project management side of things (after all that's my manager's job). But since Suzie and my manager cross-cover, Suzie is now responsible for the database set up and any issues are going to be down to her to resolve - welcome to my world! It seems Suzie would have tried to persuade my manager to either postpone her holiday or take it a month or so earlier if she'd known about the new deadline. Well Suzie (oh Great Brain of Britain), I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess that is precisely why my manager didn't tell you. As you can guess, my manager also hadn't told Suzie about the insane number of hours I would be working over the next few weeks either, but since Suzie is currently in charge she has decided that I will get paid instead of having to take the time back; so I'll get a nice little holiday out of it all. And boy will I ever need one! Thanks for listening/reading to me vent. I feel a little better now.

That's right. The first countries moved over to the Euro on Jan 1st 1999, but their local currencies remained legal tender until 2002 or so; which probably explains the Mole episode with the lira still in use.

NNN - here is the link http://www.gayauthors.org/forums/topic/33667-a-note-to-the-critics/page__hl__+note%20+to%20+the%20+critics#entry331904

But look what it did to your head It's all sideways tilted and covered in orange hair

I have done. When I was fourteen, my BF at the time wore braces - no major headgear or anything, just regular braces. And then another BF when I was sixteen wore braces as well. Why did I go out with them? Well they were still human, and damn cute as well. It's not like they were going to go all Borg on me, and try and assimilate me

I remember reading the original post, and posting in the thread (I think it was on Christmas morning). It was actually a couple of days before I posted my first story, and I was totally shocked to find a writer of Bill's calibre talking about throwing in the towel over what went into a review. I was so shocked it almost put me off posting my story. But thankfully with a few kind words from Bill (and Lugh), I went ahead and posted. And I'm so glad I did. I think any reader is entitled to form their own opinions on our stories, but I agree that anything that is either overly critical or nitpicky over things such as editing/grammar is best done via PM. That way it gives the author a chance to resolve any such issues, without it being brought to the attention of all and sundry, for all time. We all write for the love of the craft and love sharing our stories with the GA community, however most of us are not professional authors, and none of our stories posted here have been professionally edited. If you only have something negative to say about a story or if there is a minor issue you have picked up on, then it should be done via PM; as I have done in the past with minor editing/formatting issues. As my English teacher always said, "Praise in public, criticise in private".

Happy birthday Rob. Hope you have a great day.

Happy Birthday Steve

This is one of my favourite chapters so far. But yeah, I'm also worried about the bathroom visit. Things happen in school bathrooms, and very rarely do teachers ever check them. I'm also out of likes. I'll have to catch you tomorrow.

Hi Jimmy, Welcome from the shadows. New victims, erm, authors, are always welcome

Thanks guys s to all Joann, I could never take you up on that offer - but thanks anyway

Thanks Mark NotNoNever - don't worry vengeance shall be mine. I'm going to set up the reporting so that it will require a password (which only I will know, and will periodically change without warning ). As for being paid? Yeah right. I've been told I can take the time back (as and when it is convenient with my manager).

The only "bunnyhug" I've heard of is the dance If I started calling some of our local hoodies "bunnyhugs", I'd end up in my local hospital sucking dinner through a straw

All I know is that it started in the mid 19th century (probably the 1840s) and was used by street salesmen (think Steptoe and Son). Though there are some very amusing things that come about because of the way Cockney Rhyming Slang is often truncated (apple and pears = stairs, but we usually just say "apples"; dog and bone = phone, but we usually just say "dog"), so some word origins are obscure to anyone who doesn't know the slang. One of the more extreme examples: Most of us know the word "berk" which is a very mild pejorative for an idiot or a foolish person, however it actually comes from the Cockney "Berkeley Hunt" (Berkeley was truncated to "Berk" and still is), which is the Cockney Rhyming Slang for one of the GA banned words (since there are only two, it shouldn't be too hard to guess which word I mean). So the next time you quite innocently call someone a berk, keep in mind what you are actually calling them .

So I have just finished working my seventh straight day, and it's gonna carry on for another three weeks. That means I'll have worked twenty-eight straight days by the time this is done (or 252 hours, or 15120 minutes, damn this just sounds worse and worse)! At work we are setting up a new database for our cancer treatments and diagnoses, which will form part of a much larger new national dataset. We knew this design project was going to be happening over these four weeks (have done since April), and my manager chooses these three weeks to bugger off on holiday! So that leaves muggins here having to design the entire database from scratch; and that's on top of working my regular Monday-Friday 9-5 job. There are three other senior clinical statisticians, and have they even offered to help? Of course not. Why would they? After all, they are going to benefit from the database once its finished and I've covered for them before! It's the first rule of the National Health Service - I scratch your back, you stick a knife in mine! It's a highly clinical two hundred and thirty eight item dataset. I have to set up all the table relationships, do all of the data mapping, set up the data item dropdowns, set up all of the reverse look-up values, write in all of the validation rules, and write the reporting. And then to cap it all off, I've got to the bloody QA on it as well. With a go-live date of October 15th, I've got so much work to do to pull this off, and most of it is actually my manager's responsibility. I am so pissed off, it's not even funny. The only thing keeping me going through all of this, is knowing once it is finished my job will become a lot easier. So anyway, I'll apologise in advance if I'm snappy with anyone. I should also probably give soapbox a wide berth for the next month.

One from my childhood. Cool/nice = Cool bananas We thought we were so cool saying everything was "cool bananas"

So many. Slang terms for money (some are Cockney rhyming slang): Shrapnel = 1p and 2p coins (comes from shrapnel being small bits of metal) Godiva = £5 (Lady Godiva = fiver; fiver is a slang term for £5) Cockle = £10 (comes from: cock and hen = ten) Apple = £20 (apple core = score; score is an old fashioned term for twenty) Pony = £25 (back in the days of the Empire, the Indian 25 rupee bank note had a picture of a pony on it) Ton = £100 (comes from 100 cubic feet of storage capacity in shipping was called a ton) Monkey = £500 (back in the days of the Empire, the Indian 500 rupee bank note had a picture of a monkey on it) G or K = £1000 (G is simply the abbreviation of "grand", in that one grand = £1000; K is the abbreviation of the prefix kilo, there are 1000 units in a kilo)

Thanks for sharing Rob. I've learned over the years with some of the things my own mum has done that if you don't laugh at these things you'll only end up crying. Caring for someone with any kind of mental health problem requires both a sense of humour and the ability to realise that nothing they do is really their own fault.

I can be very evil when I want to be. I wanna write something a bit more cheerful, but nothing is coming to mind. Looking forward to your blog entry - I think

“In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm, they rest as if in their mother's house: frightened by no storm, sheltered by the Hand of God.” Closing stanza of Kindertotenlieder The rain was beating down hard in the Whitechapel area of East London, the wind was howling, and the streets were understandably deserted. A dark figure entered The Royal London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road, and in spite of the driving rain outside, it was bone dry as it

Kindertotenlieder translates as “songs on the death of children”. Kindertotenlieder is a piece of twentieth century classical music (known as a song cycle) written by Gustav Mahler during the period 1901-1904. The lyrics of the song cycle are the words of five poems (out of a total of four hundred and twenty eight) written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833-1834 about the illness and death of his children from scarlet fever; tragically, four years after he had finished writing Kindertotenlieder, Mah