A life of chaos

Head Rambles Posted on by  

Yesterday was fierce busy.

Fierce, so it was.

I started work in earnest on the old autobiography and discovered that it is a hell of a lot easier to write than a novel. I don’t have to worry about characters or plots as there is really only one character – me. All the scenes and events are already laid out by history and I have the great advantage of tweaking history to my own advantage! As they say – history is written by the victors. I can finally get my revenge.

It’s a very interesting exercise and at times a little depressing. It forces me to delve into my deepest memories some of which would be better forgotten. It also means a lot of editing as I keep having extra memories and so have to keep going back and inserting paragraphs.

The one major problem is that I don’t know how the story will end. Presumably it will end when I finally get planted [or incinerated] by which time I’ll be in no fit state to write about it. If someone else finishes it it presumably will lose the “auto” bit? Unless I come back as a ghost writer?

I also had to drop down to the village yesterday.

They have finally finished laying their drains or whatever pipes they were putting down, so those fucking traffic lights are gone. Except that they’re not. Another crowd started digging up the road further down on the hill and are using the same infuriating lights. Having run that little gauntlet I got to the village to find the place has gone mad. Builders all over the place causing diversions and of course Disney, building their fucking Princess Castle. No parking anywhere. Shit!

And everywhere I went I was asked the same question –

“Have you had your jab yet?”

When I say I haven’t they all then ask when my appointment is. When I say I haven’t got one and that no one has been in touch they step back in amazement. I don’t know why they are so surprised considering the crowd that are running the fiasco are the greatest bunch of incompetents who couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in the proverbial brewery. I swear Graddaughter the Younger and her classmates would make a better fist of it.

They are crowing today that they are lacing through the vaccinations for the sixty year olds. This must mean they are finished with my age group and have forgotten about me.

That suits me just fine.

 

Sentenced to the Electric Chair

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

I have been somewhat busy today.

For a start Herself had the idea of robbing my chair when she’s in this room. She tried it yesterday evening and found it very comfortable so has decided it’s now hers. Fuck! I tried the chair she normally uses but it’s not as comfortable. It’s one of those fancy electric ones that not only lifts your feet off the floor but has another button the flips the whole thing up to almost a standing position. I tried speeding it up to try flipping Herself out the door but that didn’t work. I had to make do with just tipping her onto the floor in a heap.

I decided to wage war on Penny and recapture her armchair which used to be mine until the newfangled ones arrived. I always liked it so I decided to reclaim it by moving all the furniture around. Penny isn’t happy as she is now reduced to a mere bed and sole use of a two seater couch in the sitting room. Having moved the chairs around I then had to clear all the rubbish I had thrown in behind the chairs for want of a bit of storage space. A lot of the rubbish has to be shredded too as there are some documents that may cause a wee problem should Revenue ever come poking around.

I have decided to give the Biography thing a bash. If it reaches a couple of thousand words I will be more than surprised. What I will probably do is scribble off a few pieces here on various topics and then flesh them out into proper chapters in the book. In the meantime I will write more material for the book only, as it would probably be too boring for here.

I discovered today that going into Windows and firing up Word doesn’t work any more. For some extremely irritating reason it wants me to buy a licence or something fucking stupid like that. Arseholes. So I’m using LibreOffice Writer which will be as good [if not better] as soon as I get used to it. I even found a formatting template for writing a novel which is novel?

I’m taking a break now. I’m waiting for a grocery delivery at the moment [life here is wildly exciting and hectic, isn’t it?] and need to conserve my energy for putting away stuff into cupboards, freezers and the fridge that are already full.

I can see the Electric Chair out of the corner of my eye. It’s big and black and is looking extremely unhappy at being shoved against the wall. It actually looks quite agressive as if it’s about to launch itself at me. I should be all right though, as I doubt it can attack me when it’s not plugged in?

But you can never tell with modern appliances?

 

Autobiographies

Head Rambles Posted on by 12

I’m not quite sure what got into me last Friday.

For some reason it just crossed my mind that it might be an idea to put pen to paper [as it were] and give a little insight into how things were when I was growing up. Television seemed as good an idea as any to start with as there is one in front of me as I type. It’s one of those large flat-screen high definition yokes that has access to literally hundreds, if not thousands of channels. It’s rarely used as Herself has a slightly smaller one which we watch. But where it now stands, there was once a 405-line VHF monochrome set with only one clear channel, mono sound and no remote control. How times change?

The little exercise which I inflicted on the world over the last few days is also part of a thought that has been running [rambling?] through my head for a while. There are many things I never asked my father about. I never really quizzed him about his childhood and now all my questions remain unanswered. Will the time come when the Grandkids have the same problem? Will they have questions that I can no longer answer?

It occurred to me to write my biography.

The problem with an autobiography is that nobody would be really desperate enough to read the story of an ordinary[ish] Irish bloke who never did anything famous and whose name doesn’t even appear on Google. It would be for the Grandkids only, and the chances are that they would never read it, so it would be a massive waste of effort.

One solution is to break my life up into segments and write about each. My life could be broken up into a weird sort of overlapping Venn Diagrams such as Pre-18, Post-18 [18 was a significant year], Unmarried, Married, Television, Computers and Retirement. Some of those would be intensely boring but some might have a passing interest. The yokes what I writ in the last four days could be padded out a bit as there were quite a few escapades left out for the sake of brevity.

The Computers chapters would be mainly about my working in the main RTE campus [as distinct from being shifted around in the cable television area]. The problem is that it’s naturally a quasi-technical subject and I would have to work hard to make it interesting enough for even me to read. I do have the advantage that most of the people involved in those years are now dead or senile [or both] so there’s little chance of ending up in court.

So maybe I will give Computers a bash? A handful of you have expressed an interest so maybe it’s worth a try?

There’s fuck all else to write about anyway.

 

The story of television – The Final Chapter

Head Rambles Posted on by 11

Continuing on from the last post….

I’m not sure why I’m writing all this, but if nothing else, it’s a bit of autobiography that someone may find interesting. Anyway it clears my mind of some clutter and is an actual topic to scribble about.

During my years in the cable company, there had been some major innovations. One was my first sight of a BetaMax video tape recorder someone had set up in the office. Also a manager laid his hands on a widescreen television. It was an enormous yoke. It’ll never catch on! One day the Technical Manager borrowed a satellite dish from the nearby university and the two of us spent a happy time scanning the skies for signals. It was a success but I didn’t for a moment think anyone was going to buy an eight foot diameter dish on its own trailer.

Then the storm clouds arrived.

Relays used to be based in the old White House on the RTE campus. Suddenly we were moved to the furthest possible location from the studios while still remaining on RTE land. Rumours started about mergers and sell-offs. The rumours were all denied by management.

Then we were moved off the campus and into Dublin City Centre [Hawkins House – Dublin’s ugliest building]. Rumours grew stronger that there was something nasty going on. It was then announced [via newspaper reports] that Relays had merged with another company and that the name was changed to Cablelink. This led to an interesting scenario where those of us originally employed by RTE were semi-state while the rest were private sector. This led to all sorts of anomalies in wages, entitlements and security. We [RTE mob} demanded to know what the situation was. We were told nothing. The rest of the staff were furious that we had fewer deductions from our salaries [because we had less entitlements but they didn’t want to know that]. It was a very unhappy place to work.

Then we heard [via the newspapers] that the company was now for sale. I applied for a transfer back to studios but was told I belonged to a grade that no longer existed. In effect I was no longer an RTE employee and if I wanted a job there I would have to apply as an ordinary outsider with no special privileges. I was assured however that the fact that I was now paid with a Cablelink cheque instead of an RTE one was just a simple matter of efficiency.

There were strikes, mainly at the frustration of hearing everything via newspapers. The staff were never consulted or even informed. Eventually all the RTE staff got a letter assuring us that legally our status as semi-state RTE employees was secure and that we retained full pension rights and access to all RTE facilities. [Note: years later I found a letter from RTE’s lawyers to prospective purchasers explaining that the letter that had been sent wasn’t worth worth the paper it was typed on and its sole function was to keep us quiet].

The office was moved again, out of the city centre to its own building in Ballsbridge

At this point I was applying for every job that RTE advertised. It didn’t matter if it was something technical or making tea in the canteen, I went for it. Personnel got used to me turning up for every interview.

A job was advertised where they were looking for a computer programmer. That was one job I decided not to apply for as I would be up against university graduates and my only experience was on a Sinclair Spectrum. But then I realised that if I didn’t apply, Personnel would wonder why I hadn’t and this could count against me at the next interview. So I applied anyway just to keep the bandwagon rolling.

Two hundred people applied for that job. We had a series of interviews whittling down the numbers. Then us survivors were sent for a written test with multi-choice answers [it looked one of those intelligence test things]. I carefully completed the page. With two minutes to go I suddenly realised there were five more pages. I frantically lashed through those pages just answering the questions with random ticks. At my next interview they mentioned I had had the highest score in the written test. The Gods were with me?

Ten of us were then sent on a two week programming course [in COBOL!]. Six of us survived. I was offered the job!

But then Relays/Cablelink wouldn’t let me go. They said they had no replacement for me. A war of words broke out between the two companies and finally I was told I was released.

As a footnote, the day before I officially left to become a programmer, Cablelink was sold to Eircom [National phone company] and all staff including the RTE ones were informed they were now Eircom employees.

And thus ends my time with televisions. From then on it was computers and no one wants to hear about them?