That’s the time I’ve got to come up with 300 or so words. The time it takes to cook pizza, tonight’s menu of international cuisine. Home alone, moi?

It’s been a messy couple of weeks with builders in de-bathrooming and re-bathrooming us. The noise of drilling tolerable although you feel sometimes, when they hit a particularly knotty piece of wall, like you’re on the set of Saw III. Backed-up by the huge variety of implements of torture – well it’s torture the way I use them for DIY! – you may recognise them as tools, lying about.

We’re just about done and only have half a dozen new doors to be fitted. Dull, dullness with a side order of dull I hear you say until you’re passed the quote for said work scribed in carpenter’s pencil onto a piece of nicely finished 2″ by 4″ – I guess this is what passes for humour in the woodworking fraternity? Couldn’t find a piece of paper my ass! It amused me nonetheless and I intend to keep it. After all, it’s an eye catching way to submit (ooh that’s a nasty IT word) a quote for a piece of work. Perhaps I could adapt the technique for my IT company. Maybe hand-in my next quote etched with a nicely sharpened pencil on the back of an old punched-card. We used to have piles of those lying around -used ’em for bloody shopping lists – but I bet they’re like rocking-horse excrement these days!

Reminds me of my first real programming job after college. Mainframe COBOL development. Dumps, printed often, we didn’t care for forests in those days, were employed by a colleague who had a brilliant party piece. Print a dump, make sure it’s a couple of inches thick. Sharpen your weapon of choice – coding pencil – until it could pass for a hypodermic and then drill the pencil into the dump, Lean forward at a jaunty angle and … go to sleep! From the corridor, walking by, it looked like you were diligently poring over yet another core dump. How professional 🙂

Stop the clock … dinner is served