Go as an eccentric absent-minded genius, who has therefore forgotten the dress code. Signify this by carrying a completed cryptic crossword. (Buy the paper on Thursday
and Friday - then carry Thursday's completed one.)
Me, I’ve gone out for a meal in a random pub after a day of re-enacting, dressed in full mid-Victorian gear, including crinoline and bonnet.
I’d be straight in the loft digging out my Tudor black gown and ruff as an excuse to go posh as a middle class woman (I usually play peasants).
It's amazing how many decades a sharp suit can cover fancy dress wise. This is yours truly at a 1940s event. The hat was bought for a 1920s-themed Christmas meal, the Rolleiflex and Contax (in the background) are real, and I used them that day.
It's amazing how many decades a sharp suit can cover fancy dress wise. This is yours truly at a 1940s event. The hat was bought for a 1920s-themed Christmas meal, the Rolleiflex and Contax (in the background) are real, and I used them that day.
It's amazing how many decades a sharp suit can cover fancy dress wise. This is yours truly at a 1940s event. The hat was bought for a 1920s-themed Christmas meal, the Rolleiflex and Contax (in the background) are real, and I used them that day.
The last fancy dress event I went to was about ten years ago at a statewide conference dinner, which was themed around the ocean, as we were dining at the National Maritime Museum. Out from Mrs BA's craft stash came card, braid, sequins and ribbon. They were turned into a bicorne hat and suitable decorations resembling a KCB. Add to my dinner suit and I became Sir Joseph Porter KCB. No expense and fitted the theme - although I was missing the retinue of sisters and cousins and aunts!
I learned yesterday that there is a theme: a character from a movie and that money should not be spent on bought costumes. Too late for that now anyway. I’ve now spent far too long looking for ideas online, chatting with my granddaughter (who has discovered how scant my knowledge of movie characters is) and feeling more and more stressed over what should be a happy occasion. And nothing else has got done today. I feel deprived of the opportunity to relax and wear some nice clothes of my choice. At least I think I am now getting a lift, so alcohol can be consumed. I don’t even know what time it starts, for goodness sake.
Finally decided, I am going as Joy Adamson from Born Free.( True story. She raised an orphaned lion cub in Kenya and eventually released it into the wild). Brown trousers, shirt, straw hat. I doubt the younger generation will have heard of her but that’s not my problem.
I’d better write the birthday card now.
Finally decided, I am going as Joy Adamson from Born Free.( True story. She raised an orphaned lion cub in Kenya and eventually released it into the wild). Brown trousers, shirt, straw hat. I doubt the younger generation will have heard of her but that’s not my problem.
I’d better write the birthday card now.
This made me smile.
In addition to having been a mission partner in Kenya I also lived there as a child, not far from Joy Adamson's home in Naivasha. I loved her books.
Hope you enjoyed the party!
Sorry you had all that hassle @Puzzler , glad you found a solution and hope you enjoyed the event. We had a similar thing when away at the weekend. Mr Nen informed me, somewhat last-minute, that the dress code for the dinner on Saturday evening was "loud shirts or outfits." I obsessed over it for a short while, trawling the charity shops, and then realised he has several tasteless shirts in the cupboard that he never wears and I had an outfit I wore some years ago to the Goodwood Revival. As it was, he made his own choice from what he had (of a nice shirt), some people hadn't bothered at all, and it was particularly for the silent disco after the meal and I'd admitted defeat to tiredness and gone to bed by that time. (I now regret that as it sounds as though it was great fun.)
Everyone wears headphones, and chooses which style of disco music they prefer. I have to say it is something that can look slightly weird when you see it happening but can’t hear any music!
Everyone wears headphones, and chooses which style of disco music they prefer. I have to say it is something that can look slightly weird when you see it happening but can’t hear any music!
I’ve been to a silent disco at a birthday party, great fun to watch/participate and it means you can chat without competing with the music. I think I’ve also been to one at Greenbelt.
Didn't they have one in (gasp!) Canterbury Cathedral? (Presumably before the "graffiti" were installed).
I wouldn't put anything past Canterbury Cathedral's doing, Pagans and Hellbound Hereticks that they all are. Why, enny fule kno that such places are only for the recitation of 1662 BCP services, and for no other porpoise.
I see how the 'silent disco' might work, but I don't think it would work for me.
TICTH the management of the building I live in. The front door to the lobby, which is supposed to be locked shut by an electronic lock, has been set open for weeks now. I've emailed management twice so far and nothing's been done, Today I called and spoke to someone I could barely understand, his accent was so thick, and complained. He said he'd look into it. I don't expect anything to change. But it's unsafe. There is no security, anyone can walk in.
I’ve been to a silent disco at a birthday party, great fun to watch/participate and it means you can chat without competing with the music. I think I’ve also been to one at Greenbelt.
I went to one at a birthday party. There was a choice of three different streams of music, and you could see by the coloured lights on people's headphones which one they were listening to. So you could join in with a group who were dancing to the same thing, if you wanted to. It was good fun.
@Puzzler, I hope your party has gone well and I love the idea of a silent disco, they are becoming more popular in Oz too.
We are fans of the easy fancy dress, preferably using something in the wardrobe. A spotty dress and fluffy koala ears, I became Nutsy the girl Koala from Aussie classic book, Blinky Bill. Husband made a Ned Kelly suit of armour from brown cardboard and wore a Dry as a bone coat over the top - the theme was Australiana.
Easiest ever costume for son was a pair of brown cords (op shop), white shirt and blue v neck jumper with gelled up fringe, he was Tintin. Helped a lot that he already had the correct colour of hair!!
TICTH cyclists who think that shining a ridiculously bright light in my face when going the other way is a good thing. We all need to be able to see where we are going.
Yes, and many a cyclist can't be bothered to properly direct it at the ground, a good few metres in front of them. It seems it's much preferred these days to blind oncoming traffic. These LED lights can be a curse!
Speaking as a cyclist in a city where cyclists get killed by drivers who don't see them, anything that will help me be seen is worth it. It is pointed at the ground, and has the plus that its bright enough to actually see by on an unlit road.
Speaking as a cyclist in a city where cyclists get killed by drivers who don't see them, anything that will help me be seen is worth it. It is pointed at the ground, and has the plus that its bright enough to actually see by on an unlit road.
I get this but it doesn't give cyclists the right to endanger other road users. Your right to safety ends if it endangers my safety.
TICTH a local authority, that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, who repeatedly send me emails with no salutation, no signature and no message other than an instruction to open the attachment.
And they wonder why I consider local authorities to be systemically incompetent!
TICTH a local authority, that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, who repeatedly send me emails with no salutation, no signature and no message other than an instruction to open the attachment.
And they wonder why I consider local authorities to be systemically incompetent!
As a local authority employee it's usually a result of trying to do too many things with too few staff and not even enough time to pause and work out how to do things better. I reckon if you gave each team in turn 6 months of (say) 50% over current staffing to sort out their policies and processes at the end of the 6 months when staffing returned to normal you'd have much better systems and a whole lot less apparent incompetence. But of course there isn't the money. On the contrary it's constant cut, cut, cut.
TICTH a local authority, that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, who repeatedly send me emails with no salutation, no signature and no message other than an instruction to open the attachment.
And they wonder why I consider local authorities to be systemically incompetent!
Along the same lines--
The insurance and major health care providers in my life who constantly muck up my life by calling me out of the blue, intimating that there is a matter of major importance they need to speak to me about, but first I must identify myself by giving them my birthdate, part of my Social Security number, and address. I generally respond with an annoying lecture on identity theft and why you don't give such data to random callers. Then I have to hang up, go obtain the phone number from some trusted source, call it, and ask "Was it in fact one of your people who called me, and if so, why?"
Wasted time and frustration. Bonus points if, once I have done all this, they either say "I'm afraid I don't know why we were calling" or alternately, "Oh yes. Would you please take a brief survey..."
The telephone company, Bell Canada. Our land line is down, and yesterday I eventually I got through to an automated line that said it could be back by Friday. Their website says there are no outages in our area and a perplexed human I managed to reach at one point said the same thing, adding that our address doesn't appear on their service map. They don't maintain their lines, which frequently pass through trees with rotten branches. (Another factor around here is a fashion for vandalising cables of any kind). Our mobiles are unreliable, as we're in the bottom of a wooded river valley, but it usually gets better in the winter with the reduced leaf cover. The thing that constantly aggravates me is that a telecommunications company puts up every possible barrier to communicating with them.
Are you sure this is not spam or virussy of sorts? I'd be very hesitant to open any such attachment. And yes, it'd be very rude.
I occasionally get emails which I think are probably genuine but because they are poorly created they look more like dodgy things so they get marked as junk. It doesn't take much effort to at least make your email look real enough that I investigate further.
Are you sure this is not spam or virussy of sorts? I'd be very hesitant to open any such attachment. And yes, it'd be very rude.
I occasionally get emails which I think are probably genuine but because they are poorly created they look more like dodgy things so they get marked as junk. It doesn't take much effort to at least make your email look real enough that I investigate further.
At my last employer, the most suspicious looking emails were the automated ones from our external IT provider, I actually forwarded them one and even they agreed!
Dodgy emails sometimes have a clue in the address of the sender, which may look a bit odd, especially if you know how the correct address (for example, your local authority) should read.
Having involved about twelve different people in three different organisations over several days (I'm really hoping they'll realise that saving money doesn't save money. But I have no realistic expectation that they will!)
It turns out to be a genuine invoice relating to my mother's care package.
Of course, this is after I've called three different customer officers, spoken to a finance officer twice (who couldn't understand why I had a problem with the email! It was automated so obviously had to be okay!), received a verbal assurance that someone else had said it was okay via another member of my workplace who happens to share my first name...
I'm sorry. pace@Arethosemyfeet I have to say that local authorities should be abolished.
(I accept that they are underfunded. But they spend that funding on things no one cares about. I actually worked for a local authority (worst experience of my life) for ten years. During that time, they hired space heaters for six months for a hall, rather than replacing the domestic boiler that had been installed to provide heating. They knocked down a wall to provide a fire escape to a hall before checking what the structural situation was. They required staff to take the European Computer Driving License when the People's Network was introduced, but failed to provide any further training to staff hired later, even when the software was changed. They hired management consultants to advise that we couldn't afford staff to actually do the work.... I can keep going! I'm sorry. We should get rid of them. They're crap to work for and don't provide a decent service to the public. )
I've worked for local authorities (first as a teacher and now as, bluntly, a bureaucrat). I've seen individual examples of wasting money (mostly by headteachers; it seems like the role attracts people with a certain kind of arrogance) but mostly what I see are a lot of people working hard to keep services running. I spend part of my week doing social works complaints admin, so I see some of the screw-ups; I also see how utterly bonkers some of the public are and how hard people are working to keep vulnerable people safe.
Large bureaucracies of any kind tend to produce absurdities (capital spend vs operating budget is a classic one) but the absurdities don't tend to have a particularly high monetary value. I also think waste is far less likely now than it might have been in the past. Every year as far back as I can remember budget time has meant a hunt for savings, and everything that can be trimmed has been, often beyond the point of wisdom.
If you did get rid of local authorities I’m not sure what you would replace them with. I know they are impossibly unwieldy. So are many large organisations. Local authorities have many employees who are definitely underpaid for what they do and a few who are overpaid, many quite sensible systems and some pretty stupid ones, sometimes too much bureaucracy and sometimes not enough. Very much like the NHS, in fact. But often with lower pay rates for the level of expertise and experience.
I've worked for local authorities (first as a teacher and now as, bluntly, a bureaucrat). I've seen individual examples of wasting money (mostly by headteachers; it seems like the role attracts people with a certain kind of arrogance) but mostly what I see are a lot of people working hard to keep services running. I spend part of my week doing social works complaints admin, so I see some of the screw-ups; I also see how utterly bonkers some of the public are and how hard people are working to keep vulnerable people safe.
Large bureaucracies of any kind tend to produce absurdities (capital spend vs operating budget is a classic one) but the absurdities don't tend to have a particularly high monetary value. I also think waste is far less likely now than it might have been in the past. Every year as far back as I can remember budget time has meant a hunt for savings, and everything that can be trimmed has been, often beyond the point of wisdom.
I used to know someone who worked as a research scientist for a cancer research charity. They relied on various grants to finance their work. They had to justify if they needed a certain amount of money, and to do this they had to spend that amount of money in the previous year. If they hadn’t spent that amount, then those awarding the grants would deem that they didn’t need it. One year, they knew they would need 100K for a particular project, but because they’d not spent that amount they realised their application was unlikely to be successful. The solution? They bought £100K worth of angle-poised lamps.
I've worked for local authorities (first as a teacher and now as, bluntly, a bureaucrat). I've seen individual examples of wasting money (mostly by headteachers; it seems like the role attracts people with a certain kind of arrogance) but mostly what I see are a lot of people working hard to keep services running. I spend part of my week doing social works complaints admin, so I see some of the screw-ups; I also see how utterly bonkers some of the public are and how hard people are working to keep vulnerable people safe.
Large bureaucracies of any kind tend to produce absurdities (capital spend vs operating budget is a classic one) but the absurdities don't tend to have a particularly high monetary value. I also think waste is far less likely now than it might have been in the past. Every year as far back as I can remember budget time has meant a hunt for savings, and everything that can be trimmed has been, often beyond the point of wisdom.
I used to know someone who worked as a research scientist for a cancer research charity. They relied on various grants to finance their work. They had to justify if they needed a certain amount of money, and to do this they had to spend that amount of money in the previous year. If they hadn’t spent that amount, then those awarding the grants would deem that they didn’t need it. One year, they knew they would need 100K for a particular project, but because they’d not spent that amount they realised their application was unlikely to be successful. The solution? They bought £100K worth of angle-poised lamps.
That seems an oddly bulky expenditure! Even if they were pricey presumably they had to store 1000+ lamps?
Comments
and Friday - then carry Thursday's completed one.)
I’d be straight in the loft digging out my Tudor black gown and ruff as an excuse to go posh as a middle class woman (I usually play peasants).
https://flic.kr/p/2rhD4Bd
Did anyone follow the instructions on your hat?
Funnily enough... yes!
@Sandemaniac - very dapper!
I’d better write the birthday card now.
Yes, he was - in 1989 - but Joy herself was murdered by a former employee in 1980.
This made me smile.
In addition to having been a mission partner in Kenya I also lived there as a child, not far from Joy Adamson's home in Naivasha. I loved her books.
Hope you enjoyed the party!
Thank you. Weird, indeed...
I wouldn't put anything past Canterbury Cathedral's doing, Pagans and Hellbound Hereticks that they all are. Why, enny fule kno that such places are only for the recitation of 1662 BCP services, and for no other porpoise.
I see how the 'silent disco' might work, but I don't think it would work for me.
I went to one at a birthday party. There was a choice of three different streams of music, and you could see by the coloured lights on people's headphones which one they were listening to. So you could join in with a group who were dancing to the same thing, if you wanted to. It was good fun.
We are fans of the easy fancy dress, preferably using something in the wardrobe. A spotty dress and fluffy koala ears, I became Nutsy the girl Koala from Aussie classic book, Blinky Bill. Husband made a Ned Kelly suit of armour from brown cardboard and wore a Dry as a bone coat over the top - the theme was Australiana.
Easiest ever costume for son was a pair of brown cords (op shop), white shirt and blue v neck jumper with gelled up fringe, he was Tintin. Helped a lot that he already had the correct colour of hair!!
I get this but it doesn't give cyclists the right to endanger other road users. Your right to safety ends if it endangers my safety.
And they wonder why I consider local authorities to be systemically incompetent!
As a local authority employee it's usually a result of trying to do too many things with too few staff and not even enough time to pause and work out how to do things better. I reckon if you gave each team in turn 6 months of (say) 50% over current staffing to sort out their policies and processes at the end of the 6 months when staffing returned to normal you'd have much better systems and a whole lot less apparent incompetence. But of course there isn't the money. On the contrary it's constant cut, cut, cut.
Along the same lines--
The insurance and major health care providers in my life who constantly muck up my life by calling me out of the blue, intimating that there is a matter of major importance they need to speak to me about, but first I must identify myself by giving them my birthdate, part of my Social Security number, and address. I generally respond with an annoying lecture on identity theft and why you don't give such data to random callers. Then I have to hang up, go obtain the phone number from some trusted source, call it, and ask "Was it in fact one of your people who called me, and if so, why?"
Wasted time and frustration. Bonus points if, once I have done all this, they either say "I'm afraid I don't know why we were calling" or alternately, "Oh yes. Would you please take a brief survey..."
Grrrrrrr.
I occasionally get emails which I think are probably genuine but because they are poorly created they look more like dodgy things so they get marked as junk. It doesn't take much effort to at least make your email look real enough that I investigate further.
At my last employer, the most suspicious looking emails were the automated ones from our external IT provider, I actually forwarded them one and even they agreed!
Having involved about twelve different people in three different organisations over several days (I'm really hoping they'll realise that saving money doesn't save money. But I have no realistic expectation that they will!)
It turns out to be a genuine invoice relating to my mother's care package.
Of course, this is after I've called three different customer officers, spoken to a finance officer twice (who couldn't understand why I had a problem with the email! It was automated so obviously had to be okay!), received a verbal assurance that someone else had said it was okay via another member of my workplace who happens to share my first name...
I'm sorry. pace@Arethosemyfeet I have to say that local authorities should be abolished.
(I accept that they are underfunded. But they spend that funding on things no one cares about. I actually worked for a local authority (worst experience of my life) for ten years. During that time, they hired space heaters for six months for a hall, rather than replacing the domestic boiler that had been installed to provide heating. They knocked down a wall to provide a fire escape to a hall before checking what the structural situation was. They required staff to take the European Computer Driving License when the People's Network was introduced, but failed to provide any further training to staff hired later, even when the software was changed. They hired management consultants to advise that we couldn't afford staff to actually do the work.... I can keep going! I'm sorry. We should get rid of them. They're crap to work for and don't provide a decent service to the public. )
Large bureaucracies of any kind tend to produce absurdities (capital spend vs operating budget is a classic one) but the absurdities don't tend to have a particularly high monetary value. I also think waste is far less likely now than it might have been in the past. Every year as far back as I can remember budget time has meant a hunt for savings, and everything that can be trimmed has been, often beyond the point of wisdom.
I used to know someone who worked as a research scientist for a cancer research charity. They relied on various grants to finance their work. They had to justify if they needed a certain amount of money, and to do this they had to spend that amount of money in the previous year. If they hadn’t spent that amount, then those awarding the grants would deem that they didn’t need it. One year, they knew they would need 100K for a particular project, but because they’d not spent that amount they realised their application was unlikely to be successful. The solution? They bought £100K worth of angle-poised lamps.
That seems an oddly bulky expenditure! Even if they were pricey presumably they had to store 1000+ lamps?