A big hand

Just got back from the allotment. I have a proliferation of comfrey and over winter I made up two barrels of fertiliser from it. Smells like catshit. I used some today and washed my hands about six times afterward, but one hand still smells of cat shit. I expect to wake tomorrow with one normal size hand and one giant shit smelling hand; like Kenny Everett with worms.

Got a few beers in for the start of a big week. Beloved Arsenal take Villareal back to our place on Wednesday and The Penguins enter the playoffs. Tonight Peterborough are away to Millwall. Earlier in the day Steve Howard scored a cracking last second header to sink Leeds. Reckon leicester have got the title but good for Posh to push them all the way. Darren ferguson, despite being the progeny of the evil one, deserves a great deal of credit for turning sleepy Peterborough into winners. I liked both keith Alaexander and Mark Wright and thought the club was daft to dispense with either of them for a big head like Fergie who still rated himself as a player. But results speak for themselves. Boro are odds on for Promotion whilst both Chester and The Silkmen climb over each other to avoid dropping out of the football league. Shows what I know.

Back to work tomorrow. Let's see if I can manage to keep this blog going.

Later on I watched Stewart lee's comedy vehicle. his "I hate the Trevelodge outine" was familiar since I recall a moment when I was working on a PFI school development in the East End on a pro bono basis and discovered that they had decided in their wisdom to use a helpdesk to handle all school maintenance needs. It turned out that if a child was sick in a classroom it was necessary to route a call through a call centre in Winchester. They would log that call on a computer screen. The school caretaker was responsible for logging into the task screen and acknowledging the task before he went to clean up the sick and then logging back in to clear the task once the sick had been dealt with. This added some time to the cleaning up of the sick. One of the main benefits of having a task management system in maintenance is statistical manipulation of data. In this case a spreadsheet in Winchester is scrutinised by a team of management consultants to see how long it takes for sick to be cleaned up in an East End school and how diligent Mr Watts was in getting to the puddle of vomit and effectively neutralising it. Or not. Maybe no one ever crunched the data and found out just how sick children were at that school or how conscientious Mr Watts was.  The next development is inevitably to use a PDA, which would allow the caretaker to acknowledge tasks whilst on the move. That would certainly improve response times. So to effectively clean up sick you need 1 x caretaker (IT trained), 1 x PDA and 1 x PC, 1 x 24 hr manned helpdesk, 1 x IT Comms specialist experienced in maintaining both PDA's and PC's. And some sawdust. This is how modern Britain works; by taking lessons from the corporate world and applying them successfully in non-corporate environments such as schools, political parties and hospitals. And we all feel the benefit of the increased efficincy such developments have brought.