For many years I worked with the same company. (Note the Freudian slip? with not for). Except for one unsavoury incident, I truly loved every minute of my time there. The work was interesting, but what made it was the people. HR did a great job of selecting new hires that would fit in - meaning you could be the greatest engineer in the world, but if you didn’t have a wild or witty streak, you could fcuk right off.

There was more laughter in that building than in the Foley department of the BBC sit-com studios.

It suited me fine. I seemed to get away with murder. Or at least, manslaughter. Or maybe mouse-slaughter. Well nearly anyway. I was in the office late one evening and ended up getting roped into loading a truck. A mouse ran across my path and was killed instantly by 4 tonnes of forklift and 70kg of Sneeze. The following day, a funeral was held and the scrapings off the floor laid to rest in the flowerbed. The GM officiated and, I was later told, said some very nice things about Michael and offered his condolences to his wife and their 153 children. As perpetrator of the crime I wasn’t present - I was locked in the warehouse cage for the duration. I was only released after a team from accounts reported they couldn’t say conclusively that the bum-prints on the forklift seat were mine. So much for forensic accountants.

Early one morning, in an effort to cheer up the receptionist, who had missed out on a promotion, I burst out from the mens’ shouting call the Guards! Call the Guards! We’ve got a floater. It worked and she literally fell off her seat laughing. Which would have been fine if she hadn’t been in the process of transferring a call from Germany to Sales and ended up putting it through to the canteen. The chef wasn’t having a great day either and screamed at the head of procurement in BASF: How many times do I have to tell you fekin eejits? I will not take orders from you at this hour of the day. I honestly can’t remember how that one was soothed over.

We had a manager temporarily transferred to us from California to lead a particular project. Erik Wenger insisted on a meet-and-greet breakfast for all the senior staff. I did up a nameplate for the janitor and invited him along. It read Crisis Avoidance Manager - well he kept the toilet roll dispensers topped up, didn’t he? No one was more deserving of a free meal. Erik-with-a-K, as he was to become known, introduced himself and told us how great he was for half an hour or more. It was the day before St. Paddy’s, which sort of counts as a Friday, so we were all pretty chilled and let him rabbit on. Enough about me. We squirmed - we’d all have to explain our roles and tell him how great we were. So tell me … we squirmed a bit more. What are you guys all doing for the holiday? We relaxed. Are you going to the mainland? Stunned fckuing silence. The janitor came to the rescue. Well we can’t because of all the heavy rain ya see. The Irish Sea’s too high and the boats aren’t allowed sail. It’s a health and safety thing. Really, said Erik-with-a-K, that’s unreal. Oh it’s not just here, went on our saviour, it’s all of Europe. Shur they had pictures of Venice on the telly last night and the place is under 20ft of water.

On the shop floor, most of the staff were young Dubliners. In the days before cheap air-travel, few had been past Newlands Cross, never mind seen exotic places like Kildare or Wicklow. To put that to rights, one of the company nights-out was held in Navan. It became obvious after a couple of hours that the pub we’d chosen was too small and with more still to arrive, something had to be done. The production manager volunteered to scout for a larger venue and took, Wayne with him. Settled in the new hostelry I asked the PM why he’d taken him. At each pub they went to, he had Wayne stand inside the door while he approached the counter. He’s explained to each barman that there were 40 in the group and pointed out Wayne as the drunkest. If you think you’ll have no problem with him, then the rest will be a piece of cake.

The Fat Controller returned my thesis, suggesting some changes and correcting some errors. One of my frequent “errors” was using the phrase these data show instead of the data shows.

My reply:

| Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, FC. I will work on this over the weekend.

| In the meantime, I beg to differ on a small point of grammar:

| That the word data is the plural of the singular datum - from the Latin meaning a given (thing).

| While the use of data as the singular form has become acceptable in general usage, in particular in US English, it is, nevertheless, incorrect and in my opinion, should never be used in scientific or academic texts.

| This is not to be confused with the incorrect usage of referenda as the plural of referendum. Referendum, as it is from the Latin meaning that which must be referred, is by its definition, a gerundive and therefore has no plural in Latin. Hence the correct English plural is, by default, referendums.

| Similar debates have been had for centuries as to whether the word trousers is singular or plural. No doubt this is fuelled by it’s being commonly prefixed by a pair of or two pairs of. It is my assertion that the word trousers is at once both singular and plural - singular at the top and plural at the bottom.

| Until such time as all nations have held referendums on trousers, can we agree to differ on data?

| Le gach deá-mhéin
| - Primal

His reply:

| You’re correct, Primal. I don’t know what I was thinking there.

| Lgd

| - Fat Controller

| ps. Permission to use the “trouser” one down the pub?

A mail burst into my inbox on Tuesday bubbling over excitedly with the news that the County Kildare Community Network website, kildare.ie, run by Kildare County Council, won a LAMA award for “Best Use of External Communications”. You can read it here. Ah, don’t bother - I’ll give you the main points.

LAMA = Local Authority Members Association. Llama = a useful animal.

The award was presented by RTE presenter Sharon Ni Bheolain and John Gormley. For overseas readers, the former is just a teeny weeny bit less hot (about 1cal or 4.1868J) than Jolene Blalock, her name is actually Ní Bheoláin not Ni Bheolain and she works for RTÉ not RTE. The latter is a Green who sold his soul to Fianna Fáil for a ministerial post.

kildare.ie was recently redesigned. Adherence to web standards and improved accessibility & usability are an integral part of the new design. Ah yes, I remember them doing that. I couldn’t view a damn thing on the site for days unless I buried my pride and switched to Internet Explorer. Months later and their online planning system still only supports IE. If your browser of preference is Firefox or Safari you can use their LiteView version. So much for usability.

Here’s an interesting little exercise: Go to the World Wide Web Consortium’s markup validation service and plug in http://kildare.ie/. 23 errors! So much for adherence to web standards.

Go to the Council’s home page. Like the tiny text in light grey font with the white background? Pretty isn’t it? If your eyes aren’t the best it isn’t pretty at all. Oh, hold on, I apologise. I’m being far too harsh - on the right, toward the bottom there is a tiny link for Larger Font. Have you found it yet? Ok, I’ll give you another ten minutes.

*Puts kettle on. Makes nice mug of coffee*

Ok, you found it. Good. So now the font a readable size, even if it is light grey. See the Help/Accessibility link in the same section? Let’s go there and see what it says. Oh no! The font has gone back to the default size! Very accessible indeed.

Ok, well we’ll just have to struggle on. Let’s see what they have in the Publications section. Oh, look, the Development Plan for 2005-2011 is there. This will be interesting. I wonder what they have in store for my area? Now which is my area? I can’t tell because it’s all laid out in gobbledygook map references - I’ll just have to work my way through all the PDF files all until I find it. At least it’s usable.

Now I understand: They got the LAMA award, not for accessibility & usability, but for improved accessibility & usability. Believe me when I tell you most downloadable documents on the site used be in MS Word format - at least I can open PDF.

Personally I think the county would be better off with a few llamas.

It’s done now. Well the hard part. I still have to concoct some “conclusions” and think up some “further work”. Oh, and write the “abstract”. But I’m doing none of that until the Fat Controller, my supervisor, and I meet this week, just in case he suggests a lot of changes. I don’t think he will though. He knows I would just give him my I’m ten years your senior, boy, so don’t tell me what to do look and he’d have to relent.

I really shouldn’t be slagging him - he’s one of the soundest lads you’d meet. As sound as a €1.27 and he’s been a great help. And one of the few I’ve crossed paths with in academia who understands that my day job, the one that puts beer on the counter, has to take precedence over writing 100 pages of bumph that only a small few will ever read.

The one thing I really hated about this was having to cite references throughout. You can’t say “the cat sat on the mat” unless you can back it up with a paper paper given by say, Catologist, Dr. F. E. Line, at the 5th International Carpet Conference in Caracas in 2005. On a Tuesday. About teatime.

The Fat Controller was brilliant at finding such wonderful bedtime reading as this in the labyrinth the university call a library.

Now the CEO of the railway, the course co-ordinator, was a different kettle of horses altogether. A fish of a different colour. About as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. He caused more confusion than father’s day in Tallaght.

He asked us all to attend a workshop in July. “Who will be doing a work based thesis? A show of hands please.” All hands went up. “Who will be doing a research based thesis?” (Yes, he really did ask!) No hands obviously. He talked for two hours about research based theses.

Before the Feathers, I sent him the same email three times: “Your website states three hardbound copies of the thesis must be presented … Where do we present them? What are the specifications? Does the university have a preferred print supplier? [And so on]“. No replies. I phoned. No answer.

I went by his office the week before last. Not there. I dropped in next door to the Fat Controller. We bitched for a while. I suggested renumbering his office 665 - the neighbour of the beast. He opted not to, but promised to put my queries to the beast himself. In a neighbourly sort of way.

Just in the door and I get a mail from the CEO: “I am doing a survey. Can you tell me where you heard about the course?” I felt like telling him to go fcuk himself - that information was already provided on my application form if he’d bother his arse to look in his filing cabinet. But I didn’t. I was far more polite: “You answer my questions from before Christmas first. Then I’ll gladly answer any you have”. That was more polite, wasn’t it?

I did a survey of my own. Some of my fellow students were struggling to finish their work like me. Others were done and dusted. Three already had their theses bound (at up to €60 per copy) and were waiting to be told by the CEO where to submit them.

Last week, the Fat Controller called. “Good news, Primal. You only need to soft bind two copies - one for me and one for the external examiner. Once approved, you have until September to worry about hard binding the three copies for the exams office. Do not, for the life of you, hard bind now - the extern may suggest edits”.

Writing a thesis is hard enough without having to cope with plonkers like the CEO. Such incompetence wouldn’t be tolerated outside of academia. As a wise man once said, if you did that in Russia, you’d be fcuked in the Liffey.

But there was sunshine, or maybe moonshine, throughout all this too - You folks! Thankee all very many for the encouraging comments. Without them I would have been, I don’t know, sniffing boot polish or something. A particular hat-tip to Aonghus who unwittingly, or wittingly, I’m not sure, gave me the inspiration for the concept I was seeking that would bind the whole thesis together when he quoted Tony Hoare: Simplíocht an praghas atá le n-íoc ar iontaofacht. It pulled it all together. G’raibh maith agat. Mo ceol thú.

The Eolaí fella made a request a while back: tell me, why aren’t your stories in a nice category all by themselves, indexed and linked for our handy benefit? Well, okay, it might have been phrased as a question, but it was a request.

I don’t have the time right now to do anything special, so for now, what you’re getting new Category (Sneeze Type, in the left column) called Crappenings. And a new tab on the top of the same name.

Clicking on either will open the Archive for the Crappenings category. The sweet part is that each post ends with a Table of Contents with links to all other Crappenings in the Series. See - there it is - right under this.

That’s what I am - thesised to pieces. Six days solid now trying to finish the damn thing. Every waking minute and some of the sleeping ones.

Six long days under mouse arrest and all I’ve got to show for it is 20,000 words. They are good words though. I’ve used the word the a lot. It has to be good - it’s in thousands of other theses so it must be. I’m going to use the word conclusion at the end. What do you think? A good move?

So anyway, blogging’s going to be light the next day or two. I may not even get to read yours. I won’t get to read the newspapers. I won’t even get to read the text from aunt Nell asking me to mind her cat.

Before I sign off though, just some quick messages to my most frequent commenters:

Daniel - Listen here, dick head! If you’ve enjoyed every single post on my blog but would “like to check some references” then you are just plain thick and shouldn’t be reading blogs. Get the fekin Beano or a lad mag or something and leave me alone. Fek off!

Samantha2267 - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you “love my blog and will be back”. Just stop telling me that 20 times a day. Bitch! Fek off!

Ryexf and your mates Grskiq, Lfpwic and the rest of yez - No, I do not need any Superclorofiedunction with or without prescription. In tab form or otherwise. Oh, and I like my lad the size it is, thank you. The lot of yez, just fek off!

Carlos, Mario, Antonio etc. - Right, so you found my blog while “searching for information on dromedary scrotal hair / Zen and the art of lawnmower repair / fur-lined sky-hooks / whatever”. Know what I think? You need help! Help with Google. Yee lot, fek off too!