Past Chris has been kind to me this week.

On Thursday, at work, I spent the day installing some new equipment as part of a project we’re doing. The desks in our control room are full of ancient PCs that are long overdue for replacement and we’re now, finally, replacing them with new stuff. That means taking the old PCs out, untangling all the existing cables so they can be removed, and then running new cables to all the screens and stuff.

It takes about four hours to do a single desk if everything goes to plan, and at the end of it you have cuts and grazes all over your hands and your arms from the cable ties and the metalwork and the unexpected encounters with sharp corners as you rummage about.

One of the desks I did on Thursday four screens, plus one more that had been there for years but hadn’t got a PC attached to it. It was always meant to get a PC to support some other new stuff we’re installing which is why I’d put it there all those years ago. Thursday was the day it finally got wired up to something.

I ran a new video cable for it easily enough, but then I had to connect the touchscreen. The USB cable came out of the back of the screen, ran neatly down the monitor arm, and then vanished into the desk. Inside the desk was a rat’s nest of a million identical cables. I looked at this and then said some swear words.

Then I looked in the pod where the PCs live, because that’s where the cable would have to end up, and in there was a trailing USB cable. Attached to the cable was a green paper label. Written on the green paper label, in my handwriting, were the words “touchscreen USB for 5th PC”.

Thanks, Past Chris. You’re an absolute legend.

That would be enough good deeds, you’d think, but he did it again.

Just now I thought I’d better make a start on the Pouring Beans Calendar 2026. I opened the Pouring Beans folder on my laptop, and inside that I opened the Projects folder. (Kev may want to take notes on this example of a useful filing system for his work on the podcast.) I was going to make a new folder in there called Calendar 2026, but there already was one. That’s strange.

I opened it. Inside it I found this.

And when I opened that folder, I found this.

Inside those folders are 240 photographs, which are an extremely welcome sight when I have 315 blank calendar pages to fill.

He’s only bloody gone and done it again.

Thanks, Past Chris. If I ever get to use a time machine I’ll come back and return the favour.