Entries from May 2006 ↓

If this is your first visit at iScatterlings, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

God Played Highclere

The Countryside Alliance faithful were favoured tonight in all ways:

1. The weather held. It did not rain. It was dark n cloudy and cold. But no rain.

2. And then there was Clapton. Or ‘God’ to the faithful.

3. But before God came Jeremy Clarkson and 12,000 aces of partridge rich land in Scotland.

PS: As I type the rain is starting to fall (01:11am)

Highclere Rocked

Tonight I saw some amazing rock. When did you last see Pink Floyd’s Waters & Mason play with Rutherford and Carrack and Clapton?

Shame Warne

Here is a great story from Aquila Online

Hot Metal

American Idol

I crave American Idol. I want her to win. Y’know the Mac girlie. Can’t remember her name. Or maybe the gray haired dude. He is good. But I like Elliot too. He has the unusual voice that catches my attention.

Paula Abdul does as well.

Bloggle & Web 1.0

How Pathetic Will UK Society become?

The Times today reports that a prisoner who tried to commit suicide and self-harmed himself has been awarded £2m compensation because he will require longterm medical attention.

Well I want to meet the idiot who stopped him and landed me and 50 million other Britains with a tax levy to support this waste of space and his longterm medical bills.

According to the Times, prisoners have been awarded $4million in compensation claims against a Prison Service legal bill of £20million per year. Now how does the Prison Service pay for defending these ‘human rights’ claims from murderers, rapists, robbers, burglars and paedophiles? That is right - me and my fellow tax payers pay the sodding bill and I for one do not want to. No more.

This is justice (errr if that term still applies) gone down the sewer. Maybe the Lord Chancellor and his new wallpaper (we funded it) should go down the frigging sewers too. Take Gordon Brown and Mr Blur with you you git! Something stinks and I smell paethitic limp & feable indecisive minded liberal politicians in Brussels and Westminster who support this type of stuff.
Do murders, rapists and paedophiles stop to consider how the ‘human rights’ of their victims will be impinged upon? I don’t think so.

So why not offset the value of their compensation claims against the price paid by their victims? I know it won’t bring back the victims of murder nor help the people who have been raped or children who were abused. Something must be done to stop criminals taking the piss out of our legal system and being rewarded for their crime. And screw Brussels too.

Of course I will take into account the lifelong mental damage caused by whatever horror these surviving victims have to endure because of what the criminal bastards inflicted on their victims and add in the effect the crime has had on the families and children of the victims too.

Why didn’t any dingbat in the British Judiciary think of this and impliment it?

bmi drop a bollock

bmi has dissapointed me. It had to happen sometime. For years along with Virgin, they have been the anti-christ to BA’s dominance, arrogance and narcissism. But alas, no more. Now they are relegated to BA’s level. Yup, in my book, they have dropped a bollock big time.

Because why?

1. If you are going to run an airline and boast big style in all your marketing and develop a brand that has reliability as a feature, bmi need to get their basics right. Before trying to distract the audience, or in this case, those who fork out a large wedge to fly a few miles to Dublin, you might think that laying on a free cup of PG Tips for each of the 195 prepaid customers (assuming this number excludes crew and is capacity for passengers only),would not break the bank. Or would it?

2. If I went to Tesco,(a supermarket chain in UK) and purchased a big box of PG pyramid tea bags costing £3.99 containing 240 bags which equates to .0204615p per tea bag or an extra .0204615p over and above the price of my ticket that cost gross £204.00. Add on the cost of a few litres of hot water and labour (trolley dolly/koffie moffie labour) and if it tops out at .50p per passenger it equates to £97.50 for a planeload of passengers

The total fees paid for 195 passengers could be say £200 each . This amounts to £39,000.00 . Mmmmm a nice sum.

To summarise:

bm1 has a fleet of 42 planes. If at any given time, the entire fleet was airborne with full capacity, bmi would have 5,366 passengers relying on them to bring them safely to their destinations. A free cuppa for all 5,366 would cost bmi the grand total of £109.80 for the tea bags (1 x PG Pyramid tea bag per passenger).

to accomodate each passenger with a free cuppa tea, someone would have to nip down to the nearest Tesco to Heathrow and buy 23 x boxes of PG tea bags (240 per box) at £3.99 per box = a massive, whopping, huge bank account breaking £91.77 (23 x £3.99) or .0171021p per passenger.

Now, I hope bmi have a few capex forms awaiting approval by their board of directors because this outlay will dent the bottomline bigtime. This is what the sums look like for all 42 planes full to capacity on a one way trip could be based on only £200 per return ticket:

Total amount paid by 5,366 passengers = £1, 073,200.00

Total amount paid for 5,366 cups of PG Tips = £91.77 (0.0171021 x 5,366 passengers)

bmi charge €1.20/£1.02 for a cup of tea inflight. It could be more - like €1.50 but I’ll stick with £1.02 per cup of tea.

This amounts to £5,473.32 if all 5,366 passengers buy a cup of tea. Not on. Not fair. Yes I understand that not all passengers buy any tea, coffee, alcohol or food so they might need to hike the prices. But at the prices they charge for the tickets then insult us with huge prices for what other airline give away for free, its too much. No wondeer that passengers do not buy bmi’s inflight drinks and food. IT IS A RIP OFF!

Pump up the Volume

Last night I was probably one of only 4 males at the hotel not watching the football. I was in my room reading a book. Yes, I was consulting my Dummies Guide to Understanding Hotel ADSL & Dial-up Procedures. I was also naivily trying to comprehend and find a logic to the Guide the hotel produced. I was reading this while also talking to our company’s helpdesk to get a speedier resolution to my dilemma. I had a report submission deadline. I also had the TV on (Volume Level 2 ). All was going wrong, wrong, wrong. It was not going well. No connectivity etc etc and before I knew it, I’d dozed off to sleep at about 10pm.

Then I was wide awake within what seemed a minute. It was actually 01:14am and the TV in the next room had woken me.

My TV had masked their volume and I just fell asleep none the wiser. Cut a long story short - that was all the sleep I was going to get last night! Knocking on the walls, getting up, dressing and going to knock on their door door did not work . Neither did going downstairs to complain to the Duty Manager work the first time round. He delegated the task to a junior who came upstairs and perfunctorily knocked on their door a few times. No answer ? I could almost hear him thinking, “Oh good this means no nasty confrontation business and I have done my job so now I can go back downstairs to resume the sleep I was having in the back office “.

So I waited until 02:0am before I called reception again. This time the duty manager came up. She bought Security with. They banged on the door in progressively longer and louder knocking sequences and bangs. Still no answer. By this time the other guests had been woken up and were crowding in the hall to see what was going on.

The duty manager and Security man opened the door after 5 minutes, walked in, turned off the TV and walked out banging the door behind them. They said nobody was in the room. The person or people who paid for the room had hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign outside on the door, pumped up the TV volume and gone out to razzle away the night.

They returned at 03:17am. I knew this because I was trying to finish my report and submit it before 08:30am from our office in Dublin.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am knackered. Tired. Bereft of kip and not in the best of moods.

I think I got my own back. When the time came for me to get ready to come to work, I turned on my TV , got showered, packed while carefully banging the cupboard doors and ‘accidently’ bumping into the adjoining wall a few times (loudly), had a hearty Full Irish breakfast, went back upstairs, repeated the earlier room exit process in reverse, chatted loudly to housekeeping outside my door, collected my stuff, pumped up the TV volume and left the building slamming the room door behind me!

Sod them! I did not get a discount on my bill. Last time I stay at that 4 star hotel.

Blog Lite from Dublin

Am in Dublin for a series of meetings so will be in blog lite mode.

The trip (Heathrow to Dublin took a good few hours thanks to 4 ladies doing their shopping and not noticing or purposely ignoring the screaming Gate Attendant on the PA system calling them to get to the Gate 86 very prontoish or they would find their bags offloaded and left on the apron! She was also being very carful to announciate each surname succinctly and clearly through clenched teeth. The outrage and seething venom in her tone was all to clear!

I love Dublin. I love Rolleys Bistro.

I’ll connect tonight while the EU Cup Final is on and has your attention.

Byeeeee!

Don’t tune me kak hey!

All I hear these days at the office is , “I can’t”, “You can’t” and We can’t”

Bollocks! Kak!

How the hell do they (the bosses) expect to increase revenues when internal numbnuts prefer powergaming and preventing staff doing what they need to do.

Instead of, “I can’t”, “You can’t” and We can’t” the turds or NEs as I call them (Non-Entities) or just plain fuckwits’, should tell the truth. If they did I think I’d hear:

“I am actually too scared to sanction this PO (Purchase Order) in case the budget director queries it”

“I can’t be arsed to do do it ‘cos I am a lousy git and prefer MSNing my mate so we can talk footie”

“I am too scared”

“I don’t know what I am doing”

Well move over asshole and let someone who does know, who does appreciate and get the big picture and wants to converse with other departments and really enjoys the job get on and do it

If they were able to to tell us the truth then at least we know where we stand and can then tackle the problem on a properly informed basis. The outcome needs to be positive but the current frustrations and mistrust needs tackling and resolving soon.

Why is it so difficult to cull deadwood in corporations?! Aaaaaargh!

Become ‘you’ centric

Do gurus fail to recognize that they should be more ‘you’ facing, you’ engaged, ‘you’ centric? Do gurus become ‘me’ centric, ‘me’ centred, ‘me’ spoilt and ‘me’ selfish to the exclusion of a lot of normal stuff, things and a lot of brilliant people like you?

No they do not. Only false prophets like me do crazy stuff like lose sight of reality and turn so completely inward we end up as quavering, shivering, whimpering wrecks with a Prozac habit!

Do not lose sight of nor contact with normality.LEARN from the gurus. Observe them. If you don’t learn how to remain in touch with terrafirma, it’ll cost you big time in terms of respect and potentially it could cost you that all important UberGuru status.

CARPE DIEM

In the end all gurus, filmstars, presidents, and rockstars lose their glitter. The glitz and fizz goes out the window while the flabby jowels, beer paunch and reconstructed teeth, blue rinses and false hairlines creep in.

They lose status and that is the opening for the next craphouse expert to exploit and to overwhelm us with his ‘disruptive’ transportable crapjoint theories. So seize the moment people. Do not delay. Start something right away. Lead the way into our future.

Carpe diem.

Amen.