I am at home. I am waiting for a plumber.

7 months after the radiator in the kitchen sprang a leak, the one in the bathroom decided to do the same. It was not too much of a leak. Luckily we caught it before the bathroom floor became too wet.

The radiators are old. We have not done anything to upgrade them. Things corrode, break down and fall apart. (The thermostat on the cooling fan on the cooker also broke down on Saturday. Not a disaster. We just switch the cooker off at the plug when we are not using it.) It is to be expected. Time marches on.

We have not done anything replace the radiator in the kitchen. No replacement is desperately needed. Once the immediate problem is fixed, Jennifer has an idea to replace the radiator in the bathroom with a tall radiator; the kind you can put several towels on simultaneously to dry. She wants the new radiator to be installed on a different wall. Behind the door, rather than beneath the airing cupboard. I have no problem with that, but it will be the short end of the wedge. Jennifer will eventually want to replace all of the radiators. I know that we are going to have to do that at some point, but I certainly do not want us to spend the money until we have to.

Pain in the arse. All of it.

**

Somewhere along the way I stopped writing about movies. Blame lack of time and lack of interest. I am still keeping a list of the movies I see at the cinema. Words about them will follow, at some point, but not today.

Work. The aftermath of the crisis. I told them the way it had been handled was wrong. I told there was going to be trouble. I knew it. I was right. It gives me no pleasure to write that.

So...

A mighty fine song by Razorlight. It pretty well sums up my feelings at the moment.

I arrived at work in the middle of a crisis. The details of the crisis are not important. Let's just say that the crisis was with regard to a number of customers being unable to access particular business critical information due to a (unspecified) server problem.

Before I even took my coat off Jennifer said to me, 'If anybody rings up you are not to say, I repeat NOT to say, that it is a known issue and that other customers are experiencing the same problem.'

Eh?

Sorry, but it's disgusting, it's immoral and it's indecent. It's everything that I hate about The Company. Managers that are so busy running ridiculous protocols and certain words cannot be used. There are no such things as problems. There are only incidents.

What is wrong with honesty? What is wrong with being straightforward. Why can't we just say to a customer, 'Yes, we know there is a problem and we are trying to fix it'?

I think it is pathetic and I do not like it. I was vocal about my unhappiness. I was told to shut up.

(Rant over. Jerry straightens the halo on his head and continues.)

I changed my desktop on Monday. This guy.



Jack Bristow from the TV series "Alias", portrayed by Victor Garber.

Bit of a bland looking guy, isn't he? He could be a chief waiter? Or a bank manager? Or maybe even the anonymous CEO of one of those financial institutions that went bust last week?

He isn't. Jack Bristow is Sydney Bristow's father. He is a spy. He is humourless. He is deadly. If you do not give him the information that he wants he will most likely hurt you and then kill you.

But, he is a good guy. (At least I think so. We haven't quite finished watching the series yet.) He sometimes has to do nasty things. In the episode of "Alias" series 5 that we watched last week, Jack Bristow cut off somebodys ear! It was OK. He had good reasons.

Jack Bristow. Father of Sydney Bristow. My hero. I love him.

Jennifer has passed the first set of her ITIL exams. She got an 82% grade. It is one of the highest grades achieved by anybody who has taken the ITIL exams at The Company.

Good. I am proud of her. Jennifer has worked hard to achieve that result. I just hope that before she rushes headlong into the next set of ITIL studying, she can obtain something of what life coaches would call a better "Life/Work" balance, because she is dismally failing at achieving that.

The Company are pushing to get all staff to take ITIL exams. I have told them to get stuffed, unless the studying and the exams can be done in work time or as paid overtime. I have said that I do not intend to utilise a single second of my unpaid own time on something that I believe will bring no benefit to myself or to The Company. The Company are unhappy at my attitude and I am not the only one.

I spoke to a guy today who discovered that the studying of ITIL and the taking of the exams had been put as task to achieve on his annual appraisal form. He refused to sign it, giving reasons for declining very similar to those I detailed above. The Company were expecting him to do a lot of work in his own time and The Company had no right to tell him what to do outside of work.

A few people have taken the exams. Quite a lot have not.

Career? What career?

Watching people is interesting.

Girl and boy at the bus shelter this morning. Boy is leaning against the fence. Boy has a serious expression. Girl is all over him like a rash. She kisses his neck. She strokes his hand. She caresses his ears. Boy is indifferent. Girl puts her hands on his chest. Boy pushes her away.

"No."

Girl puts on a sulky expression. She sits down. She lights a cigarette. (While in the bus shelter, smoking police!) Girls looks into the distance. Boy says, "What's up?"

"Nothing."

Boy walks over to her and kisses Girl on forehead. Girl smiles. She reaches out and takes his hand. Bus arrives. Cigarette gets put out and Boy and Girl get onto the bus.

THE END.

What was all that about then?

Life is very boring around here at the moment.

"Disaster Movie".



Question: Why does Hollywood persist in releasing lame movies like "Disaster Movie".
Answer: Because they make money.

"Disaster Movie" made it's 25 million dollar budget back in 3 weeks, on release in the States. I am assuming that it also went straight into the Top 10. From then on it was into pure profit. "Disaster Movie" will certainly make even more money overseas. On those terms alone "Disaster Movie" alone is a successful movie.

I paid money to see this dreck. (Well, kind of. I have a pass that, for a monthly fee, allows me to see unlimited movies at a particular cinema chain.) You may have paid money to see "Disaster Movie" as well, and so you should. No pirate DVD's here, thank you very much. We are responsible for potentially more rubbish like "Disaster Movie" being inflicted on the world. I apologize deeply and humbly. I hope you do to.

"Disaster Movie" is almost totally awful. (Almost totally awful? OK. I admit that for a microsecond a slight smile played across my lips at one of the "Juno" jokes, but that could just have easily been a small belch.) "Disaster Movie" is a terrible movie. A piece of cinematic poo. A textbook case of how not to make a comedy in the Noughties.

Magnificently unfunny. Obvious, witless, stupid, crass, vile and so very, very bad. Not bad in a good way. Bad in a bad way. There was definitely a whiff of death coming from that screening. People left the cinema dazed and in shock. I saw a man who looked like he had eaten his own tongue in horror at what he had just seen. When I got home after seeing "Disaster Movie", I rushed into the shower to wash off the smell. Jennifer noticed it. She said to me, "Have you just seen 'Disaster Movie'?"

Amazingly "Disaster Movie" is worse than "Meet The Spartans" and worse than "Superhero Movie". At least the latter had Pamela Anderson in a Fantastic Four outfit.

I would say that sometimes it is worthwhile seeing a real stinker of a movie, because that can help you appreciate the gems even more. I cannot say that seeing this movie would serve even that purpose.

If you have to see "Disaster Movie", wait for it to appear, for free, on the television. Trust me. It's not worth the effort.

I didn't make it here last night because I was busy... Er... watching TV.

But I was also finishing reading "Endymion" by Dan Simmons! Very good book, but also a very long book. I was glad to finally finish it. It seems like I have been reading "Endymion" forever. There is only one book left now for me to read in the "Hyperion Cantos" and that is "The Rise Of Endymion". I intend to start that next week. I normally read for half an hour every morning before leaving for work, but this week I am rising at 5am and leaving at 6am. No time to read.

After "The Rise Of Endymion" I am going to read something short. Then I intend to finish Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Got to be done. Jennifer and I have booked to see the stage adaptation of "His Dark Materials" at the Birmingham Rep in March next year. In my opinion it is never a good idea to see an adaptation of a novel, or a series of novels, directly after reading the source material. It is always best to leave some distance. I remember seeing the movie of "L. A. Confidential" a week after I had finished the book and thinking that the movie was absolutely dreadful. Of course it wasn't. It took another viewing of "L. A. Confidential" a year or two later to get me to change my mind.

At work, today, I was on a customer care course. Everybody in The Company is going on the same course. I last did a customer care course 20 odd years ago and found it very useful. No, really I did. That course was full of very practical tips. Obvious stuff like making sure you have a pad and a pen on your desk at all time to jot down notes, and also to identify yourself and/or your department when you answer the phone. You would be amazed at the people I know who always scramble for a pen and paper and how many of them just say 'Hello?' when they answer the phone.

The new course was much more to do with the psychological aspects of customer care. Aggressive, assertive and passive customers, and the different ways to deal with them. High loyalty, low loyalty, high satisfaction, low satisfaction customers, and the ways that they can move between the different parts of loyalty/satisfaction grid. Maybe some people thought it par for the course, but I thought it was fascinating stuff.

There was one exercise when a group of people were told to talk to each other about 'holidays'. After 30 seconds an Outsider was to try to join in with the conversation and the group had to ignore them for 5 minutes, before allowing the Outsider to join the conversation. An observer (the lecturer) would make notes on how the group coped with ignoring the Outsider, how the Outsider tried to impose themselves on the conversation and how they reacted when finally being allowed into the conversation.

Interestingly enough, I managed to ignore the Outsider completely. He wasn't even there, as far as I was concerned. The lecturer said that this was unusual. I told this to Jennifer. She said that it was not unusual at all, because any one of the Cornelius clan could have managed it. She said that when we get together we all talk over each other, interrupt each other, none of us are listening to each other and that none of us care a fig about the opinion of anybody else.

Gulp! Am I really like that?

Yes, I suppose that I am. Thank God for the Blog. Nobody to interrupt me.

The other fun thing was the presence on the course of a new girl (a beautiful, stunning, sexy girl) from the marketing department, who was wearing the thinnest and lowest cut blouse I have ever seen. The poor child looked like she was about to freeze to death. I hope that she didn't catch a chill. It would be a waste.

Boobs are very distracting for poor blokes, you know? What was I supposed to do? Not look? At least I didn't drool. Dignity at all times. Dignity.

I have more films to write about, but not now. "Lost In Austen" starts at 9pm. For a light chick comedy, I think that it is hilarious, especially the performance of Hugh Bonneville as Mr. Bennett. Wednesday night period comedies? Shit! Jennifer has obviously brainwashed me.