Where to wee

A few months ago, my department was moved downstairs as we were merged in with another similar department. Now we all sit in the same place. Our new surroundings are in the basement, as befits our status. Engineers do not need daylight, and are not to be allowed to have it. We are so deep in the basement that Bakerloo line trains cause an audible rumble through the walls every few minutes. We’ve calculated that they might actually be slightly above our floor level.

One interesting feature of the sub-basement where we have been hidden away, as though we are some sort of embarassment, is the shortage of toilet facilities. It’s almost like this floor was designed for apparatus rooms and storage areas, and the idea that teams of people might spend their lives down there wasn’t considered by the architects.

That leaves me with a choice of three sub-optimal toilets, as follows.

Toilet One is a single cubicle, self-contained with a sink and hand dryer, located a short walk from our room, but close to other rooms where people work so it’s often busy. If you flush the toilet the sink tap stops running, so you have to wash your hands before you flush or (more often) you forget to wash your hands before you flush so you then stand there for several minutes waiting for the cistern to slowly refill before you can get a trickle of water on your hands.
Toilet Two is another single self-contained cubicle, not much further away, but located at a little kitchen area where people come to make tea. From inside the cubicle you can hear everything people say and do at the kitchen, and I know from experience that people in the kitchen can hear everything that happens in the toilet cubicle. I don’t like that at all. Once I sat in there for the whole time it took someone to make a round of tea because I didn’t want them to hear me having a poo.
Toilet Three is yet another self-contained cubicle, and technically a disabled toilet with one of those seats that feels a bit higher up than it should be. The automatic tap makes a massive noise when you wash your hands, like a siren going off to alert anyone nearby to the fact that you’re using a disabled toilet. It’s a long walk away from the room where I work on the other side of two security doors. Someone once came out of it when I was approaching to go in who gave me a really angry look.

I haven’t yet decided which of these is the least worst, but please keep me in your thoughts as I struggle to find somewhere satisfactory to go for a wee at work.

Designer diseases

I’m starting a new business venture and this is your chance to get in on the ground floor. Here’s the pitch.

Designer diseases are going to be the next big thing. Here’s how it works: influencers are everywhere now, filling up Instagram with their poses and getting lots of sweet corporate sponsorship on Youtube. What they’re missing is the human angle, something to pull on people’s emotions. Enter the designer disease.

We will offer a full 360-degree customised bespoke personal consulting service where we will offer a choice of designer diseases and infect the influencer with their choice of ailment. We then provide the tools and resources for the influencer to splash their horrible illness all over the ‘gram, soak up the sympathy and massively up their likes.

Already, Kendal Jenner (is that one of them?) has signed up for a package we’re calling “The ‘Roids”: painful hemhorroids form a distinctive grape-like package that’s visible through lycra and gymwear. We suggest using pile cream as a stylish but challenging form of face paint.

Are you in? I’m going to need $15,000 for a 5% stake. This is going to be huge.

You a voley mother f… intervention

Christopher. I’m talking to you as both your friend and your alien overlord.

It has recently come to my attention, well, to the attention of all of us that you seem to be showing signs of unwanted behaviour. There have been times over the last few months where doubt has been creeping into our collective consciousness as to whether you are able to cope. Cope with what, you ask? I’d like you to take a deep breath and read your comments under Kevin’s eleventh (what a hard-working trooper he is) podcast, Celebration Days.

I need you to understand our reasons. If you’re allowed to carry on like this then it can only lead to worse things. Your love of roads will turn to a love of voles. You’ll spend your weekends scurrying along riverbanks with blades of grass between your teeth. You’ll open a bowling alley called ‘Hollywood Vole’ where all the balls have vole faces on them, all the items on the evening menu have titles with voles in and when you press the soap dispenser in the gents it makes the sound of a vole chewing on a dandelion.

You have to remember that what we do is out of love and kindness, even now as we’ve strapped you to a chair and put a roll of newspaper in your mouth, soaked in petrol. We know that you’ve been under a lot of pressure recently, which is fine, and we don’t expect you to change immediately overnight. This is a process which will require you to change significantly. Your view of the world will need to be distorted, then broken, then fixed back together with PVA glue before you can set foot outside again.

All this talk of voles just isn’t healthy. It was okay once or twice but you repeatedly brought it up. After the first few days it was all you could say and then Zoe took a photo of you in Hampstead Heath. It was the most shocking thing any of us had ever seen, and I’ve seen the film ‘Grease 2’.

When I’m done talking, Steve Steveingtons is going to loosen the shackles around your ankles so that you can move a little more freely. We’re going to watch a short film about the horrors of voles and then, after a light lunch with a little Q & A, we’re going to let you loose into the kitchen so you can make everyone a nice hot beverage.

Four Word Reviews: ‘Til Their Eyes Shine

I started these reviews when I got sent a Wang Chung album as a joke, and Kev and Sarah had just reviewed a Papples album in this format, and I thought it was a fun thing to do with a CD I’d been sent. Then more CDs started arriving. But I never thought we’d end up here. The CDs that arrived were just crap albums, and I would write reviews of how amusingly bad they were. Until now. Now I’ve been sent… I mean, what is this? It’s called “‘Til Their Eyes Shine: The Lullaby Album”. It’s a 1992 charity compilation of slow, snoozy numbers by female artists that will supposedly put a child to sleep, though for my taste half are too lively for that and the rest are too disturbing.

Am I being punished, somehow? Is this horrendous mush the price I pay for some indiscretion I committed? I don’t know. I just know it was awful.

Four Word Reviews: Double Wide

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to just read these reviews, never having heard the music I’m reviewing. Sometimes I wonder if a casual reader would believe that I actually do listen to the whole album in its entirety before writing one. But I do, and that is why I have very mixed feelings when another CD-shaped package mysteriously arrives in my postbox. Sometimes the contents of that package are familiar to me and maybe even borderline palatable, like when Sade emerged from her Jiffy bag. Other times I find myself facing up to an album like Double Wide by Uncle Kracker.

Stationary Harassment – Part 2

Following the harrowing experience I encountered in Asda car park last year HERE, there is another dog looming on the horizon who clearly has something against me.

The kind of job that I do involves a lot of checking windows. I mean I love windows me, even if it wasn’t part of the job I would happily peruse lists and lists of properties with the same postcodes of the people I know to see who has got the correct certification and who hasn’t. Some people have hobbies, some people spend hours looking at double glazing; that is my life and I am sticking to it. What greets you though as you load up the lovely FENSA website is this (apologies for the poor quality photo):

What is his problem?

The woman is happily discussing getting new windows, possibly for her semi-detached house that desperately needs refurbishment work because the rest of the street has already done it and it she had to wait for her aunt’s inheritance to come through before she could pay for everything, and hiding above her shoulder is this grouch, this Grinch, this menace. The prospect of double glazing means that the house will be adequately insulated against the bad weather types so the dog should be actively encouraging this behaviour. Instead he squints and grimaces his way each time you come to the website.

He looks as though instead of serving him doggy kibbles and sweet cheeks for breakfast (I’m not quite sure what dogs eat) he received a massive turd garnished with dandruff. He looks as though he’s been waiting for his PPI refund cheque for over four weeks and the company isn’t responding to his emails. He looks like Eamonn Holmes gave him a right good telling off for not observing the strict kitchen rules, carefully printed on a wooden plaque, hanging over the doorway.

I am doomed to repeat this each and every single time. If you want to have a peek with your peeking eyes, and have the stomach for it, you can witness his face HERE

Trekkin’ Abroad: Norman D.

So many posts in so few days. It’s almost like it’s the end of the month and people have one eye on the Bean Counter.

No matter. This isn’t just any post, this is important. Listen carefully.

I am posting to the Beans from a foreign location. I am, literally, Trekkin’ Abroad at this exact moment. I am within a country apparently called Norman D., though as yet I have been unable to ascertain its surname. However, armed only with this rudimentary information, I’ve narrowed down some likely suspects.

Norman Dodgin

An English footballer, who mainly played defensive positions, Norman Dodgin’s professional career lasted from the late 1940s to the early 1950s and he died in 2000.

Norman Douglas

An author, most famous for his 1915 book South Wind, Norman Douglas died in 1952 – interestingly, at a time when Norman Dodgin was at the height of his professional football career. A coincidence? Unlikely.

Norman Dyhrenfurth

Confusingly born in Breslau, a German city that no longer exists because it’s now called Wroclaw and in Poland, Norman Dyhrenfurth was a cinematographer who produced movies for National Geographic in the 1960s and is apparently also known for a film released in 2007, which is two years after his death. He was born on May 7th, the same as me. Another coincidence? Unlikely.

Clearly these are the three most eminent Norman D.’s in the world, and so logically if I am in a place called Norman D. then I must be in one of them. All three are dead, which brings the unsettling but inevitable conclusion that I have gone on holiday to a corpse. However, it seems to be a reasonably nice corpse, with a pleasant apartment that has a balcony and a short walk to shops and bars around an attractive harbour front setting, so if this is life inside a dead body it’s not all bad.

I am due to leave this place on Sunday and if any further information about the location or identity of Norman D. comes to light, I will share it here.

Cynical Filler

What do you mean?

Who says that this is just a cynical ploy to cram in another post before the end of the month because I forgot to do others during the early part of December? Who says that I am writing whatever comes to mind just to fill enough space to constitute another post for me and my tally?

Who is daring to stand there accusing me of all these things? Who has the ten ton tissue balls to climb up on top of their work station to point the finger at me? Where the hell do you get off blaming me for these matters when there are much bigger, wider, nastier things that you could be accusing me of?

Wait, forget that last one…

Where is the cause for all this animosity when I have done nothing wrong? Why don’t you take a long, cool drink in the mirror and leave me alone scoffing in the corner, counting my beans and giggling like a mouse high on charcoal?

So there.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Grim