Blog titles I never thought I'd use part IX: A good day at work

And what was so good about it, I hear you ask?

Well.

At 9 o'clock this morning, everyone who works in my office got into a minibus and we were driven to an undisclosed location which turned out to be a catering company in one of Melbourne's snootier suburbs. We proceeded to cook a three course French lunch (Cider and Onion Soup, Chicken Normandy Style with French Beans and Crusty Bread, and Lemon Brulee) and then we ate it, while drinking more than one glass of a rather fine Sav Blanc.

And I really need to learn the French word for 'awesome'.

Two people were assigned to each course. I was paired with someone who cannot cook at all. His entire contribution was to peel and chop up two apples. Following this, my 'Chicken Normandy Style' was presented to two of Melbourne's best caterers so they could tell me where I went wrong.

These two complained at length about how often this job requires them to eat really badly cooked food. I got slightly nervous, particularly when they started bagging the soup because my team had diced the onion instead of slicing it.

The fact that I had never cooked French food in my life was also kind of playing on my mind at this point.

So, would it be bragging too much to report that they said nothing bad about my cooking, they ate the entire plate of it and they asked if they could feed the leftover chicken to their catering staff?

I hope not, because that is what happened, so the odds that I could resist blogging about it are around the 'none in a billion' mark.


In other news:

1. Apparently readers of this popular blog persist in thinking people with religious beliefs are stupid. I suppose this should not bother me, but it turns out that it actually does.


2. My father has now joined facebook. He sent me a friend request. In accepting, I ticked the bit that indicates that he is a family member and specifically, my father. Just until he logs in next and confirms this, facebook is rather distressingly telling me that my father refuses to confirm paternity.

Which strikes me as just the type of trouble making that is viewed by many as utterly antithetical to social utility.

3. As of last Friday night, I have completely lost interest in football until next April. Except for the round ball variety, obvs.

4. My local supermarket is selling Christmas decorations.

5. It's still September, people.

6. SEPTEMBER.

7. PEOPLE!

8. I plan to use/yell the phrase "Normandy Style" in casual conversation as often as possible.

I, I was standing, you were there...

I may have mentioned in passing that, a fgew weeks ago, many of my lovely friends gave up a very pleasant Saturday to move my furniture from one place to another, which frankly can;t have been their first choice for how to spend a weekend. This made me realise how few of these people know each other, although at least one fishing trip got organised in the course of the day so I guess they all know each other now.

Mostly, everything went smoothly, except for one awkward moment when I introduced my friend the Dude to my other close friend the Real Actual Craig. It went something like this:


INC: Dude, this is Craig, Craig, this is the Dude

Dude: [looks at Craig thoughtfully for a moment] Right. So, you're not Craig, but he is.

Craig: [looks mightily miffed that apparently the first thing people who meet him think of is this blog. For slightly longer than is comfortable]

INC: [trying to think of a way out of this] Wow, do you see how famous I have made you?

Craig: No, this shows how famous you have made "not me".


And I guess he was right.

It is good that I have some very tolerant friends.

And that I never plan to move ever again.

Inventions that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, Part 1: Google

With all due respect to whoever came up with this thing, Google has not improved our lives.

Someone, possibly my employer, recently decided we should do some work on our little company website. Someone had the bright idea of checking how easy the website was to find by googling the name of the firm. Then they decided to google the names of various employees.

Including me.

Of course, the result of this was that, ten minutes later, someone had taped to my door a very stupid description of me that I wrote ten years ago for the website of a band that hasn't played a gig since grand final day 1999 (unless playing at each other's weddings counts) but which is still on the internet.

Improvement in website: 0%

Improvement in productivity: 0%

Increase in mockery of INC: like, about a billion %

Not pleasing.

I also spent the rest of the day having waking nightmares imagining what would have happened to my career if one could google my real name and find this blog.

Even though I feel utterly confused maintaining a facebook account in my real name and a blog in more or less someone else's, I have decided for now that linking my real name to this blog in even the most remote and tenuous way is just a recipe for career disaster in the manner of a trains smashing into each other.

On the other hand, the only thing my facebook account has which this blog lacks is a fairly bad picture of me (fashion and I are not close friends) and the potential for readers to throw hadouken and/or trout-slap me.

Gotta say I still prefer the blogging.

Have you noticed how when chutney's bad it's still pretty good?

The absolute highlight of work in the past two weeks was last Thursday, when I ate some chutney.

It was not even very good chutney.

So, rather than travelling down the long and whining road of posting about work. I decided to take some time to update my much neglected links. A very overdue and also very big welcome to Leilani, Killer Rabbit, Grover Jones, The Man at the Pub and everyone over at Square Eyes.



In other news:

After watching the Chaser last night, and reading that the Foreign Minister said "The point is they were in any case arrested, so I think the security works", I am convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary over the past 12 years, Alexander Downer is clearly a comic genius.

Unless of course he is just a dude who is wishing he'd bothered to look at the video before commenting.



Also, this just in:

Hugo Weaving rang me yesterday. He was wearing a suit and some sunglasses and screaming "It is inevitable".

I assume he was referring to the fact that I have signed up for Facebook.

If so, he was right.

INC goes global (in Iowa)

What with everything that's been going on lately, we have delayed our local Father's Day celebrations by a week or two (although, good son that I am, I managed to buy a reasonably decent looking box of chocolates and hand it to my father on the actual Day).

All things considered, I was very excited to find an email in my inbox at work today which said this:

"Hello, inc@incsworkplace.com.au
Of All The Famous Dads In The World None Compare To You."

This was followed by a fairly surprising link to the homepage of the Osky Indians.

I'm not quite sure how the good people of Oskaloosa, Iowa heard about my Famous Parenting, but it was very nice of them to take the time to acknowledge it.

To avoid confusion, it appears that I am only famous in Iowa. Nobody in Oskaloosa, Kansas has any idea who I am.

This is all pretty exciting, as Oskaloosa is also the home of Phil Jones, rock musician, who once toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

As you may have guessed, Oskaloosa is also home to the Osky Indians Volleyball team. Their recent battle with the women of Pella is rather excitingly described here.

I read this review twice, partly because I enjoyed the vivid language along the lines of "The Lady Dutch used three straight kills and an ace by Ashley Meirick for a 12-10 advantage" and "Snowbarger, Flander and Abby Pollard all had five kills as Snowbarger added four aces, 11 assists and five digs", but mostly because I was endlessly fascinated to discover that "Pella clawed its way back following a timeout although it didn't know it at the time."

You do not find sports journalism of this quality just anywhere, people. Writers of the Pella Chronicle, we salute you. I will be checking for updates regularly.

When bad spelling attaks

I read a story in The Age, possibly yesterday, about a woman who discovered that her youngish son had been googling "prawn" and she suspected that the onset of puberty had not caused him to develop a sudden interest in seafood.

Who knew that falling educational standards could protect our kids far better than multi-million dollar internet filters?

Still, spelling errors are not always a Good Thing. Here's a few examples of what happens when they go horribly wrong.

I tried to send a letter to an insurance company demanding that they pay up because their client had driven into my client's stationary vehicle. Unfortunately, my secretary typed it as "stationery vehicle" and the insurance company sent me a rude letter asking me what my client thought she was doing driving around in a car made entirely of manila folders and paper clips with pencils for axles and erasers for wheels,* and claiming that it was not their fault if a car like that got written off.**

I wrote to my former landlords asking for the return of our $1200 bond. They got confused and ended up sending me a $1200 bong. What the hell am I supposed to do with a diamond studded bong? Do these people think that I'm some sort of hip-hop uberproducer? DO I need to change my name to "I'm not Dre"?

Maybe this was my landlords' way of hinting that we need to do some more weeding.***

Then I went to Bunnings to buy a pair of Stair gates for my new house. Through a mix up that might have been amusing if it wasn't so damn serious, they sent me a pair of Stargates. You try telling your wife that the children tried to climb the stairs and now they're in freakin' Atlantis. It took me three weeks and a seriously hardcore submarine to sort that one out.

The next time a child asks you why spelling is important, remember that everything you need to answer that question is write here in the one post.




* hence the expression 'that's where the rubber hits the road'



** The important thing here is that I find myself hilarious



*** Zing, ka-pow, etc