Be Excellent To Each Other

I only have to look at a pregnancy test to give it two stripes.

Probably best for women not to take the test straight after a swim in a public pool then, eh?

I only have to look at a woman to make her pregnancy test have two stripes.

I get a lot of blood taken. You'd struggle to do much worse than a lot of fully trained people seem to do.

I think as long as you keep pressure on it after you take the needle out so there's no bruising you're all golden.

Also bear in mind that if you do screw up it won't actually hurt any more than it did with the plastic arm.

I was being tested the other month, and the person taking the blood sample took blood from 4 points as he kept coking it up. I then had to give blood from the artery in my wrist; that hurt.

The plastic arm has never tried taking blood from me though.

The artery blood was what's called an ABG or arterial blood gas sample.

That's just careless.

yeah, it was for blood gas, still hurt though!

Good luck, just make sure you go second, then you can get your own back!

They don't nail to church doors very easily.

Yup. I can't say that when I look for perfection in my burgers that a frosted bun is the missing link, to be honest.

That's just so wrong, in much the same vein as pouring maple syrup over bacon. Or for that matter, eating iced buns/pastries for breakfast.

Americans, eh? Pffft. You'd think they'd know stuff about cheeseburgers.

A ring doughnut as the bun of a bacon bap works surprisingly well.

It's an interesting avenue for experimentation though - that odd mix of really sweet and meaty, savoury flavours.

* tucks into his delicious bowl of sausage'n'custard *

Get out, gramps; maple syrup on bacon is incredible, especially with some fluffy pancakes.

Agree. I had waffles, Bacon and Maple Syrup for brekkie in New York. MrsP was making faces until she tried some.

Deja vu mate, who could forget the infamous KP salt 'n vinegar crisp with chopped Mars bar baguette fine dining concept, complete with warm Vimto...

I once ordered a lamb passanda in an indian restaurant in Bristol. What appeared was a bowl of custard with lamb in.

I've tried it mate, I honestly thought it was rank. I'll take a loaded bacon buttie with tommy sauce any day.

I think i'll try something similar with my new found superpower!

Umm.. I think men only give a positive result if something is wrong (I think it is an indicator for testicular cancer)

Broken! Broken, I say!

Chilli con carne with maple syrup works quite well.

I couldn't see the icon or name, but I knew this had to be your work

Crikey.

That said, it works well with plain pasta. You feel so dirty for doing it, though.

Superpower update : Bread rolls taste too bready.

To be fair, it was wrapped up in a pancake so my hand just instinctively went for the maple syrup before I knew what was happening.


Blood taking update: Just stabbed the plastic arm a couple of times with a needle, feeling better about this afternoon.

Get some choc mate, quick - chocolate can't be 'chocolatey' enough mate!

(Seriously, is this due to antibiotic side effects? Arses. Sorry to hear that mate).

You'll be fine. Just remember: the worst that can happen is your patient will die and it'll be your fault.

Hope this helps!

Top tip #2: Do not ask for a junior hacksaw or bottle of cheap brandy for the patient to take a few swigs before you start.

Good plan, currently eating Frazzles, which also taste awesome.



I'll find out in a few days when I am off them

Can I ask for a bottle of cheap brandy for me to take a few swigs from? Or do you think that sort of thing might be frowned upon?

I'm no doctor mate, but I'm prepared to hazard a guess that a half drunk bottle of Metaxa probably wouldn't be considered good form.

(Seriously, just being an arse here mate - good luck. )

I always put some chocolate in chilli con carne.

Hmmm, I've heard of this numerous times in the past but never tried it. As it happens I'm making a chilli this afternoon/evening and have some dark chocolate.

I've also had some pretty tasty chilli-flavoured chocolate.

Lindt 85% dark chocolate is an excellent addition to chilli - makes it smoother. Mrs C swears by it and her chilli is legendary.

Makes no difference as far as I can tell - more onions and/or more chilli powder has a more satisfying effect

Mole Sauce from Mexico is chocolate based. Not at all sweet though

Yeah, you need to use the proper dark shit.

Like what happens about 9hours after you drink lots of Guinness?

PM me your address, newborn baby isn't far off now.

Seeing as one of our main databases is down, and I really cannot be fucked to go looking for more proper wor right now, I thought i'd do a little checking up on everyone to see what's going on.

I found things out. Ignoring for the sake of convenience the ... 1,078 emails (I spend about half an hour a day trying to keep it below 1,000. The majority have been done of course, but the last time I tried to clear it out, I spent two hours of my personal time just getting it down to 800. That was in November) in my personal inbox:


* The other half of the department I'm in currently has 59 items open that they need to do. They have about 8 full time and 4 part time staff (not including their manager or the overall boss)

*The half of the department I'm in, excluding my open things, has 36 to do. They have 4 full time staff (not including their manager and the overall boss).

*Now me, doing the things I do, which nobody else can do (although gradually, a few people are learning when I have time to show them some of it). I have 97 things to do. I have one part time staff, including everyone.


I literally have more to do than everyone else put together. And this is the least amount of work piled up I have ever had - this is the first time since I started over a year ago that I've even had time to check exactly how much work I or anyone else has coming in. Their response has been to reduce my hours, tell me in future I'll also be doing MORE things, make me wear a uniform, and slag me off for replying to a student's email at 9pm when I was off sick, because this "could create an expectation".

Would giving all this as a "reason for leaving" be something other employers would respond well to, or poorly?

What you don't point out is how long their "things to do" take compared to yours. Because, obviously, if yours take one minute but theirs take twenty hours, that makes sense.

I'm guessing, however, this isn't the case.

SA: I have done this before and it works:

Select every single one of those e-mails and delete them. Seriously. Delete every single one that didn't arrive today.

Half of them will be not urgent. Another 20% will be chasing up previous e-mails. 29% will be junk you could have read and then deleted anyway.

The remaining 1% of useful is where you may think it gets tricky. It doesn't. If there is a real need, then the user will follow it up again saying how they haven't heard about their situation. If they don't it's not urgent.

IF YOU HAVE GUILT ABOUT THIS:
Send an e-mail to everyone in your address book saying how you've had a catastrophic computer failure, and any e-mails they've sent you that have not yet been resolved to please contact you. You may choose to spend some pretend time to IT on the phone complaining first.

But this really, really works.

I have every email I've ever sent or received in the almost 10 years I've been here. Ain't no fucker telling me "You never told me to X" or "You said you'd Y".

Ah, you see, this is the major point I've been repeatedly bashing idiot boss over the head with since she started prioritising the 'number of open items' statistics over absolutely everything - it's pretty much the opposite of that. Much of what I do takes bloody ages, as research courses are all individually tailored to each person. You can't take a blanket approach to it like you can with undergrad stuff. Many things take a few moments or five minutes, of course, but most will or at least can easily take between ten minutes and an hour. Quite often I will have to look at the last four years of a student's registration before I can answer a question. That doesn't happen with the others.

You're still right, and that's exactly why I've rejected idiot boss's obsession with 'closing items' over actually getting important shit done for the last year. I mean, I once spent a day doing photocopying so I could play it her way and close a lot of items. This meant that people who were, say, being overcharged £2,000, or needed an update to their records so they could extend their visa, had to wait for another day.

Naturally, idiot boss was pleased, for once. Although at that time, there were still over 250 things open for me. The upshot is, by my metric (ie: how much actual work there is to do), I am absurdly, ridiculously overworked and they should bloody well hire more people and let me train others, and stop hindering my every effort to improve the way we do things (I set up a forum for the people in other departments I work with to discuss our work. They had never even met each other before, and now they exchange notes and give me feedback. Idiot boss told me not to do this both before and after I'd done it, "in case they ask awkward questions". Had I listened to her, I still wouldn't have met most of the people who I work with). By her metric, I still have more to do than 20 other people put together.

I'm really looking forward to walking out of here.


Russ - I actually get very little useless email (especially compared to when I was in libraries. I think 80% of it was completely irrelevant). Right now the last 20 things in my inbox are about specific students (and a notice of a disciplinary meeting tomorrow for not following proper absence reporting procedure, which is fair cop to be honest as it's happened a couple of times now. Although if my work were not so fucking horrible, there's a high likelihood that I wouldn't have been absent in the first place), and from people who know that if they email anyone other than me, nothing will happen, or they'll just be fobbed off.

The main reason I don't delete it all is because most of the people who email me are the ones who actually appreciate my help.



Also, that. A lot of students I deal with are ongoing cases that can be quite complicated, so having the conversation somewhere often pays off months later. Officially, I'm supposed to delete these and log everything in the big item list thing. Realistically, it's more effective to have a summary email in my inbox than to have four or five items I have to re-examine every time I come back to a student. Plus it's possible that idiot boss has the ability to delete items, and I don't trust her not to use it to make me look bad.


Guh. I need a drink.