Rick's b.log - entry 2022/02/27

A lovely weekend

Today? Another sunny day. As yesterday, slightly marred by a freezing morning that brought a chilly wind until about 1pm. But out of the wind it was hot.

In the late morning, time for more chips. Remembering a comment Vince made, I created a video. Turns out that the timer's five minutes works out to be closer to four. Well, even better - faster!

When editing the video, I noticed that my chaffinch is back. That's the really loud chirpy bird towards the end of the video.

I washed Caoimhe, and then not wanting to run the engine for the short time it took to go around back, I went for a drive. Only about 7km, 16 minutes. Didn't want to go far - have you seen the price of fuel? Passed a group of hunters at the top of the driveway. It crossed my mind to do a route that would take me past the end of the driveway multiple times, but not a one of them looked like they had a sense of humour.

Back home, I'll be honest. I made a tea, pulled a deck chair around the end of the house (out of the wind) and just sat there enjoying the sun. For, like, two hours.

Then I went to "play in the water". This meant taking a rake to the stream and dredging for useful sized stones to drop on the top of my dam. Anna came with me, and was certain to examine everything.

I wonder what's in here?

Afterwards I took Anna back. I didn't want her wandering around out of sight when there are hunters nearby. She wasn't happy with that until a pouch of Felix fell from the sky. Cats are much easier than children - they can be conditioned to recognise Felix pouches. ☺
It also helps that they have very small brains. I watched, the other day, Anna getting upset because she couldn't pull any crunchies out of the bag. Perhaps because she was standing on it?

As it was too nice to go back in, but the sun was losing its heat, I decided to de-weed and tidy up some of the pots out front. Some, which looked like piles of grass, actually had bulbs lurking inside. So I had to pull out the weeds while trying not to damage the plants I wanted to keep. I was mostly successful, but one was a right tangle and there were a few casualties.

PS2 games

The first is Taxi 3 in which you have to race around major roads to make checkpoints in time. It's... actually terrible. The grpahics are sub-par, the soundtrack is awful, the car handling is pathetic (crashing headlong into an oncoming car sent it flying away somewhere while I sustained "some damage"). The missions are basically flooring it to whizz around various roads and motorways to pass checkpoints before the timer runs out. There's no on-screen indication of how far you have to go, only a count down timer.
The second mission was to escort a pregnant woman to the hospital, being very sure not to hit anything or jar the car too much because preggies are delicate. Accordingly, I hit everything I could and only succeeded in wrecking the car, but seemingly with no penalty for the impacts with a woman in labour in the car. At this point I took the disc out and tossed it behind me. It's down the back of the bookshelf, I think. I don't care. That's how awful this game is. Just a lame-ass attempt to cash in on a popular movie.

The second? Much better. Smuggler's Run (nothing to do with Star Wars). You can pick a vehicle and go on missions that are basically dash over to grab some loot, dash back to "home base" to drop it off. If another car hits you, they swipe the loot. If you hit them, you can swipe it if they have it.
I did, amazingly, actually mamage to get five bags of loot within the time (ten minutes?). I impressed myself, as I usually suck at games.
Very usefully, the developers included a "Joy ride" mode, where you can pick a map (forest, desert, snow) and one of the vehicles, and then just... well... joy ride.
The physics are a bit ridiculous, if you time it right you can manage to get the car propped up on the front bumper (tail up) and spinning around. Or if you crash in the right way, you can keep the accelerator down and turn and just roll and roll and roll. Hitting hikers will throw them a ridiculous distance.
There is a "lighter cars" cheat that takes the acrobatics up to eleven. Like in the desert level, going up a sand dune, flying over what looked like and oil field, and then landing in a pueblo. Doing dumb stuff like this is more amusing than playing the game...

I have also ordered from eBay a game called Bully (or Canis Canem Edit in Europe). I actually got this because it was a Rock Star game not unlike the PS2 era Grand Theft Auto (think GTA3) but set in a school. It turns out that this game has a bit of a reputation.
Ordered on the 20th, posted on the 21st, expected to be delivered around the 11th of March. What? I know they're using "Economy Int'l Postage" but are they sellotaping it to a migratory bird or something? The tracking shows it made it to Wrexham for the 22nd, and then nothing. Awaiting a crate to be filled? Stuck in customs? Lost in space?

A hellish end of the week

Well, the morning guy took last week as his holiday (outstanding days and hours must be used by the end of March). His colleague has... actually only worked three days since the Christmas break. It was her seventh week of absence. Why? No idea.
The afternoon guy came in on Monday and saw what a disaster things were, so he didn't come in any more.
The daytime woman is also absent - she has Covid.
Which meant, out of a team of five, only the afternoon woman turned up. The job has been done by various people from production. There are a couple of people who should know how to do stuff (mostly filling in for the eternally absent woman), but unfortunately they aren't particularly fast, and they often get paired with whoever production is willing to let go to plonge which, let's face it, isn't going to be their best workers.
Whoever was put in on Wednesday evening made such a balls-up of it that my boss caught up with me on Thursday morning and basically said "drop everything and go to plonge". I went it at half nine, went on my break at ten past three, and in the nearly six hours only just managed to sort out the complete and utter disaster. Seriously, in all my time there I've never seen it look so bad when somebody was supposed to be working there. Stuff was piled up so much that one of the girls who came in looking for a bowl was actually climbing over things. Me? I used the other door. ☺
On Friday, same deal but things were a little more relaxed. There was lots to do, but nothing like Thursday. I stopped at half two in order to give myself time to do the bare minimum - emptying the bins and restocking everything. I just let everything else fall by the wayside. Accordingly, the staff break room and changing rooms look like a pigsty. Well, I can't do two things at once. I will, however, need to sort that out tomorrow. Unless it's still a disaster in plonge. The guy should be back from his holiday. The daytime woman will be off until at least Wednesday, depending on how and when she tests negative. As for the absent guy and the woman who is lost in space? No idea. And, to be honest, I don't really care.
Suffice to say that if eternally absent should ever return and dare to complain about how I do my job (she seems to think that as I'm part of the cleaning team (as they are) then I should be willing to do some of her work - I will happily do that when she cleans the toilets for me.... oh, wait, you mean we actually have different roles? damn, that's just too complicated to fathom!), I might have some choice words to say.

So, tomorrow... Totally looking forward to it. ☺

Oh, I should add, I had my yearly interview recently. Two things were amusing.

The first was the brief expression that passed my boss's face when I said that I like my job. I do (mostly) like my job. I work sane hours, 9pm to 4.45pm (or from 8.30am when in peak production time). I am pretty much left to my own to get on with stuff. The worker's committee is getting on my case from time to time about whether or not I'm doing my job properly. One of them called me out for 'disinfecting' the tables in the staff break room by wiping a soapy cloth over the table, instead of using an antibacterial solution. I told her exactly why anti-bac is utterly useless against a virus, explained what a virus is, and why soap works. She probably understood none of it, because I think she had reached a conclusion in her mind before saying anything. Oh well, I'm more than happy to point my boss at the CDC's website which will more or less back me up (antibac = useless, soap = good).
Other than minor things like that, I am pretty much left to myself. When working in plonge on Thursday and Friday, I looked after the little plonge by myself (the difference is big plonge has a big machine for washing flat things like baking trays, moulds, and the like; which little plonge is for everything else like mixing bowls (from hand-held to big hundred litre industrial jobbies), whisks (from hand-held to big industrial jobbies)... you get the idea.
I am capable of working in a team, but as an introvert I much prefer to work by myself. Pace myself, get things done. It also helps my mind greatly if I don't have to explain my logic process to anybody else.
So, yeah, I like my job.

The second amusing thing was that I wrote, under the bit about "what did I think of this interview" a rather pointed commentary of how much I hated the website. She corrected my French, and deleted the rude parts, all without saying anything. So what remained was a polite, grammatically correct, outline of why their site sucked donkey balls... though I'm not quite sure suce les testicles d'âne quite carries the same meaning.

Making chips in an air fryer

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David Pilling, 28th February 2022, 01:53

Dettol do two versions of a product one scented, one not. To the bystander it is obvious the scented one is really powerful and the non-scented is as much use as water. Which version of the placebo effect is that.    Possibly scented is better because you can tell where you've been with it, but maybe it gives a false sense of security.

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