Category: Things on my desk

Avatar Calendar expansion pack delivery

The unprecedented girth of this year’s Pouring Beans Calendar has caused many of us difficulty, as we found that only eleven months would fit into the calendar’s patented display case. Thankfully, help is now at hand.

Your delivery of an official Pouring Beans Calendar Patented Display Case Expansion Pack Deluxe™ will take place shortly, and provides more space than is required even for the 2026 Calendar’s pages, which are printed on the same stuff they use for invitations to a coronation.

You will shortly receive:

2x Brick Corner 1x2x2, white

2x Brick 1×6, white

3x Brick 1×8, white

You will additionally receive any nitrile O-rings (20mm diameter) that you may have previously requested as part of the same package.

We recommend inserting these pieces as a new layer in the Display Case, and removing one layer of flat pieces, to obtain the optimum space for your 2026 Calendar. The additional pieces may be stored on the back of the Display Case and brought back into use in future years if Phil at work decides to order even more absurdly luxurious paper than this. However, we are now confident that, whatever arrangement you decide to settle upon, your Display Case is now capable of adapting to any calendar thickness eventuality.

Yours sincerely,

The Pouring Beans Calendar Customer Fulfilment Team

Avatar Butter keks

I like those biscuits that are actually just a big slab of chocolate with a bit of biscuit loitering on the back. That’s the correct ratio of chocolate to biscuit.

Anyway, in the midst of battering my way through a delicious packet of them, I paused briefly to turn one over and have a look at the biscuit side. It had a message for me.

I have decided to start using this as a slightly condescending pet name for people.

  • “Hey, slow down there, butter keks.”
  • “Right you are, butter keks.”
  • “Alright, butter keks, you and whose army?”

If you have other suggestions for slightly patronising ways to use this as a mild pejorative, please post them below.

Avatar Splashing out

I don’t like Black Friday. I don’t like that it’s an American thing that makes no sense here, and I don’t like that it’s a ridiculous incentive to buy stupid crap I don’t need, and I don’t like that it causes stampedes of morons to trash shops in the hope of getting a bargain on a games console. I don’t like Black Friday.

So when Black Friday rolls around I take a principled stand and refuse to take part. My morals are stronger than my desire for bargains. Or so I thought.

This year I happened to be doing some Christmas shopping online when I hit on the Amazon list of Black Friday deals, and something turned my head.

I couldn’t resist. I was weak. I bought it.

I splashed out a totally unplanned £5, and now I have a pack of five adhesive cable clips in a range of sizes to keep all my wires tidy at the back of my desk.

Im not proud of it. But at least, when my standards slipped, it was for a just cause.

Avatar Calendar Conversion

Way back at the start of the year, when we all excitedly built our, now legendary, lego pouring beans calendars, we all deiscovered the small but important flaw that not all the pages actually fit inside.

At the time I shoved in all those that fit, and the rest went in the luxurious golden box it was delivered in. (Which incidentally, still smells of whatever magic they put into laser printers to make colours stick to paper).

Well at the start of the month, the time came when that initial tranche of pages ran out. Giddy, I opened the gold box and wanged in the rest of the year, only to discover it was too baggy and they all fell out every time I moved the thing.

Modifications were needed, and modifications were made…

The holey-bit was trimmed down by removing two layers of the thin bits, and thus a perfect fit was once again achieved.

Don’t worry though, this being Lego, all the spare bits are safely stored on the back.

They’re all ready to be re-fitted when next years calendar refill-block duly arrives from Chris at Christmas.

Avatar The dancing monkey

There are many complex and bewildering technologies to master in my new job, but probably none more complex or bewildering than the robotic dancing alarm monkey.

Alarms go off quite regularly, you see. We look after technical things, lots of them, and the technical things are all wired up to an alarm system, so when something goes wrong it comes up on a screen and an alarm goes off. Then we press a button to make the noise stop and see if anything needs to be done.

The alarm could just come out of a speaker. That would certainly make sense. Instead, though, it’s been wired up to an animatronic monkey with inbuilt speakers. He makes the alarm sound, and he dances from side to side while he makes it. By such means the announcement of a potentially catastrophic system failure is made delightfully charming. This is, with no danger of overstatement whatsoever, one of the best things about my job.

If you have a need to make noises in your job, I would recommend getting yourself a dancing monkey. You won’t regret it.

Avatar Book news

Are you ready?

OK then, here it is.

The Book is finished.

I have finally, FINALLY, written the final page of the Book and the story is complete. I’m going to scan it in so you can read it to your children and share it with your friends, and you’ll have to wait until then to get hold of the thrilling finale. What will happen to Eric Bins? Will Dr. Rombobulous Combobulation succeed? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, I’ve typed it up so that we don’t have to read handwriting in the online version, and I can present you with some statistics.

The finished book is 34 pages long, which means we all did eleven pages and I did one extra at the end.

  • Ian wrote 2,563 words
  • Kev write 2,505 words
  • I wrote 3,220 words and am therefore the winner

The first page of the book was written on 10 January 2009, and I finished writing the last one on Thursday, so it has taken us 3,226 days to write it, or exactly eight years and ten months. We have averaged one page every 94 days – less than four a year – or, if you prefer, two and a half words a day. I think we can all be proud of that.

Avatar Things On My Desk: 2016 edition

Over the years, the Beans Massive have been careful and diligent in keeping each other informed about items on their respective desks. In 2008, Kev produced an inventory of items on his desk, which was turned into an informative pie chart, and then in 2011 I itemised the objects on my work surface.

More than five years have elapsed since the last update, so it is high time we found out what is now on my desk.

As of 13:57 BST today, the following list is accurate:

  • Two phones and two mobile telephones
  • A massive old fashioned sellotape dispenser that weighs a ton
  • A desk tidy, containing seven biros, three orphaned biro lids, four pairs of scissors and a hoop of white rubber foam with no known purpose
  • A cafetière, with damp coffee grounds at the bottom
  • A dispensing tub of antibacterial Azowipes
  • A remote control with a bit of paper sellotaped to it that reads “RR”
  • A blue folder containing lots of disorganised bits of paper, open at a page with today’s date on and a note that says “TOMORROW aft ed no” and another one that says “Matt regions”.
  • A dirty sheet of paper with lots of small writing, titled “Thirteen years and not so unlucky”
  • A red whiteboard marker
  • A manual for a laminating machine
  • A roll of sticky paper tape
  • My sleeves