Thursday/Friday: Another Horrendous Night on EA

Once more SNOW and ICE cause the UK to grind to a halt and yet again we are inundated with calls. Tonight was especially bad, still no JDM plus C, Jen and JB ill and D's baby in hospital, so that's five down to start with or half our complement of staff. In addition H asked me to do EA and it was a nightmare and to think only last week I was certain I'd never be doing it again after all that was one of the reasons why I choose to stay a part of our existing team.  We didn't stop, from 21:00, when we took over, to 03:00 it was non stop. The only break I got was when I went outside to clear my head and inadvertantly left my pass on the desk. Quick trip round the outside of the building looking for someone to let me back in! Bh and Prash stayed on with me until just after 03:00 but after that I was on my own and it was still busy. Finally noticed a text from one of our missing members and made a note to call them when I got home. It's now 05:52 I finish at 07:00 and I've yet to take my lunch or any other breaks. Oh well, it's our last night tonight and much as I'd like the overtime cash I don't think I'll be coming back in again untill we start again on Thursday. Apart from anything else I'm pretty sure I'm coming down with Hannah's cold now. Can't stop coughing, and hurt all over, especiall my right arm. The old RSI seems to be playing up again I'd best start stretching the long latex bands again asap.

Pope, Westminster Cathedral, Will This Ever End, BBC Brown Nosing, Back To Work, Busy on EA Tonight

Today the his Holymess was doing a show at Westminster Cathedral so I stayed up to watch it on BBC 24 while swopping tweets with others doing the same. I’d got work in the evening so couldn’t stay up all day but I managed to make it to midday before going upstairs to Bedfordshire. I attended a Catholic wedding once and that seemed as if it would never end but compared to this long drawn out farce it was but the briefest moment.

Jesus, if you’ll pardon the reference, the right-wing press have been berating the BBC for being anti-papist but their coverage could not have been more sycophantic. It seemed as if most of the commentators were paid up Bells and Smells left footers. The BBC must have had to spend a fortune getting their brown noses clean after this display of reverence. I don’t know how much time was paid to the anti-pope rally being held, in London, that afternoon, as I was, by then, in my bed but what I saw was the BBC shoving it’s collective nose as far up the papal fundement as it was possible for said proboscis to reach. Shame on you Auntie Beeb!
Well it’s the start of another busy our nights as we start the journey into Winter. Tonight , after a dream ride in on my newly repaired bicycle, was probably the busiest it’s been for months and of course tonight was the night I drew the EA short straw. I can off normal duties at 22:00 and joined Jeff on EA; apparently we issued over a one hundred by then! Eventually, after a few strained hours we broke the back of it and the rest of the night passed routinely enough. When things had quietened down I started catching up on these outstanding blog posts. Left on time home by 8:30

Home, Florida Nightmare, Hurricane Katrina, UK/US Society Compared, Nudie Cycling…Not! E.A. and Manuals

I’m at a loss for anything to write about today. Deb picked me up this AM and shortly after we got home she left again to do a little shopping. I decided to catch up on some recorded TV but didn’t really fancy much of what there was to watch. In the end I settled on, the documentary about Brits in Florida followed by another documentary this time looking back at Hurricane Katrina on the fifth anniversary of it devastating the city of New Orleans.


The Florida documentary was somewhat misleading because the title implied it concerned those Brits who’s American Dream had become a nightmare whereas, in fact, it was much more 50/50 focusing on as many successes as failures. It did bring home the fact that while the US and the UK “almost” share a common language they are very different societies, very different indeed! Until they hit on bad times I don’t think that the majority of the Brits realised quite what it means to live in a society that espouses, and practices, private health care and self reliance. If you get ill and can’t afford the treatment then TOUGH TITTY matey you’re on your own. Similarly, if you don’t earn your own money you don’t get to spend mine instead. In fact, even if you do earn your own money, but you’re not a US citizen, you can still get your Visa revoked if the US government decide that you don’t earn enough of it! In the US you can soar to incredible (indeed to what some would consider obscene) heights, of wealth and success but the corollary is that you can plunge to depths of hardship that are “supposedly” unknown and unthinkable in the UK. Even if the current coalition government, in the UK, manages to rein in the welfare state to the degree that it would like to the remaining provisions will still offer a far greater safety net to the disadvantaged than the existing system in the US does.

The Katrina documentary (which Nat and I watched together) also brought home these differences in particular how much underlying racism continues to exist in modern America. You couldn’t help but know that if the population of New Orleans, that was most affected by Katrina, had been white then much more and much more rapid help would have come their way. Indeed it was difficult not to get the impression that many white folks, especially rich white property developers, saw this as a heaven sent opportunity to gentrify the Big Easy by losing much of it’s” more ethnic” population. The actual flood footage provided a timely reminder, in view of what’s currently happening in Pakistan, of how incredibly powerful Katrina was; houses with only the very tops of their roofs above the water brought home the sheer extent of the devastation.

Afterward, I went to bed and slept until 6:00 when I woke, washed, ate and cycled to work. Halfway there I turned back for home having realised that while I’d washed and eaten I had in fact forgotten to get dressed. Despite the fact that it appeared that I had grown a perky set of bossoms (see below) and now possessed an anatomically correct lady's front bottom I decided it would probably be best if I returned home and got dressed!

 Once I was properly clothed, and my body had returned to normal, I resumed my journey to work. For the first time since I returned I covered EA and manuals. It wasn’t all that hard; apart from learning the new patch codes.

EA Update

I wasn't wrong; its now 00:18 and the pressures just begun to drop off. I haven't stopped taking closing calls since 11:00. The problem is that the message line over-rides everything so you get stuck listening to garbled messages whilst engineers can't contact you and so they leave even more garbled messages. I'd love to get my hands on the person who designed this new system and get them to use it for a night. Yet another example of something designed by someone who doesn't really understand what it is that the people they are designing for actually do!

Now That's A First
After we'd cleared the backlog I was expecting the overnight EA jobs to start hitting my terminal but this wasn't to be! For the first time ever, when I've done it anyway, we didn't issue a single EA from 1.30 until 7:00 when we finished for the night. I kept waiting for a late one to arrive just before close of play but it never came. It'll probably be another five years before that happens again.