Archive for October, 2007

Psychic job finding
Besides fixing PCs, part of my job at the moment is calling in on local businesses and introducing myself. You’d be surprised how often such un-announced visits turn up work. Yesterday we called in on a large motorcycle shop in Swindon. We walked in and there was a man and a woman behind the counter and a dude leaning on the other side. The bloke behind the counter was on the phone.

We walk up to the counter and John says, “Hello, we’re computer technicians and … ” and all three of them start laughing. John and me look at each other querulously. “Seriously?” says the lady. “Ermmm … yes.” I say. They all laugh again. Then the bloke on the phone says, “I’ll call you back.” and hangs up.

Turns out that the manager of the shop had been having some grief with a desktop PC. The PC, equipped with Vista, wouldn’t work with their printer and was refusing to send and receive email. They’d previously employed one of my competitors to come out and fix the system – despite spending several hours there and charging them $600 for the honour, he’d failed to fix anything. Feeling a bit stung by my fellow computer professionals, they’d let their PC agro go a bit longer. Finally, that very morning, mere seconds before John and I walked into their shop, they’d finally had enough and were on the phone to another of my competitors arranging to get it fixed. Anyway, to cut the story short – I fixed their PC pretty quickly and the manager was so pleased that he insisted I use him if anyone needed a reference.

Par-tay
On Saturday we threw a little party to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. This was originally planned as a big knees-up, with sound system and lights, but we got a glut of cancellations at the last minute. It turned into a fairly simple piss-up for 14 of our closer friends and whilst I was pissed off with all the last minute cancellations, it was still a cracking night.

Pain in the RIB
After all the work over the winter by everyone in the surf club, the first day of nippers finally rolled around last Sunday. This is the full-on club day during which everyone from the five year olds to the grey-haired grandads get onto the beach. The big problem from my point of view was that I was on patrol that day, but also supposed to be handling registrations. Fortunately a couple of helpful club members stepped into the breach and handled the sign-ups for me, letting me get onto the beach. If I’d known what was going to happen I think I’d have retreated behind my desk and done the paperwork.

I should preface the following by pointing out that I am the original walking accident. If there’s something to walk into, to cut yourself on or to contract a tropical disease from, I’ll find it. I walked onto the beach to help set-up the shelter. As we were maneouvring one of the side panels round, I swiped the front panel (which was lying flat on the sand) with my left foot and sliced several layers of skin off the pad of my little toe. I was sent up to the first aid room where Wes disinfected it and put it a good bandage on it. Not bad for my first 30 seconds.

Sporting a fetching bandage on my foot I went back down to the beach where nippers was, by now, in full swing. The various age managers (including my missus) were running the kids through their paces and the older kids were getting ready for the first board paddle of the day. Byron, the patrol captain, asked Garry and I to patrol the surf in the IRB – there being a fairly lively swell rolling in. We took to the water and escorted all the kids doing board paddles round the various cans that had been set up in the water. We pulled one girl out of the water who’d paniced in the surf and returned her to shore.

After a good 90 minutes of patrol, we began our run into shore. The surf being what it was I got ready to get out of the IRB as quickly as possible to shore it up and make sure it didn’t turn sideways and get flipped by a wave. As we approached the sand I took my feet out of the foot-holds, read to jump out – unfortunately Garry chose that moment to give a last squirt of the throttle to take us over the last wave. I slid down the rib’s pontoon backwards and banged my back heavily on the large bolt that holds the outboard to the transom. It hurt like fuck.

I managed to get up and out of the boat, but my back was hurting like hell and Matt had to take over crew duties, while I went back to the shelter to nurse my injuries. It was bloody painful sitting down and standing up. Thanks to prior experience of such injuries (during rugby matches as a kid) I had a good idea of how my back was going to feel the next day and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I consoled myself with a roving patrol on the quad bike, during which I drove all the way to the southern end of the beach – I’d never been that far up. It was beautiful down there – there being no houses or anything – just the breakwall and the Broughton River entering the sea. I had a little look around and then pointed the quad north and returned to base.

With two o’clock approaching, we began the clean-up process – tidying everything away, washing it down and storing it. At shift-end we all went up to the radio room, just in time to see a humpback whale and its calf play only about 800metres off-shore. The whale did multiple breaches as it slowly tracked south heading in the direction of Jervis Bay. From the sublime to the bizarre though …

As we all took turns with the binoculars, three coppers walked into the radio room and asked us about the ‘washed up body’. This turned out not to be some unfortunate drowning victim but a classic case of chinese whispers. Earlier in the day, a kite surfer had spoken to us because he’d managed to lose his kite. He’d swum back to shore and wondered if we could retrieve his kite for him. By then it had blown way north and so we handed collection over to our colleagues in Sandy Point, who called out the jetboat from Surftown. Anyway, in the course of that kite’s journey north, various members of the public had spotted it and phoned it in – a couple suggested they saw a body attached to it. Hence the arrival of the old bill. Byron explained the real deal to them and they left – must have irritated them, having to drop their on-going pointless harrassment of motorists to investigate a real incident.

We were due a committee meeting at 2:30, giving me just enough time to shower and change. Unfortunately, Liz had driven my car home, leaving me without a change of clothes or even a towel. So I had to sit through a very dull three hour committee meeting with a buggered back, sliced open foot and still covered in sand and salt in my patrol uniform. By the time the meeting ended I was not a happy camper.

Next day my back hurt so much I cancelled all my meetings for the week ahead – there was after all, no way I could go around crawling under desks fixing PCs. Three days on, it’s starting to feel a lot better, but there’s no way I’ll ever be getting in the IRB without a wetsuit on again.

Prang
About six weeks ago an old biddy reversed into Liz’s car and then did a runner. The good news is that the insurance company have now nailed the bitch and are fixing the car with no excess or impact on no-claims. You can run …