Anonymous Blogging
November 17th, 2006 at 02:49

Its annoying having a blog that is obviously written by me. As my name is plastered all over this website, and I’m a shameless egotist, it’d be pretty hard to say anything of any substance on here. Which is why I mostly talk bollocks.

Ages ago, I nearly got sacked from my old job at a well known highstreet hardware store, for writing about it on the internet.  Thankfully my former co-workers mostly saw the funny side, so they stuck to hating me behind my back rather than publically lynching me using the own-brand gallows in the seasonal section of the store. It probably helped that I was coincidentally starting university and thus leaving the store the week after they found my blog.
There’s so many things I could tell you lovely readers about, but it’d get me into no-end of trouble, or at least into no-end of awkward conversations with people from different parts of my life. Today there was some major shit going on at work (and there was a wonderful Office style moment that I can’t tell you about), but it is written into my contract that I can’t to the press, so I instead have to refer you to the press office.

Likewise, I can’t really talk about all of the amusing moments at University, because for all I know, the lecturer who I might want to make a wry comment about could well be reading this blog.

The lack of anonymity that I’ve given myself worries me a bit. Surely any future employer is going to google my name and find things that I’ve written going back a number of years? And without the context of all of the other rubbish I’ve ever written, am I going to one day be answering questions about teamwork and problem solving in a job interview, before suddenly being asked why I think that slavery should be legalised?

Gah, I should have used a pseudonym.

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Old school data protection
January 8th, 2006 at 16:15

I’ve finally got back my data after sending a data protection request to my old school. In case you havn’t been keeping up: you can write to any company or organisation and demand all of the information they hold about you. They can charge you upto a tenner to do it, but it’s certainly worth the money.

The school’s certainly reacted slightly differently to my former employers, whom I did the same thing with. After not responding for about two weeks, I went up to the school to investigate, and it turns out they were trying to out-trick James O’Malley! They demanded the tenner in the same sickeningly “haha, I’m so clever” way that I demanded my data.

It can’t be a coincidence that a big two page spread of information on the data protection act appeared in this week’s school newsletter, can it?

Yesterday morning I was delighted to find a huge package had been sent to me through the post- it contained around one hundred A4 pages about me- approximately one metric tree. Most of it was photocopies of old school reports, although like with my former employers, there was some other gems:

The letter that my former employers sent to the school asking for my reference, and the form my head of house filled in on the return:

As you can see- aside from my head of house not putting much effort into filling out this form for my former employer, I’ve got hold of some strictly private and confidential information! It’s a shame I wasn’t a little bastard (industry term) whilst at school, then this would have been much more exciting “James throws chairs at teachers”, “James is so tough and threatening that we just debit the cumulative lunchmoney of all the students in the school to his bank account monthly”.Better than this though, I got back the secret teacher bit of the UCAS form that they refused to show us last year when we were applying to University. All of the teachers wrote reports on the students which were then forwarded to UCAS… and I have what they have to say about me! It’s so very damning:

Key quote: “He is an intellectual who loves to learn”. Yeah, that’s me. Have you seen my post about Big Brother? Or all the ones where I go out drinking, and steal the inevitable traffic cone?

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Data Protection Act
November 25th, 2005 at 21:17

No, wait! Don’t be put off by the title! Y’know the data protection act 1988 right? You can write to any company and get them to disclose everything they have about you- they can charge upto £10 admin, but they have to respond within forty days.

Political comedians like Mark Thomas have found this lovely act useful in the past - Mark has managed to dig up internal memos and e-mails sent about him in the environment department or whatever. They were apparently proposing they try and “out-stunt” him, perhaps by having a comedy sized Geiger counter, or whatever.

I’m not quite as exciting as Mark Thomas, although I did want to do exactly what he did in a bid to eventually better him, so I wrote to one company that I know had data stored about me. My former employers, a well known chain of hardware stores. I recieved their letter today. It contained photocopies of my application form, my passport, my staff discount application, the letter where they offered me a job, and an electricity bill used to confirm my address.

Oh, and one more thing- the notes made about me during my interview! Whilst I was trying to come up with positive and pro-James answers for their questions, they were covertly taking notes about me. Presumably to assess whether I was suitable for the job, and not for later character assasination.

As you can see on the scan above, there is a number of fields in which my interviewers commented. I was apparently “Nervous” during the interview and my previous experience was this: “None, but willing to learn”.

I “spoke well, answering questions”- which I suppose is nice to know. I’d worry if I had instead ranted about British prison labour exploitation, or something. I had “no problems” with my “flexibility”. I don’t remember the gymnastics test, but I’m quite surprised to learn that I got through that bit.

The strangest comment was that my appearance was “very smart”. I was wearing a blue shirt (sans tie) and school trousers, if I remember correctly. This “smart casual” appearance is somewhat at-odds with my standard “casual casual” look. It’s especially interesting that someone noticed.

In terms of the bigger picture, this just shows that democracy and “pub trivia” legislation actually works! I’m fighting the system one business at a time! Like with the train tickets, I’m sticking it to the man, again!

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Back to the slacker’s league
September 25th, 2005 at 17:32

It’s been a turbulent 48 hours. Yesterday, was my last day at WORK. Yes, that’s what I’ve been censoring all along. Long story short, all of my co-workers found out about this blog, read it, and wern’t too pleased. I’ve now restored all of the posts I removed, as I no longer work there!

No, I wasn’t sacked! I left on my own terms because of University.

Incidentally, I’m writing this from my room in my halls of residence. I’m on the sixth floor- that’s the top one, and the view is quite spectacular. You can see quite a long way.

The room is pretty much what you’d expect- a bed, a (surprisingly nice) desk, and some shelves. I’ve got my computer setup in one corner, my TV in the other, and all of my other consumer electronics surrounding me.

When I arrived, I met one of my flatmates- Harshil is from London, and actually arrived yesterday, so had spent the last 24 hours on his own. Ross arrived a bit later- he’s from down south too. It’s bizarre to think that they’d refer to Leicester as “oop north”. Trivial information: they’re both doing business-esque courses, which is in the building next door… I’ll have to take a five minute walk to get to where all of my lectures take place. It might be like walking to Great Stretton, every day!

After my parents had abandoned me, we went to a so-called “party” at the Student’s Union- it was just like a bigger and louder version of one of the pubs I’d been to many times before! There was a magician poncing around, showing people tricks, and in a letter sent out a few weeks ago, we were promised fire eating and chain saw juggling- unfortunately I didn’t see either.

When we got back to our flat, we met our fourth and as it turned out, final flatmate. He dashed off almost immediately to go and visit relatives who live “down” here (he comes from Manchester), and I’m afraid to say I can’t remember his name. Fingers crossed I’ll find it out soon.

And now… why I’ve been sitting on my computer for the past couple of hours… it’s a home from home! The exciting thing is, because of the network setup, I can see other people’s shared files, if I know their IP address- the person who’s IP is one digit below me has the entire series of Lost on their hard disk! Needless to say I’m working my way through as many IPs as possible, seeing if they’ll respond to ping.

So far: University is quite good.

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CENSORED (and Heather’s party, too)
September 11th, 2005 at 17:05

Yesterday at CENSORED I discovered that CENSORED including the CENSORED have read my blog! Needless to say, they spent all day CENSORING me. So I said to the CENSORING CENSORS that they should CENSOR off. Not really, I took a very CENSORED stance, and have CENSORED a lot, and gone as far as CENSORING the CENSORED entries from my blog.

Yesterday evening, after CENSORED, I went to Heather’s dad’s 50th birthday party.

My initial fears of only having a proxy-invite (ie: I was invited by Heather, and not her father) were rendered needless when I discovered how excellent Heather’s family are at organising a party. I thought my party was done pretty well- but it was a shetland pony to the really, really big horse that was Heather’s family’s “do”. They had a marquee going seamlessly from their house into the garden, a CD player in the garden, mountains of food and drink, and what felt like around 100 guests!

Apart from Heather, the only other people whom I vaguely knew were Heather’s friends, Naomi and Alice. Unfortunately, they only vaguely knew me as the one dimensional background character with a gimmick, and probably a catchphrase. When they saw me, the first thing they asked me about was where my monocle was. I was tempted to cry, to show them that I’m actually multi-dimensional, and I have feelings too. I didn’t in the end, as it might have given the wrong impression on what I was thinking with regard to the party I was attending.

One of the nicest surprises of the evening for me was that it turns out that I’m quite the celebrity in my old school. Heather’s sister reliably informed me that people talk about me in the corridors, and they play my duck shooting game in ICT lessons! I think this is because it’s the only games site that isn’t banned.

All in all, it was a tremendously enjoyable party- just what I needed after a long, hard day at CENSORED.

Happy Birthday Heather’s dad!

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Wilko Quiz
September 4th, 2005 at 18:15

Saturday night was an interesting change from the usual “spend the evening on the computer, doing nothing really productive”- I went to a quiz night for employees of my place of work. It was held at quite an unusual place, so you’ll have to use your imagination. It was in a big tent, which was in the garden of a so-called “pub”. Apparently there’s a small minority of people who rather than spend their evenings clicking “Stumble” on the Stumbledupon toolbar, go to these places and drink and “socialise”.

Only later it turned out that I wasn’t being paid overtime for being there!

Anyway, it was a bit like the quiz episode of The Office. We’d all been previously put into teams- I was with Matt, John and his girlfriend- all three were last seen together at Matt’s birthday party, last April. There was four or five other teams, predominantly made up of the full time staff, but our main rivals. There were a handful of other teams made up of the other members of staff there, but our main rivals were “Team Tills”, which, as you might have guessed from the name, was the rest of the till people who arn’t me. By “main rivals”, I mean that I’d been boasting for a few weeks previously about how we were going to own them like noobs. I don’t think they were taking the quiz as seriously as I was.

This is where my plan fell apart slightly - I was anticipating questions like the general knowledge round on Mastermind. That is to say: politics, history, flags, greek gods, artists, Shakespeare, “what is the capital of x?” type questions. Unfortunately, these subjects only made up one or two of the sixty questions.

The first round was ten “riddles”, with the clue being Chocolate- for example, “The red planet”, would be referring to Mars. They were slightly more cryptic than that. It was here I first thought a Slashdot round was becoming slightly less likely. Following this was the music round - ten tracks were played and we had to name the artist and song. The only one we recognised was the Crazy Frog. Where was the Canadian hardcore punk? Team Tills, as they called themselves, or Team Rubbish, as I called them were probably going to do quite well here, which worried me a bit.

After this though, it was the “general” knowledge round! Excellent! This is what I was here for. First question: “who is the presenter of The X-Factor?”.

…

Hmm. Oh well, it’s the taking part that counts- dignity isn’t everything. I mean, yes, I was being beaten at a general knowledge quiz by a team of now-tipsy women, and yes, I’d just paid £2.20 to watch a former school “mate” pour Coke from a standard bottle into a glass, but it’s the taking part that counts!

Question 39 is where things got good for us anyway- “Who was sacked twice by Tony Blair and is now EU trade commissioner?”. Team Rubbish said “William Hague”. I’m not even going to go into the reasons why THAT is incorrect, but I knew the correct answer immediately, which is the main thing. It was obviously “Prince of Darkness”, Peter Mandelson.

In the end, we got 42/60, and more importantly, our rivals got a pathetic 40/60. Yes, we were one from last. In our defence, all of the members from the other teams have been alive for longer than us, and might actually remember Nixon’s death in 1994, or be the sort of person who can endure The X-Factor, without their brain melting and creating a sticky mess on the bottom of the interior of their skull.

All in all, we didn’t win, but at least no one can say to me “you got beaten by a girl!”.

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An Alarming Situation!
September 2nd, 2005 at 21:54

I’ve been having a very “techie” week since I last updated, or more specifically, since I spent a slightly less “techie” day with Heather the other day. My point is, I’ve bought a hard disk and a new digital cameras.

Yes, lady readers, it’s one of those updates. I’m going to talk about gadgets.

The hard disk was part of a grand plan of mine to finally join the elite club of Linux users- I’d stopped applying deodorant in preparation, and bought myself a Babylon 5 t-shirt. The 120gb Maxtor drive was going to have Fedora put on it, so I could do everything I currently can do, but in a more fiddly way. I’d also be able to sound like an elitist, rather than a cheapskate by telling people who don’t care about how wonderful free open-source software is. Trouble is, I couldn’t get the sodding thing to work. More specifically: Matt couldn’t get the sodding thing to work. A trip to his house, via nearly hitting a cat in a big car, confirmed that the motor inside the hard disk that turns it around isn’t infact doing its job. What I essentially had was a metal brick that I’d paid forty pounds for.

Having spent a big chunk of money on a useless piece of equipment, I thought I’d dig deeper into my savings and buy a digital camera. I justified it to my parents by saying it was for University. It’s dead good- 5 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, links up to a telly, takes SD cards, so is vaguely compatible with my MP3 player and memory card reader and only cost £100! You can tell it’s a good camera because it’s made by the giants of the digital camera world Vivitar. And yes, it’s a model that isn’t even acknowledged on their official website!

You’re thinking “this is all well and good, James, but where’s the regular hilarious anecdote?”.

I left Argos, digital camera in hand, and went into good old-Wilkinsons (who happen to be my employer) to buy some batteries. Whilst standing patiently in the queue, the fire alarm suddently went off! This never happens when I’m working!

After a good two minutes of carrying on as normal, only with some added occasional mutterings of “what’s that noises”, and rotating our heads about to see if we could see what was causing it, the supervisors/management eventually told everyone to evacuate.

It was dead good- all the staff stood where they’d been trained to, outside Argos, whilst all the customers looked on in bewilderment. The alarm kept going and going. The only problem was, it wasn’t a very effective alarm- it didn’t scare you into thinking “oh crap, there might be a fire”, it was slightly more slapstic. I was half expecting to have won something for being the millionth customer, or the gunge tank to activate.

Fingers crossed, the alarm won’t be fixed by tommorrow, when I’m due in work, so they’ll have to send us all home. Or I suppose they could force us to work, whilst listening to something louder and worse than the music. Latest reports from the aforementioned Matt suggest that it still isn’t working, despite having someone out to fix it, and they did indeed force the shelfmonkeys to work during it.

I can’t wait for tommorrow!

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The Lynx Effect
August 6th, 2005 at 22:11

The second most odd thing happend at work today. It appears that the so-called “Lynx effect”, actually works! The question of scientific phenomenon or marketing slogan aside, I was complemented by a handful of people (women, more precisely) at work by my erm… smell, and it was down to my “wearing” Lynx anti-perspirant.

It was odd. I mean, if people are complementing me on how I smell now, does this mean that I smelled particularly awful before? It made me quite self concious.

I don’t even want this attention- I have no desire to break out into a dance, or control what a woman does by doing various gestures, like the adverts would have me believe. In fact, this attention is unwanted- for at least one reason. Additionally, I like being slightly mysterious and not part of the main tillmonkey society- I’m an elitist. Today I was reading a piece by Noam Chomsky in The Independent whilst my co-workers were reading about Big Brother (no, not Orwell!) in Closer Magazine.

(To clarify: I would like to control what everyone does, but through some sort of control panel with a bank of monitors, as opposed to making gestures and using an aerosol.)

Tommorrow morning, I’m going to go to the nearest field, and roll around in the mud, and hopefully manure, for a bit.

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“Employee Training”
July 18th, 2005 at 18:17

Not much has happend so far today, so I thought I’d share with you, oh lucky readers, a small tale from work. In fact, consider this the start of a new occasional feature: twunt of the week.

On Saturday, a gentleman (as we have to call him) came into the shop where I work and after finding his goods, enquired to my supervisor, “Are you going to open a till for me then?”. There was already five tillmonkeys on various tills, with queues at each. Everyone in all of the other queues was waiting patiently, either as they’re braindead idiots (likely), or are being polite and not abusing the good nature of Wilkinson staff.

My supervisor got me to go back on to my till- something I consider infinitately less interesting than such exciting tasks as “replenishing the kitchen roll” and “taking the piles of baskets back outside”.

After I scanned his goods and got to the payment part, the chip & pin broke down. It took four attempts for the card to go through the system- each time various errors occured. This, you must understand, is clearly a technical problem- any idiot in their right mind could figure that out upon seeing what was happening.

It finally worked. This twunt of the week, or “bastard”, as he’s known in some circles, looked at me in a very “smarmy” way (probably a local colloquial expression), then a

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People at work
July 9th, 2005 at 22:44

As you know, I work in a well known hardware store, I worked there today, for eight and a half hours. (Three breaks inclusive, two paid 15 minutes, one unpaid 30, if you’re making graphs). It’s insanely dull, but there’s a few characters in there, who make you realise that however undignified tillmonkeying is, there are thousands of other weirdos, nutters and twunts out there who are much lower on the step ladder of humanity than you are.

One of the most bizarre character traits of the middle-aged male customer is his habit of winking. I mean, there’s obviously no homosexual subtext to his wink at the end of the transaction- I hope so anyway. If there, that’s WEIRD. Not in a homophobic sense, of course, but in a “it’s an old man winking at you in a somewhat out of assumed-character way”. This was made more disturbing today when this exchange took place:

INT: Store tills area (”Area 1″)
Me [to woman]: Have you ever used the Chip & Pin before?
Woman’s husband, whilst winking: She’ll try anything once!

Good lord! You can’t say that! I had horrible mental images of this bloke’s wife white-water rafting, parachute jumping, eating roast dog, attempting to read through the entire EU constitution, taking on 50 five year olds in a fist fight in an area the size of a basket ball court, after receiving an hour of training, compared to the five year old’s day of training. You get the idea.

If I ever serve you in the line of duty, please don’t wink at me, it’s WEIRD.

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