The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[Kim]

Lurgy.  Fuck off.

Sorry

I'm fairly sure this is barakta-lurgy, not tunnel-lurgy.

[Bledlow]

Lurgy.  Fuck off.

+1

[hellymedic]

My mother's late 70s Hoover washing machine lasted 25 years. The Bosch that finally replaced it lasted less than ten.

My mother's 1959 Hoovermatic lasted till 1974. Its various Philiips successors lasted around 5-7 years.

I bought my Miele in 2000.

[Lady Cavendish]

(Helly how on earth do you have a memory for stuff like that, I wouldnt have a clue when anything like that was bought in my house never mind my mothers house!)

I am Not Very Well today At All. I'm in a right grump and really want to go home.

[Mrs Pingu]

Lurgy.  Fuck off.

+1

+2

[hellymedic]

(Helly how on earth do you have a memory for stuff like that, I wouldnt have a clue when anything like that was bought in my house never mind my mothers house!)

I am Not Very Well today At All. I'm in a right grump and really want to go home.

Get Well Soon!

Dad bought the Hoovermatic as a present for my Mum around the time of my sister's birth. It's not amazing if I know my sister's date of birth!
New washing machine was bought when I was doing O Levels. They were memorable too.

I suppose I remember associations rather than the dry facts so that anything O Level-related must have been 1973/4 etc and A Levels were the long, hot summer of 1976.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Now, I remember that summer - I didn't even know what A levels were then and I think they would have rather spoiled it for me.

But I came here to grumble about a new grading system at work.

The new system has a more practical outlook -  we are still interested in people doing their best work, but we are not going to pretend that our translators have a perfect knowledge of the target language, or that they always have enough time to do their best.

The original idea of the (previous) grading system was to help translators improve and help project managers select the most appropriately skilled person for the job. We now seem to have given up and accepted most of them are shit and not getting better. Well, I suppose it should keep me in work. 

[Arch]

only a few inches long, but that's enough.

As the Bishop said to the Actress...

(A phrase you can attach to the end of any sentence to render it extremely rude!)

[Mrs Pingu]

My work is a horrid place to be at the moment, and I can't even get away from it in bloody Norway....gaaah

[rafletcher]

So... when did the current trend for starting responses to question with "so, we did.." or "So, what happened was..."  it SO annoying!

[nicknack]

How the heck do utility companies do their bill estimates? We moved nearly 4 months ago and had a proper electric meter reading after we'd been here 20 days. We'd used 120 units. 3 months later we get an estimated reading for those 3 months - 90 units. Did they think we'd gone on a very long holiday or something?

[interzen]

How the heck do utility companies do their bill estimates?

Generally with a Magic 8-ball, chicken entrails and an crypto-grade random number generator.

[spesh]

How the heck do utility companies do their bill estimates?

Generally with a Magic 8-ball, chicken entrails and an crypto-grade random number generator.

That, or a handful of ten-sided dice. 

[interzen]

How the heck do utility companies do their bill estimates?

Generally with a Magic 8-ball, chicken entrails and an crypto-grade random number generator.

That, or a handful of ten-sided dice. 

No, they just use those to calculate the annual price gougingsincreases - rumour has it that they'll need to upgrade to D20s because of the wholesale price of cheese or some such bollocks.

[nicknack]

I must be in grumble mode at the mo.

I have to go to Amsterdam next Wednesday. I'm not used to this sort of thing. So I book a flight with Easyjet. Which all went very easily until I come to the online check in bit. All it seemed to do was open a new tab for downloading Adobe Reader, which I already had. After a gazillion tries at getting round this I realised that the pop-up window on the original page offering me insurance was actually the gateway to the check in process. I'd just been closing the damn thing since the options were "Yes, I have insurance" or "No, I don't but I would like to buy some" with no "fuck off with your insurance" option. I had to lie and click on "No" and then tell them I didn't want it. Arseholes.

[interzen]

Village fireworks display tonight, at the recreation centre at the bottom of the street.

I thought about taking pics of some of the weapons-grade fud-like parking but then figured that the camera would be undergoing meltdown before I was even halfway to the Co-op 

[Guy]

It's wet out. Not raining as such, just that fine, penetrating "Welsh Mountain Drizzle".  Me 'at and trowsis is soaked.

[mcshroom]

Why do I feel like I've just finished a 300km ride?

I've had a sensible night's sleep, but I woke up feeling achy and tired and still don't feel fully awake. This is getting silly now.

[Mr Arch]

I wish Twitter would switch off the thing that makes some, but not all, images show up on their time line.  I am more then able to decide if I want, or need, to see an image when I read the tweet.  It is a little more then a bit annoying.

However, I have a phobia of dead stuff, animals and people generally, and Twitter is showing images of dead animals when people tweet news stories or views about badger culls.
I really wish Twitter would stop showing the images as I really don't like scrolling through to be faced with near decapitated animal when all I want to do is read the text of the tweet.

[interzen]

I wish Twitter would just switch off. End of story.
Looking at the 'coverage' on the BBC's website it would appear that Rory Cellan-Jones has found another company to fellate (along with Apple, natch)

[David Martin]

I didn't realise you had to read twitter. After all it isn't compulsory. ANd if you do you can choose who you follow.

As for images, use a third party client that lets you choose how tweets are displayed. And then you can avoid said images appearing

[Kim]

ANd if you do you can choose who you follow.

...unless you're reading it via the website (do people actually do that?), in which case random stuff gets inserted into your timeline by Twitter.

[Notsototalnewbie]

I've just got back from Montpellier for my Masters field trip.

It is very cycle/walking friendly with traffic excluded from large chunks of it and a bike path all along the river.

I really wanted to rent a bike for a few hours (they have a Velib style thing there) and several of my classmates were easily persuaded to join me. We were going to explore the city and cycle down the riverside.

Sadly, I had reckoned without the French bureaucracy, lulled into a false sense of security by the much simpler system in Paris and London. Am still bitter that it was seemingly impossible to hire a bike for a few hours without queuing for two hours in an office with all your ID etc. (We didn't manage it because we weren't even sure we were in the right office).

[mcshroom]

If you list things on your website as in stock I don't expect to get an email the following day that says you won't get it until the 26th November.

Also if you are telling me that this is the due date, putting the line 'Out of stock. Available to order, normally dispatched within 7 days if in stock with our suppliers' while technically correct is still misleading. the 26th is rather more than 7 days away and you know that because you are telling me so.

[Kim]

Several weeks of unswept chutney accumulation on the cyclepath^[1], with bonus tactile paving.   


_{[1] A short but incredibly useful stretch of closed-to-motor-traffic road that provides cycle/pedestrian permeability from one side of the new hospital site to the other, bypassing a large roundabout that's uphill on every approach.}