Masturbatory Fuckwittage

By masturbatory fuckwittage I do of course mean that I fuckwittaged myself, not that I committed fuckwittage by wanking.

The new assignment which I have my first day of on Wednesday is up in North Derbyshire. As this is not my "base location" I get to claim travel expenses. However, as it's travel I get paid for, I need to get it authorised first. This is an online process, hampered only by the fact that going to a global multinational's website from another global multinational's network still feels like using a 33k6 modem. Still, I got it done nice and early in the day, to make sure there was plenty of time for it to get through the system. It tells you to look up the mileage on the RAC website so I did that, noting with satisfaction that it planned the same route as I already had in my mind, entered the mileage into the request form along with all the other information and sent it off.

It was only much later in the day that I realised that I'd made a bit of a boo-boo.

I hadn't doubled the mileage up when I'd entered it into the form.

In other words, I hadn't raised a request that covered the return journey.

For a moment I had an image that was both amusing and disturbing of me sitting on the Derbyshire/Yorkshire border, not travelling home because it hadn't been authorised. A ridiculous extreme of course, but amusing and disturbing all the same. I did of course raise another travel request, cancelling the original to cover the tracks of my fuckwittage. Hopefully this will all be through by the end of tomorrow.

I also forgot to mention something in last night's entry. On the way back from Manchester (which incidentally featured appalling traffic - who's fucking stupid idea was it to send London's biggest football club (fanbase-wise) up the M6 and back) we stopped for dinner at a nice pub belonging to a chain that Alison and I have always found good. I don't actually know what the chain is called, but all their pubs have "Inn Keeping with Tradition" emblazoned across them somewhere. And I'm pretty sure that like Alison, half of my readers won't even have noticed the pun there. Anyway... we were sitting there waiting for our food. As often happens at meals out, my mobile phone was sitting on the table (don't like leaving it loose in jacket pocket when not wearing jacket, uncomfortable sitting down with it in back pocket) - set to discrete of course. The waitress brings our food over, glances at the table, then giggles and says "Oooh, you've got my phone". This amused us. I was perhaps a little more amused than was called for, but that's par for the course with me.

Then she went away and came back with the salad dressings. Just as she got to our table there was a shrieky laugh from the kitchen, and this made her giggle again.

Then when I went to pay she was the one behind the bar at the time, so she served me. I gave her my VISA card, she did the whole swipe thing, then as she handed me the slip to sign she said "Do you want the gold pen or the ordinary one?" For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about, then I saw that in addition to a regular ballpoint pen she also had a fancy one that did gold ink. I said I didn't mind, at which point she promptly handed me the gold one.

Daft as a brush.

Finally, today I got a piece of email spam that really took the biscuit. The subject heading was: Protect yourself from radiation exposure. It also said, "What can you do to limit exposure to RADIATION in the event of an emergency?" Cashing in on paranoia much? What scares me is some of the people who receive that email are bound to follow it up.

Again, daft as a brush.

Still, I'm one to talk, eh?