Is that a deliberate typo there handy, as in OFSHRED? Back in the day when my dad was a teacher and for some time afterwards, they kept secret files on all the pupils that were attending. Do they still do that now, other than reports for parents and pupils alike, of course, which are for public pupil/parent viewing? The head of the 6th form left my secret file (not very complementary btw) by accident, in a bunch of careers info she had given me. Needless to say, my dad was not best pleased and visited the school, in order to give this particular teacher a bit of an ear bashing. I guess this is covered in the FOMA and DPA these days. No 'claim to gain' type companies in those days either.

Similarly for a guy who punched me in the stomach quite hard, after ejecting his accessing floppy disk from a mainframe, when working for a company that shall not be named and it was me being disciplined, rather than him, after said incident and getting a bad work review, plus being made redundant by the back door a few months later. Although, the company did give me a not unreasonable redundancy payment at the time and allowed me to use their their company resources for looking for a new job and writing a new CV etc.

At the time Windows home PCs were pretty rare. This was back in the day when companies were using huge banks of mainframes and minis and backup media was a big tape bank, like a circular briefcase without a handle.

That was 22 years ago now.

ETA.
One of my teachers at secondary school wrote in a report that I had no aptitude for science. Admittedly, my friends and I did tend to pee around quite a lot at school.

I ended up getting 5A's in science subjects at O Level (9 pass grades + in total, plus 2 B's and a C at A Level (all science subjects), plus an honours degree in Mathematics and Computing.

Hi, jra - no, that was just a typo typo. Quite a good one though!

Every school child had a file kept on them, with their attendance, progress, behaviour, any serious incidents, andy personal infor the school needs etc etc etc. It's all confidential; some of it on a need-to-know basis and some only known by medical staff and pastoral officers. Your head of year should have got into trouble for that one!

That's very cool indeed.

handy - hope it's going well! I like Plum's idea of dealing with OFSTED in character. My suggestion is pick your favourite Dr Who assistant and go with that.

I'm drowning under a mountain of things to do. They're not huge things or complicated things, but they all need doing and there's a lot of them. But it's Friday and Batman's heading home early so the moment he steps through the door we're cracking open the PG and saying toodle pip to the week. Anything not tackled can wait until Monday...

... I'm going to hate myself on Monday morning.

Plum. She stops me moaning every time, bless her. KJ's job is a bit like a startup, so paid work isn't quite enough to reach the mountain top every month but at least I've got a mountain, I'm close to the top cash-wise and I'll climb to the top and worry about squids later.

Happy for Mr M and indeed all Melons. Us oldies have to claw our way to the future.

I don't have a DestructoPup ... but we have a piggy ... not herself but a good likeness:
http://archive.vetknowledge.com/file...-pig---tan.jpg

Thank you.

It was in fact a close call whether to do mathematics or chemistry. It was a guaranteed A at O Level physical chemistry, whatever the questions, but I think the deciding moment (so to speak) was that I wasn't overly keen at A Level organic chemistry, which was carbon this, carbon that, so I opted for mathematics.

I had a chemistry set when I was a young boy and none of the chemicals in the standard set could react in a violent/explosive way, but as my dad was a horticulturist at the time, with umpteen different chemicals (pesticides, fertilisers etc.), I would add some of them to the mix, literally.



Plus, being a naughty boy, my friends and I used to nick various compunds/chemicals like sulphuric acid, nitric acid, zinc, sodium, lithium etc. from the school chemistry lab. We stayed away though from the really dodgy stuff like lead, mercury and arsenic compounds.

ETA. Though you should have seen some of the pre/post war anti fouling I used to use on my boat at the time, which contained just about every dodgy thing you could name, e.g. lead, mercury, cadmium and took at least 15 minutes to mix before application, though it's now considered an environmentalists nightmare as it killed virtually everything in its path.

And you might have read about the calor gas incident I posted somewhere, where a friend and I made a fire in the countryside and put a full small calor gas cylinder on top. That was some explosion. We hid behind a behind a bank, before the flames shooted up to about 25 feet in the air.

Aaaaargh......... feeling a right twit. Decided to bring home a bag of bed lined from work to wash today, duvet, mattress protector and blanket. Bunged it in a black bin bag, trudged home on the bus with this bag getting in everyones road. Ripped it open tonight for a pile of housekeeping rubbish to fall out. Only went and dumped the bag of bedlinen in the wheelie bin instead. Shit!!!! Now waiting on hubby coming in to take me back to work to go bin raking.

oh poor youx

Good thinking, or a favourite GoT character.... what if she picked Cersei?

Hope you and the BattyBunch have a great weekend of nothing useful.


Don't let me stop you moaning - it's good for the soul - probably. As for piggy, is she at all destructive? if so she could be DestructoPig and then DestructoPup would have a cuz!


you were indeed a VERY naughty boy! It seems to me that it's a minor miracle that you are still around today and all, hopefully, in one piece

Nothing exciting to report from this side of the world. YoungPlum forgot to bring her award certificate home so I couldn't see the actual wording but she told me it was for generally being good and hard-working and generally lovely. I managed to outdo her though because I got a badge at work ... a "good girl" badge... I demanded one because I was good beyond the normal bounds of goodness, one of colleagues made me a badge but I think was rather taken aback that I was happy to wear it til the end of my shift. doesn't bother me! Having said that, I think at times I'd rather have a "bad girl" badge

This weekend I'm going to be as lazy as I can. My right knee is giving me gyp lately so I'm going to try to rest it ..... a bit.... but probably not, knowing me!

Hope all us grumps have an excellent weekend!

PS avasgranny, hope you managed to retrieve the right binbag! Failing that, it's your duty to clean and return the garbage in pristine fashion

She has a cage with a bedroom and living room (with corner toilet), and seems determined to make it open-plan by chewing a hole in the dividing wall. Do we have DestructoPig? I think she may have once eaten an Ethernet cable but that could have been somepig else

Is it wrong to laugh? It was the thought of the bag lady on the bus.

@ "somepig else" - I believe she was guilty, DestructoPup has chewed through two ethernet cables - I definitely sense kinship and that piggy is only restrained from it's destructive rampage by it's comparatively diminutive size and being imprisoned albeit in a luxurious apartment. If I can find my camera cable I'd be able to upload a picture of DP so you can see why she is forgiven all.

It's a miracle I haven't broken any bones yet.

Fallen down 7 flights of stairs at the last count, including Old Street escalator in London.
Fallen 20 feet out of a fir/conifer tree.
Fallen out of a second floor window.
Ran fast into a chain connected between two bollards.

=

And it still went on when I was student and with other students.

Dunking people fully clothed into baths.
Using fire hoses to wet people in the student union halls and people's cars below, even convertibles.
Setting fire to room doors.
Setting fire to powered milk/custard type compounds, by dropping them down from the top floor to the ground floor, where someone else had a lit lighter. See Brainiac Science Abuse.
Not paying for electricity, by getting keys, which fitted the locks in the meters.
Nicking road cones, even road signs and taking them back to the student flats.
etc.

=

Oh. I had an air gun when I was a teenager and in my infinite wisdom though it would be a good idea to fire an air gun pellet at a rubber ball. The pellet rebounded and embedded itself in my chin.

My friends and I used to ride bikes at fast speeds around blind bends in county lanes without wearing helmets.

Yes Ima. It's probably lucky I'm still alive, let alone having never been injured, other than a few grazes and cut.

=

I might think of some more later. The above is unlikely to be a complete list.

I have. I've been involved in three car accidents where the car I was driving was written off (the other two I was a passenger) and three house fires, two of which were caused by chip pans.

greetings I picked up my first ever pair of varifocals today

Ooh, snowy, how's the specs-sickness doing? I hate the first couple of days of new glasses!

avasgranny, that's a nightmare!
I hope it all turnes out OK.
(tiny bit funny though... )

Thanks for the OFSTED suggestions, girls - I think!
No-one camr to me, in the end... you can guarantee they';d have come if I *hadn't* prepped
Anyhoo, skool did well, so that's OK

jra - I *loved* the airgun-pellet-at-the-rubber-ball story... lol
It's amazing what one can get up to growing up in the countryside, isn't it?
My brother and I went camping in the fields of the farm where we grew up and made torches out of cloths tied to sticks and set on fire, made big dens in the straw bales which collapsed on us, fell in the river countless times, walked along the stone rampart of the railway bridge above a thirty foot drop onto the lines, slid down hills in the snow on plastic fertiliser sacks and stopped ourselves by crashing into the wire fences at the bottom - and my Dad used to make giant bonfires on 5th November out of all the stuff that needed burning from the hedges and anything else that would catch light, and then get it going by dousing it with waste oil out of the tractors.
Those bloody things smouldered on for days afterwards - and we went into the embers and kicked the big logs to make sparks!

Eeeeee, them were't days!


Oh - and Melony came home from school with the Child of the Week award. Bless.
The day before she absolutely grafted herself making mud-pies at breaktime, so Mr M has concluded she must have been a saint the rest of the week!

Hope evryone is having a lovely weekend!

I love exploding things, so your escapades are right up my street jra.

Here, all is quiet, but the sunshine is spurring us on to be active. We did a massive walk yesterday so it'll probably be more of the same today. And a pub lunch makes sense as a little treat...

Fireworks.


All good stuff there handy. You can never take those memories away can you. Your upbringing sounds very similar to mine.

I went camping with the cub scouts.

BIB. I've done that as well. Great fun.

I grew up next to a farm as well. In those days, as my dad knew the local landowner, I had free reign over literally thousands of acres of land and all the shores pretty well were/are owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

21 years of misspent youth maybe.

saw this and thought of you all! hehe
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/GRUMPY-OLD...item2329c448f2

Hey there stranger! Hope life is treating you better now Mal It's funny that you should post that as I came across this today and thought of all us Grumps, especially the chocoholic ones

I've had a superbly lazy weekend. Other than a quick trip into work yesterday to do a bit of shopping and check my hours for next week, I did nothing yesterday and today I didn't do much more! Went to an out of town shopping centre and went totally mad and spent $3 on some new hangars - I really do live it up on these spending sprees! I ironed the uniforms for the week for YoungPlum and for me for a couple of days, did dinner and lazed around the rest of the time. Bit fed up because I was recording The Voice (the aussie one) to watch now but it didn't record .... bloody stupid machine.... and pfffft to any of you thinking "bloody stupid operator of perfectly adequate machine"

Hope you're all having a good weekend!

hiya Plum

and a special hello to mamma of "Child of the Week"

I think I mentioned that Monday morning was going to be, potentially, a bit horrible. Well, it's definitely going to be. Lots to do, none of it fun. Oh well, onwards etc.

hiya Plum

and a special hello to mamma of "Child of the Week"

Vibes en route

I hope they are not going by train. That'll be expensive.

=

Which optician did you get your glasses from, e.g Specsavers, Vision Express and was the build quality good.

Thanks, snowy!

Huggles to the bat - hope you get it all out of the way in one go!

Anyone else with a horrible week ahead can have huggles too (((((((((((huggles))))))))).

I'm a Boots gal when it comes to specs. They often have good BOGOF offers!

Anyone seen Sadperson and Amica recently?

Sorry Grumpers, Sad's had a busy weekend and the coming week isn't looking much better. Out with old work friends Friday for a meal (fab); to London to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time with 4 friends yesterday - tapas beforehand and Chinese in Chinatown afterwards (even more fab); then to Leicester today.

The thing that blighted it all slightly was First Capital Connect sending loads of us home on Saturday night via Hatfield due to yet more collapsed overhead power lines. Nothing wrong with that - had the promised coaches materialised. They didn't. After an hour standing outside Hatfield station, frozen, with no-one around except other similarly stranded folk, the four of us took a cab home (fifty quid) and will be having Words with FCC come Monday morning.

And tomorrow I'm off to see Simple Minds thrilled to bits as I missed out on them in the 80s, have already got a ticket to see them in June, but someone's offered me a spare they had for tomorrow night too Greedy but - as the kids are all saying - YOLO.

Am only sitting typing this because Mr Sad was being a grumpy old git earlier and made me seethe. I can't sleep when I'm seething but I feel better thinking about tomorrow... Hope other people's Mondays aren't as bad as they think they might be. Vibes to everyone, waves to everyone, big hugs to anyone that would like one.

Must. Go. To. Bed. :yawn: