Somebody stop me

 I know, it's rubbish.

    I'm stuck here at home with nothing to do; and I'll be damned if I'm going to get into a four mile queue for the petrol station on my motorbike.

    If this continues I'll have to finish the novel I started six months ago,

Off work yet again

 Do you remember those times when most, or a lot of people were laid off work because of Covid?

   And those cretins that bought all the toilet rolls, and pasta, and long life milk because Armageddon had clearly arrived? Now, because of an innocuous story that Esso had a slight shortage of drivers, it's been extrapolated to an absolute absence of petrol everywhere. And now there is an absence because the toilet roll, pasta brigade are now all besieging the petrol stations, jackal-like. To the point where there is no petrol - anywhere. Last week I sat behind a person at 04.30 hrs in the endless queue for the only petrol in the area for two hours. When the garage opened, she spent £4.30 on fuel. 

    So now, as I can't get fuel for my boss' gas guzzling monster, I'm off work yet again.

    Do you remember this from a few weeks ago?

    Well they've been working hard, although I'm not entirely sure that it could be called progress.

    At this rate I won't have to wait a year until my shortcut is back. I'm not even sure I'll live that long.

 

I spent the evening with Bob Ross.

 Last night as I was finally becoming tired of NCIS, science fiction, and other programmes where people get dead and injured, I started flicking through my approximately 85 channels of pure nonsense and happened upon Bob Ross.

    Even though constantly screaming at the TV for him to stop because he always put too much into a picture, I always loved listening to him.  And as I have a small TV next to my computer, he urged me to get on with it and experiment.

    So I did.

    I know, it's absolute rubbish. On the plus side, I haven't put too much in, and upon Bob's urging, tonight I'm going to play with it.

    The painting, that is.

I caught a cold - remember those?

Presumably because I've been wearing a mask for nearly eighteen months, (although not in the house, you understand) I haven't had a cold for about two years. 

    I'd almost forgotten how annoying they were. But after all the lockdowns, missed work - and missed wages, I've got one and subsequently been sent home from work.

    From whom I caught it, I have no idea. Unless the nasty little germs wriggled over the edge of my mask and made a bee-line for my throat, thereby infecting me, I must conclude that there's a new variant, called P*** off-Roger-At-All-Costs.

    Well it's working. Not only am I at home feeling hard done by, but I'm also losing wages - again. I told my boss that I'd done three Covid tests; all negative, but it didn't work.

    Sometimes life really sucks.

Hurty bobo

 A couple of days ago (and not for the first time) I discovered, or remembered what  happens when a human body (that's me) is flying towards earth at what felt like terminal velocity.

    I even had time to think Ohhh s...... you get the rest.

    All the other times it was when I was either knocked off my motorbike, or that never to be forgotten day that I was abseiling down from a helicopter when it caught a downdraft as I was going fast but only about ten feet from the ground. Oh, drat I muttered lumbering to my feet and extracting my rifle barrel from a very soft part of myself.

    This time a mini cab driver decided to go left after signalling right. Foolishly believing him I continued across the road on my daily run. It was only as it bore down on me that I jerked to the side, fell and slammed into the edge of the pavement to an excruciating spasm of pain. Funnily enough he didn't stop. Who'd have thought it?

   Now my right shoulder retains the semi-muscular shape it was before, while my left looks like it was bolted on from someone else's dead body.

    Twenty, or even ten years ago, I could have laughed it off, but now I feel like a cripple and can barely breathe without a grimace of agony.

    Mind you, twenty, or even ten years ago I could have got out of the way a little more sprightly.

I took a bit of a liberty

The other day I went to a well known shop which has much lower prices because they don't have to stock shelves. You just look through a catalogue, or computer these days, select what you want, then buy it. It's delivered from the warehouse to the front of the shop and off you go - all in about five minutes.

    On this occasion I bought a very cheap sound system for my PC, and after checking that I could bring it back if it didn't meet my requirements, went home happy and hopeful.

    An hour later I was back, to a barely hidden look of frustration from the same assistant.

    "But how could you know?" he exclaimed after confirming my address, "You've could barely have been home ten minutes before deciding it's no good."

    "That was long enough." I gave him my best pained grimace of frustration. Then added a slight hint of pathetic resignation for good measure. "It does work," I confirmed, "but it didn't work on my computer, and you said...." That was when I added the final touch. I began to rant in the accent from which I've been toiling all my adult life to escape. In England, everyone with a brummy accent, which to say the accent of the second city in the country (Birmingham) is deemed a thug and an idiot, or both. It might be apocryphal but I'm told that judges find any defendant guilty purely on the basis of this accent. I don't care - it never fails me.

 

    Two minutes later my card was re-credited and I was on my way.

    So I still don't have a computer with sound.

    Don't even get me started about Microsoft. "We are unable to identify your problem."

And heeeees back.

You'd think that after both building my own, and fixing other people's computers since the late 80's, I'd have a tiny trace of skill. A microscopic nugget. Apparently not. 

    A dodgy windows 10 update did for my machine for over a week. Finally it's working once more, and according to my comp, my sound card is working. It isn't. Neither is the USB sound card I fitted, although, assureth the computer, it's pummelling my ears with 100 percent volume. It's amazing how much the lack of sound can turn me off; and as a result I haven't been near it for a week, mainly because the computer generated subtitles on YouTube are, frankly, rubbish.

    On the plus side, as a result of my deep mining of the registry, it now boots up in three minutes and not the approximately half an hour of two weeks ago.

   

    And it that wasn't bad enough, just a few days ago my phone upgraded itself to Android 11. Before, my battery was like the inside of the TARDIS. No matter how hard I used it, it would always give me at least three days of joyful play. Now, I only have to turn it on and it's down to about 75 percent power. 

    Enough of the whining. I'm finally back.