Roxy means no 'arm

Finally, after what seems like forever, I have a job. It's not great pay, it's temporary and part time. But it's work - and it's better money than the benefits route.

Because we now have a dog in the house, there has always been the thought of trying to find something so that Roxy doesn't spend too long on her own. As I have mentioned before, she is a bit clingy, but spending over three years in a rescue centre will do that to you, I imagine. My job, beginning next week, is on the twilight shift, finishing at ten pm. As Julie will be home before I leave for work, there won't be any issues. This week, on the other hand, I am working afternoons, so there are a couple of hours where Roxy has the house to herself.

Where is he?

Four days into the week, and Roxy has behaved herself so far. Only one day where Julie came home to a puddle. However, being very much a family member, she doesn't like it when people go away for a while. That said, Roxy has got the idea that Julie will be back, and back at a certain time. Whatever she was doing before, when it comes near to time, Roxy will make sure she is near the door, or looking out of the window.

In my case, since I drive, every time a car pulls up, Roxy perks up. A pity that we live opposite a church hall that has events taking place every evening...

Of course, when I finally turn up, Roxy immediately demands attention, licking my face, holding herself close to me for a stroke - and then it's straight onto the sofa so the two of us can sit on either end, while she is in the middle, being the centre, as it were, of attention.

As you read this, it will have been yesterday evening that I got home and was mugg... er, greeted by Roxy before being allowed to greet my wife. On the sofa a short time later, I was stroking one of Roxy's forelegs. Roxy, in the meantime, was looking at Julie, who had dared to stop rubbing Roxy's belly.

After a while, Roxy relaxed and lay her head back on my arm, and it was such a cute picture that we had to capture the moment.

Altogether now - "Awwwwwww!"

There was just one problem. I wanted to move, but I didn't want to disturb her now that she was comfortable. Unfortunately, that decision was being taken out of my hands...

Over an hour after I extricated myself, my arm is still sore where Roxy's head was laid. I love ye, dog, but you're no lightweight.

A lengthy problem

This one is old. And I mean 'before I met Julie' old.

I used to work in a warehouse that stocked and supplied electronic components. It was a pretty big warehouse, and at the time this took place, I was a shift team leader in the goods in department.

As anyone who has ordered multiple items at a single time knows, what you ordered isn't necessarily what you receive. One supplier even threatened to take us to court because we were refusing to pay for items we hadn't received - but they were adamant they had shipped. And then they found said items in a dark corner of their own warehouse. And two suppliers seemed to think it would be a jolly good wheeze to throw a load of components into a box with polystyrene chips (a fantastic idea, courtesy of static electricity), and then leave us to guess what each item may be.

It didn't help that the term MICROelectronics was often a very salient term to describe the parts. While some items had the device code printed on them somewhere, others were too small to fit the entire code, no matter how small the print.

As team leader, it fell to me to contact the sales department in question and ask them to iron out any problems. Cue this conversation (and yes, Mary was Irish)...

All around me, people were either laughing or demanding to know what the laughter was about. All I could think of was that I had just well and truly scuppered my chances of asking Mary out...

A flowery fate.

Recently, Julie and me finally had a week off together, so we decided to go and visit my mum up in Birmingham.
As it happened, this coincided with the end of Julie's job at the CAB, a place she had worked at for quite some time. Obviously, not every place of employment works like this, but when the news broke that Julie was leaving the Bureau, there was a genuine disappointment (and relief for Julie, who had been trying to leave the bloody place for years). There was also a not insubstantial whip-round. In addition to this, a number of other staff members felt compelled to shower my wife with gifts directly and in addition to what may have been planned.

So it was that I received a phone call, asking me to collect her from the Bureau. When I drove up to the office, what appeared to be a triffid walked out. It was only when Julie's faced peeked out from behind the foliage that I undid the car's automatic locks...
Yes, she was a popular person. Even the boss chipped in, by buying some fake medals and awarding them to her, claiming that they were for long service, toleration of a certain colleague, and success in the face of labyrinthine and constantly changing procedures and protocols.

One such gift was a bowl of flowering plants - absolutely lovely, but there was an immediate problem. Since we were going to be visiting my mother in two days' time, leaving them in our front room without care may have been problematic.

PS
In case you're wondering, the flowers are still alive and flourishing nicely.

Transitory Jubilations

Nationally, and internationally, there have been some big reasons for hogging the headlines in a positive manner. One of them was the very recent transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. It took a few days to do it, but it was easily visible to anyone who had the most rudimentary of equipment. Even a pair of cheap binoculars would have done it - although you had to take precautions, naturally. Even with a little disc taken off, there's plenty of light to cause permanent damage to your eyes. Take a look at this cunning device for eclipse-watching.

Clever, eh? Would it have been worth looking like a wally, though, just to see a little dot on the face of the sun? Well, yes. Don't take my word for it, here's a picture of Venus set against the sun, taken on June 4th.

In case you weren't sure, that little black circle is Venus, set against
a magnificent dawning sun.

Beautiful, isn't it?*
Sadly, by the time you read this, it will all be over, bar the dissection of data gathered by various scientists. The last time it happened was back in 2004, but don't get excited, because I can pretty much guarantee you'll never have a chance to see it first-hand again. You see, this particular phenomenon only occurs in widely space pairs over an even more widely-spaced period of time. Here's a good description of the science bit - with no difficult parts.

I was talking about this to a female colleague of mine last week, as we sat in the canteen at work. At another table, one of our other colleagues was sat playing a game on his phone. Most of the talk was between my female friend and myself and it was a little vague, because we were excitedly talking at cross-purposes about the transit and trying to explain it to yet another colleague.
The point we were especially trying to make was the need for him to pull his finger out and make plans to either observe the transit of Venus or book a berth in a cryogenics facility. After all, it was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as my female colleague explained - before the game-player suddenly jumped in and came up with a comment that blew us all out of the water, metaphorically speaking.

Nice one, mate. Science to a diamond jubilee in one giant and very uneasy step. In case you weren't aware from our last post, Queen Elizabeth has reigned over Britain and certain Commonwealth countries for sixty years now. This fact has elicited a massive jubilee, resulting in a four-day weekend for many and street parties all over.
Quite what this has to do with a planet crossing the face of the sun, I'm not sure, but I suppose I can't really deny he was actually quite correct. Her Majesty, even ignoring her currently advanced age, will never get another chance to see Venus taking a leisurely stroll across our nearest star.
Oh well.

*ZME Science (a superb general science blog by an enthusiastic amateur) has an excellent article with even better photographs, so why not trot along and enrich your mind.

Laurel & Hardy vs. Pinky & Perky.

So I work in a warehouse. You don't need to know what type or what we sell, it makes no odds either way. What you DO need to understand for the purposes of this post is that we often sell to larger customers we term 'Cash & Carry's. These customers sometimes require special handling. One in particular is very... well, particular. Nothing over a certain height, so many copies of paperwork to be provided, special pallet notices to be attached to either end of each pallet, using their reference number, not ours. They're a pain in the proverbial, customers, I tell you.

Fortunately, the customer in this little tale wasn't fussy in the slightest. As long as they get the goods in decent condition, they're as happy as Larry. This was just as well, as the order, as these things go, was just a tad on the large side. In addition, it so transpired that this order arrived when our picking and warehousing systems decided to go belly-up. As far as my team leader was concerned, this was a bonus, because it meant that she wouldn't have to use the hated headset to pick this (or any other) order. Normally, she and her cohort in these matters would get together to pick and check the order as they went. Since the headsets are supposed to be infallible <coughcough>, there would be no need to check the order a second time. Unfortunately, with the systems down, it would need checking, which was a bit of a bugger, because it took up six pallets and six table-top trolleys. That's a lot of checking, trust me.
Enter Iain. Iain is one of the few people in the warehouse I would care to associate with outside of work. He's level-headed, cynical, often confrontational, usually blunt, but also very frequently humorous in a Statler & Waldorf sort of way. He's also a complete wind-up merchant. Iain's also one of the older people in the warehouse, being well into his fifties, which is not normally a problem, since he's also one of the hardest working people in the warehouse.

Back to the order. Our esteemed <coughcough> boss asked me and Iain to give the trolleys and pallets another checking, so we got hold of the paperwork picking list and trudged off excitedly. Keen? Oh yes, couldn't you tell? We got there and viewed the products with some trepidation, which was unsurprising as it managed to reached over halfway along the warehouse. The picking list wasn't much help either. The items came in such large quantities that there simply wasn't enough in the picking beds, which meant that more had to be forklifted down from various places around the warehouse. Unfortunately, all these separate locations were listed elsewhere on the picking list, so while there may have been 72 items on the trolley, I had only 51 from the one location, and the checking was held up as I searched through the paperwork for the second - or, in one case, third - location for the rest.
Add to this the fact that full boxes of some items were put on a separate pallet, while the sub-box quantities were set upon one of the trolleys. Not only that, but running order was only applicable on a particular trolley or pallet, but none of the six-and-six were in order themselves.

Confused yet? We were.

OK, so here's how it was we could find the total quantity of a certain item. Imagine that the customer has ordered 156 of this specific item. Since they come in boxes of sixty, that would mean there would be two full boxes on one of the pallets, and thirty-six loose in a box or boxes on one of the trolleys. Unless they were spread over two boxes, then there would be a chance they were also spread over two separate trolleys. Then, too, there is the possibility I would be scrabbling over various pages of the picking list to try and tally it correctly.

Well, I don't know about you, but I'M confused. In fact, both Iain and I were. It took us hours to check the bloody thing. In fits and starts, punctuated by occasional bits of sanity-preserving silliness and almost constant commentary and mutual piss-taking, we fumbled and stumbled our way through the order until, almost at the the very end, we fell into a truly epic fumble. Six or seven times we counted this one item, each time getting a different result. I tell you, it was really doing our heads in. Eventually, we managed to reach a consensus on the quantity, one that happily managed to match the paperwork - although by that stage, we would have happily foregone that, as long as we two agreed. As we prepared to move on to the next item, Iain sardonically observed this little Gem:

It was.

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Bonus post: Seeing as how we were referencing Laurel and Hardy today, I thought I would share this little clip of Julie and Reynard the hedgehog dancing along to Stan & Ollie in 'Way Out West'. Apparently, it's not viewable in the USA and some other places, because it contains a bit of copyrighted material...
Oh, and it's a little on the quiet side.