A quick one with with care

Now that even holding a mobile phone in your hand while driving is a sin, it’s become remarkably thrilling, especially when there’s such easy quarry to photograph while waiting at lights. This advertising sign was plastered on the van in front of me.

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Crank-o-meter: your laying had better be good

Five? (if liqueur was originally spelled correctly)

I went out for dinner the other night to a pancake bar. It’s like the Pancake Parlour but with post-1970s decor and a wider range of booze. Today’s competition is to guess the number of spelling errors on the blackboard — I’ll hand adjudication to ThePurpleOwl as I come up with a different number each time I look.

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Crank-o-meter: cranky but not hungry

License to liqueur

I went to the second interview this morning to be eyeballed by the director. I wasn’t entirely amused that my meeting was at 9.00am and he hadn’t rocked up for work at that stage, so I was bored but harried that I had a job to return to and he hadn’t settled in or had a coffee. He tried to imply that an assistant director-level chap should fetch him a coffee, which was an interesting insight into how life might be at this particular place. At an earlier job with an investment bank, I was almost sacked as my only attempt at plunger coffee nearly caused a lucrative deal to collapse because the clients thought I was trying to poison them.

If I had noticed this cafe earlier, I could have offered to buy him something quick like the ‘expresso’, or something more leisurely like the ‘cafe late’. Lynne Truss would freak if she saw the creativity of the English language plastered on the front window.

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I am one of the final three candidates on the shortlist. I still don’t know how I feel … actually, I do. I feel like I’m hoping for a call saying I didn’t get the job so I don’t need to make a decision. I guess that’s going to be a ‘no’ if an offer is made. There are equal pros and cons and I don’t wish to escape a situation that’s full of ongoing stress for another that I’ll possibly be bored with in 12 months.

Crank-o-meter: Orange juice, thank you

Let’s see who’s butchering the English language today, shall we?


I went on a morning stroll/jog/run/walk/undignified crawl today to work off some Generally Undiagnosable and Irrational but Very Real Crankiness and wandered through a new industrial estate.

It’s all rather exciting looking at chunks of former farming land being reinvented into large sheds and marvelling how importing cherries from the USA, avocadoes from New Zealand and kiwi fruit from Peru or Gautemala or some place on the other side of the world makes good sense.

The current lessee of one vacant block stores monster trucks that move dirt from here to there with a burgeoning side business in growing dandelions.

The developer’s marketing campaign for this block took my interest because it, well, seems less industrial than its intended client base would expect.

Who on earth invented the word ‘factoryette’ for an industrial estate? A dickheadette?

Crank-o-meter: the stupidettes are taking over the world