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holiday humour, on heaven and hell
I was in a room in a large building when the man came for me. It isn’t often that you get to meet a man in a black cloak and hood, and carrying a scythe, but there he was. As he lead me out through a back door I saw the mini-bus, the sort they use for shuttles from American airports and hotels. He motioned me to board.
I took a vacant seat, there were other people on the ‘bus, and we moved off. The realisation that I had no luggage struck me, although in most places, outside of the UK, the driver would have loaded my bags for me, but I couldn’t remember taking anything out of the building with me. Outside it was dark, and we seemed to stop for other people to get on, but without all of the usual activity that goes on when a ‘bus stops.
The ‘bus also seemed to have morphed from the small one into a full sized coach. No-one spoke to anyone else, and the silence was eerie. I tried to look out of the window to see what we were passing, but all I could see was my reflection. That took me by surprise, because I seemed to be a good thirty years younger, and was suited and booted as I was at the height of my working life.
Looking back down the ‘bus it seemed more like one of those new underground trains that appeared in London around 2010, where there were no doors between the carriages and you could see right down the train. I did what I always do on journeys, I closed my eyes and tried to go Zen.
The vehicle began to slow and, rather than a public address announcement, the message that we were arriving at our destination, all change please, seemed to come more as a thought. We all got up as the doors hissed open, but there was no rush to get off, no pushing or shoving, just an orderly disembarkation.
Where were we? An impression of corridors and escalators saw us arrive into what looked like an enormous airport lounge, but there were no departure boards. People sat, then got up and walked out for no apparent reason, and then I heard, or rather thought, my name was called. Before I could process the thought I had got up and was walking forward.
The lounge had gone and I walked into an area where an identical man was sat at a table with what looked like a laptop. Alongside every one one of these identical men was one of my former fellow passengers, except for one, and he beckoned me to him, motioning for me to sit beside him. He asked my name and date of birth, consulting an entry on the laptop screen, but this had become the size of a 55 inch flat screen TV on which my name and date of birth were writ large.
As I looked on a series of image appeared on the screen, like watching an animation of a photo album. In turn I appeared at each of the five schools that I had attended, then in the various employment that I’ve had. These were all highlights; receiving school prizes, exam results, getting pats on the back, pay rises, promotions and the like. then we seemed to go back to the start and, this time, I was in trouble; getting caned, staying for detention, getting told off, things going wrong. Not so much fun.
Then ladies began to appear, although only a few, a dark haired one in a bikini, a schoolgirl, one who could have worked as a lookalike for a young Sophia Loren, a blonde, an Amazonian redhead, another dark haired one, and then my first wife. Then a series of children, each on which then grew into adulthood. There were six, but I only recognised the last two.
There was more; sporting activities, charitable stuff and other memories from my life, but I was puzzled by the omission of the Berkshire Belle from the parade of ladies. The old man’s voice came into my head again; “So here we are, at the gates of heaven and hell, somewhere that you did not believe in. How wrong you were, and you are about to find out your fate, but first, you have questions about these memories, but the answers will come to you in due course, but, to answer the main question, what are heaven and hell.”
“In heaven you will meet anyone from your past that you would like to meet, as long as they want to meet you. You will see them as they were at some point in your memory that you were happiest with them, and they will see you likewise. You can do what you like and the aim is that you should be happy. In hell you will meet only the people that you wronged, that wronged you or that you most disliked. You will have no choice over who they are, nor when they visit you.”
“As to where you go from here, this is being voted on now”, he indicated the screen where two sets of counters were whizzing around, on above a green thumbs up symbol, the other below a red thumbs down. Everyone in heaven has watched the video that you have just seen, but with a commentary, and they are voting as to whether or not you should be admitted.”
I thought that I had no chance of avoiding purgatory, and closed my eyes. Opening them again I was in a darkened room. It slowly dawned on me that I was looking at a Venetian blinded window, and that it was very alike my bedroom at home. I raised my head slightly, and could see the tip of one of the blades of the ceiling fan. Behind me came the sound of gentle breathing, and I stretched out a hand under the duvet to find a warm thigh. “Groff” came a sleepy voice. It was the Berkshire Belle, and I was still very much alive. I tried to go back to sleep, just to find out a bit more about the parade of people, and other unanswered questions, but the dream had gone.
Author’s note. I am an atheist, and believe that when I’m gone I am gone. For me there is no heaven or hell, no afterlife, just nothing: It will all be over.
I did have a very similar dream to this when I was in hospital last year, during that first week when it was touch and go as to whether or not I would recover. I think that it was just the effect of some industrial strength drugs. Who knows? Anyway, I hope that you have enjoyed this tale. I enjoyed writing it, and, maybe, my Holiday Humour muse might be making a comeback. Happy Holidays!
holiday fun – saving Caesar
The Ides of March
There I was, pottering in the garden doing my Winter chores one afternoon. As I stepped back to admire my handiwork a familiar sound echoed around me. A sound that anyone who has seen a certain sci-fi show will know all too well and, sure enough a Police box materialised onto my deck. A good job I had recently replaced those rotten boards, I thought. It would be a bugger of a job to have got him back to the perpendicular, although maybe he could just dematerialise whilst on the tilt. One of those imponderables, like Daleks and stairs.
The police box door opened, and an arm appeared, beckoning me in. We had not parted on the best of terms last time, well the only time, we had met, so I was a little unsure of my ground, but there are times when you do things without thinking it through, and in I went. There was still a sense of wonder at the inside being so much more spacious that it should have been, and the light was very bright after the British Winter gloom in my garden.
The Doctor was not the same as the one I’d met before, but I was aware of the regular changes of form. This one was large, Caucasian and male, and was busy operating various controls. He hushed me as I went to speak, and motioned me towards a seat, and then, having finished what he was doing, approached me.
“I need your help, much as it pains me to take it” he said, “I’ll explain in a moment, but first, a drink. Beer, do you?” I nodded assent. As he opened two bottles of beer, he told me not to worry about my wife, for he could drop me back into my garden to the second and she would not have noticed my absence. I wasn’t sure about that one; he didn’t know the Berkshire Belle, but there wasn’t much that I could do about that now.
“It’s the Daleks again, and you did rather confound them last time. Twenty-two years ago, wasn’t it?” He moved around the console to get nearer to me, and tripped, his bottle of beer flying from his hand a hitting the control panel out of reach of either of us. Sparking noises and puffs of smoke erupted and the equipment stopped with a graunching noise. I kept quiet, for there was nothing that I could do but let him fiddle with his beloved machine.
Eventually he told me that we were somewhere, possibly the correct location, but possibly not the right date. “We’re a little North of Oxford in the UK, and it’s 54BC. Julius Caesar is part way through his second invasion, he’s heading for The Wash, and we have a force of Daleks on the loose over near Cambridge. I want to keep them apart. Now listen carefully, for this is important. You have met Caesar before, and he trusts you.”
“I don’t know Caesar! What are you talking about?” I interrupted.
“Be quiet and listen. It is one of the aspects of time travel that time is not entirely linear. I don’t expect you to understand that, but you are going to meet Caesar again in your future, but in the past as far as today is concerned, so your meeting him has already occurred for him, if not yet for you. So, you are going to meet him and talk him out of something. Assuming that I can fix this mess.” He indicated the control panel.
I had learned that I should just accept some of these things and just go with the flow, but I felt that I needed to know what had happened in this previous meeting with JC, and why he apparently trusted my word. This was not the moment to ask though. Instead I asked if I could go outside, for the view on the monitors showed that we were in what looked like open countryside. He said that I could, but to stay close, and to come back inside if I saw anyone.
On my return I found the Doctor agitated; “Where the hell have you been?” he roared, “You’ve been gone for six hours!”
I asked if he had fixed the TARDIS. He said that he was almost done, and should soon be able to make the final move to Caesar’s camp.
“Don’t bother” I told him, “It’s just over the hill there, and that’s where I’ve been. Your problem is solved, he’s going back the way he came to Kent and will pick up some tributes on the way. I told him that there was a hostile tribe called the Ides on the route he had planned, and that he would be outnumbered.”
“The Ides? That’s also the 15th of the month. Surely you didn’t tell him to beware the Ides?”
“Er, sort of. You see the idea came to me from that saying and knowing that March is a town roughly on the route that he was planning to take, as well as him trusting me like you said that he would, it just seemed like a plan. I didn’t actually tell him to beware the Ides of March, just suggested that it would be a good idea not to go that way. And the a messenger came to tell him that some of his ships had been damaged in a storm, so he’s struck camp and is on his way back the way he came. So there, aren’t you glad you brought me along?”
“Beware the Ides of March!” He shook his head, “Let’s get you home.”
holiday humour – one of those days
A true story, this one, with just names changed to avoid embarrassment. It comes from my freelance days when I, like so many others, worked in various loose collectives of the self-employed. So, let me take you back to May 2017 when I had one of those days that fall into the “You couldn’t make it up” category.
It had started a month earlier when, I’ll call him Bob, one of the people who used me from time to time, rang and asked if I knew a chap, who I will call Paul, over in Belfast. I told him that I did and Bob said that he would email something over to me and suggested a Skype chat the next day.
The brief that he sent me was for a training programme that would be delivered, if we got the job, by Dave (another made up name), one of the other mercenaries in our collective. I gave it some thought, wrote some suggestions that I emailed back to Bob for his consideration. Bob and I, along with Dave, had a Skype video chat the next day. Bob pitched our proposal to Paul and I left it at that.
Three weeks later Bob rang to say that we were on a short list of two for the work and that Paul wanted to meet us. Dave was not available, but, as Paul and I had worked together before, he was keen for me to be part of the discussion. Bob was happy to pay for my air fare and expenses to go with him to Northern Ireland, and proposed a fee of £500 if we won the work. I love Belfast and have been going there regularly since the mid-1980s and so I said yes. There was no pay, but it would be a free day trip.
On the day selected I started out down the M4 towards Heathrow on a sunny Spring morning with the aim of meeting up with Bob at a McDonalds on the Great Western Road near Heathrow. I was just past Slough when a call came in on the hands-free: Bob was held up in traffic on the M25 orbital motorway and would be late. I should go straight to Terminal 5.
At T5 I checked in and made my way to the food court to grab and sandwich and a coffee whilst waiting for Bob. Then came the second call to say that he was stuck in traffic near Watford and would not make the flight. He was about to call Paul and would ring me back. At that point the Belfast City flight had not been allocated a gate number so I sat back and watched the ‘planes as the pottered about outside on the apron.
Bob had still not called back when the gate number came up on the board, but he called as I walked through the terminal. He had spoken to Paul and the latter would meet me off the flight. We could have a chat in the Costa Coffee bar in the terminal and Bob would be available to come in on a conference call if we needed him. That meant that I would not get to see the city, but business is business and so I boarded the British Airways A320.
About an hour later we pulled up at the gate at George Best Belfast City airport. I made my way through the arrivals area, but there was no sign of Paul, so I found Costa, ordered a latte and settled down. After ten minutes I was still alone and so rang Bob, who was now on his way back to Essex. He said that he would pull off at the next junction, park up and ring Paul.
By this stage I was into my second latte and had succumbed to a lemon tart as I sat and people watched. My ‘phone rang with an unfamiliar number: It was Paul. After a few pleasantries and a reminisce about the old days; “Bob says I’m to give you a call” he said. I explained that I was sitting in the airport waiting for him as I thought that we were meeting about the training project. “But you’re not coming, are you.” he replied.
Having established that I had, indeed, come, he said that it was now too late for him to get out to see me as he had another meeting scheduled later that afternoon, but that Bob had sent him the notes that I had prepared and that they satisfied the questions that he would have asked. I finished my second coffee, wandered around the airport shops and checked in for the flight back, this time on an A319. Back at Heathrow I found my car and drove home.
It had been one of the most bizzare days in my working life.
Postscript: We won the contract and I got paid my £500, but before the programme of training could start, Paul moved on and his successor cancelled the work. Bob was good enough not to ask me to return my fee.
on computers and me, part seven
I had planned to go freelance in the early Noughties, after an impending takeover of my employer made it likely that I might be shown the door. Instead, I was one of those kept on and, for the Berkshire Belle, something similar happened, and so the opportunity for us to go back into a working partnership slipped away. However, we had formed a limited company and needed a web site, email et al.
At home the original Amstrad PC was long gone, replaced initially by a Packard Bell, then one mail ordered from Mesh, in turn swapped for another ordered on the web from Dell. All of these were upgraded as and when necessary, with more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster processors and so on. We had adopted the Web fairly early, back in the dial-up when required days, then to an always-on connection and then Wi-Fi, and so moving to having our own website was a new adventure.
Around the time of setting up a registered company we also bought a holiday home in Florida and were planning on renting that out. That needed another web site and, with two domains registered and parked, we needed content. One of my team at work had a son who was getting into web design and offered to do the Florida villa site for us. He set up a landing page using some software that he had (Dreamweaver rings a bell) and we uploaded it. That one page took all of the memory available within the hosting package that I had bought.
There had to be a better way, and so I bought an HTML book and wrote the first two websites myself. High quality images for the villa site took up a lot of space, but by avoiding all of the baggage that comes with using a software package we were fine and avoided the exorbitant hosting costs that I would have had to incur to support what my colleague’s son was producing. All of that economic and sleek programming philosophy that I had been taught in my COBOL days, when we only had about 1K of memory to play with, came to the fore, but this time in HTML. In the end we had more than ten web sites as I ran various business ventures in my efforts to make a crust, but most of these are long gone now and I have not written any HTML since 2019 when we sold the villa.
I did enjoy it though. Whilst I didn’t get around to building a PC from scratch, the constant upgrading and programming gave me a lot of pleasure. The latter also saved us a fair bit of money with it all being done in-house. I am starting to miss it and, having moved the last couple of websites over to WordPress, it is like being in a straight jacket. I will get the hang of WP at some point, but I find it harder to use now than I did when I started with it, for every upgrade that is supposed to help seems to make it harder to do anything.
This is one of my beefs about computers. I don’t want them to think for me unless I ask them to, and, with every software upgrade, I find that I am turning off features. I used to love Lotus software because it was very easy to customise, and I was sad when they vanished. My early prejudice against Windows (I was very snobby about it when it first arrived) dissipated and I can remember the excitement when I got my hands of Windows 95 to upgrade whatever PC we had back then. These days I almost dread a new version of software and can rarely find anything that helps me very much in terms of what I want to do.
It isn’t just computers in desktop/laptop/tablet forms. The computer interference in my cars is equally maddening. I first encountered this in 2002 when I had a new Land Rover Freelander and, one damp evening on the run home from Newcastle to Swindon, decided to relieve my boredom on the Brackley by-pass. Deliberately chucking the Freelander into a roundabout to get the back to break away I was faced with all sorts of mayhem and the car’s brain tried to get me out of something that I had provoked and was perfectly capable of dealing with it if it would only leave me to it. Fortunately, between us, I did not end up in the ditch. Even turning off traction control didn’t entirely solve the problem and I resigned myself to another fun aspect of driving had gone.
My current car has a marked tendency to sulk if I transgress in some way and I am frequently bonged at for my sins. That reminds me of some of my early experiences with satellite navigation systems. I am a maps man: I have been since I bought myself an old world atlas for sixpence at a jumble sale when I was about seven. My navigation skills have often been commented on and I usually say that I am a direct descendent of Vasco da Gama (although he was actually lost most of the time). But sat-nav came along and I use it from time to time, but I used to switch the voice so that I got the instructions in German. I used to call my navigator Brunhilda and would love to piss her off by ignoring her and going my own way. She never did try to get me to invade Poland though: Probably didn’t trust me not to go after Denmark instead.
I was equally snobby about Apple at one time. I had come across an Apricot PC back in 1987 when I filled in for someone for three months and it was what they were using. I did get the hang of it, but it was Microsoft operating systems that I became used to at work and at home. Apple seemed to me to be all style over substance. The change came when the Berkshire Belle bought me an iPod for Christmas. It still took a long time, but then an iPad mini came along from the same source. Then I got my first iPhone. Eventually, also leaned on heavily by number one daughter, I bought the MacBook Air on which this blog is being written.
The transition has not been easy. There is still a lot about the way a Mac works that drives me bonkers and I still have two HP laptops that are about twelve years old and have been much travelled; North and South America, Libya, China, Thailand and more. One is still on Windows 7, the other recently upgraded to Windows 11 (I’ve also got the HP PC that used to be in the villa, I don’t use it too often, but…).
Another “helpful” aid that drives me mad is tapping. I came across it with no warning when I acquired the first of the HP laptops I mentioned just now. I was setting it up and at some point, dragging my finger across the touchpad, I ran out of pad, lifted my finger to move it over a bit and then, as it landed back on the pad, things happened. Eek (that’s a polite word: I used something stronger). I couldn’t understand what was happening, the bloody thing seemed to have a mind of its own. I plugged in a mouse, got control back, found that I had encountered tapping and turned it off. The MacBook has a form of tapping, but I’ve somehow got used to that and don’t have any issues, but, having tried it again on both HPs, it has me screaming in seconds.
Another thing that infuriates me is the dumb insolence that computers can demonstrate. Stroppy teenagers have nothing on them. You try to load some new software, or to delete some old stuff or similar and get a message that tells you it hasn’t done what you asked because you have a file open. If you know that I have a file open, THEN TELL ME WHICH ONE IT IS AND I’LL CLOSE IT! There are ways around these things, of course, but there have been many times when there has almost been a laptop sized hole in the window.
But computers have been good to me. I have had a working life that took me from the shop floor to the boardroom, and that path really took off when I applied for the programmer’s job. If I had not have taken that route, then I would never have met the Berkshire Belle. She and I have been together for thirty-three years now, nearly half of my life, not quite half of hers. Computers may give me grief from time to time, but they have given me a lot of pleasure. I’ll forgive them anything for giving me the woman of my dreams.
an FM Christmas Carol
This public holiday’s attempt at a little humour sees a stab at a Christmas carol for those of us in the FM world. You should know the tune, so feel free to add your own verses: Read more…
holiday humour – FM the way it was
It’s another public holiday and so another amusing story is due. This one is a true story; it recalls events from over thirty years ago and it wasn’t too funny at the time because back then I was taking myself a little too seriously, but it was one of the things that made me see that flaw and do something about it. Read more…
Holiday humour on the origins of FM
Dateline August 31st 2415
Data-archaeologists today unveiled new evidence into the origins of Facilities Management (FM). Whilst for nearly three centuries the discipline of FM has been the core of governance and commerce throughout the civilised world little has been known of its origins, but evidence gleaned from the period between 400 and 450 years ago may offer some insights. Read more…
Holiday Humour in the Office – The Case of the Missing Desk
Bathchair Theatre presents:
The Case of the Missing Desk
(a radio script)
Cast:
Inspector Carpark, hardbitten, seen it all detective
DS Mills, Carpark’s sidekick
Alice Late, Marketing Director
Bob Down, HR Manager
Anon, Facilities Manager Read more…
The return of International Rescue? Maybe not…
Despite the chill of the early Spring day John could feel a bead or two of sweat on his brow as he approached the hotel. He was already beginning to regret having walked to Park Lane from Paddington, but a stroll through to the park had seemed like a good way to fix his mind on what he had to do. Read more…
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the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 