Can anyone beat this?

[blameless]

Can anyone beat this?

I can see where Eggchaser's coming from on this. I'd never had any secretarial help in my life until I broke my finger recently.

My boss loaned me his PA part-time (and no, there's no way of phrasing that without it sounding smutty - I've checked) to do things such as writing up reports for mass circulation based on my scribbly hand-written notes from meetings.

Not only is the lady in question much quicker at typing than me - even when both hands are working properly I'm still a sloth at the keyboard - it frees up a lot more of my time to do the other things I'm supposed to be sorting out which no-one else here can (planning our upcoming refurbishments, leaning on sales reps to bring down the cost of new equipment, spending too much time on OTF, etc).

I refer to people on OTF as my "friends" sometimes, it's faintly pathetic

I think there was a thread on this on the old board, and it was discovered that quite a lot of us do this - so if it qualifies as "faintly pathetic", then myself and dozens of others are too.

[blameless]

Can anyone beat this?

Please do the Thames Water letter.

Oh, please tell me you were offensive to them. Better still, please tell me you charged them money for something.

[Reed John]

Can anyone beat this?

Dictating letters seems like something from an early 60s romantic comedy, with Doris Day or perhaps Audrey Hepburn.

I can understand dictating if you're only dictating the salient bits and the assistant is going to fill in the rest. I did that when I was a legal assistant.

But I can't imagine dictating a whole letter word for word. Typing would be way more efficient if for no other reason then stuff that sounds ok out loud looks dumb in print and vice versa.

[Eggchaser]

Can anyone beat this?

We don't do that whole "secretary sitting in the office, doing shorthand" thing anymore - we've got digital dictation so I press record, speak into the mike, press the E(nd)O(f)L(etter) button, type the file details in the relevant boxes and it zooms over as a .wav file to await picking up by one of the secretaries.

blameless, the first Thames Water letter is an inoffensive "We regret to inform you of the death of, please let us know how much you owe us/we owe you" affair.

Subsequent letters generally go

"Stop sending us bills, we know we owe you money and will deal with it when we are allowed to."

"Why are you threatening proceedings? Have you ignored all our previous correspondence? We will pay when we are allowed to."

"Here is your cheque" Now piss off

"Why are you still sending us bills, we paid on date x and anyway the property was sold on date y"

"Will you just FUCK OFF! We are now ignoring everything you send as it has nothing to do with us. Bother the current occupants, whose details were given to you months ago."

OR

"Why have you sent us a refund made out to a dead person? You know damn well cheques made by dead people prior to their death but not presented prior to their death and those made out to them after their death cannot be honoured. Please send us a cheque payable to us or the executors." You doltish drones

[Spearmint Rhino]

Can anyone beat this?

My life is quite often the way Wingco describes his in the opening post, if you don't count going up to a door person saying "I should be on the guest list, my name's Simon Price" and then ordering a pint of cider as a work-related encounter.

A couple of weeks ago, when Mrs Rhino went up north to see her family, I actually went 48 hours without even stepping outside the front door, never mind meeting another human being. The fridge was well-stocked, I'd seen all my gigs for the week, so I just stayed in, grew a beard and slept weird hours. It only ended when Purves and Carcass came to visit. If it hadn't been for them, I'd probably have spun it out for another 24.

I really hate phone calls. I dread making them, and I resent receiving them. Mainly because it's usually someone asking if I want to come and see Clinic, or whether I've received the Malcolm Middleton album.

The worst ones are the ones who do what Chris Morris did on The Day Today where he managed to engineer a war between Britain and Australia. What I mean is, the PR will phone me and say "Do you want to come and review the Black Crowes?" and I'll say "Well, I dunno, but I'll put it on the list of suggestions I send to my editors and see what they reckon." Then, behind my back, the PR will ring one of my editors and say "Simon Price says he'll review the Black Crowes as long as you OK it." The editor will say "Er, OK..." (actually, god knows what the editor says, because I'm not privy to that part.) Anyway, then the PR rings me back and says "Your editor's OKed it, so are you going to come and review the Black Crowes?" At which point I have to yell "WAIT A BLOODY MINUTE!"

By the way, Taylor...

I haven't actually seen anyone off OTF this year at all,

Yes you have. You saw me at 3.00am on Sunday 2nd March, for about 15 minutes.

[Taylor]

Can anyone beat this?

Oh yeah. God I was pissed, hope it didn't show too badly. I vaguely remember talking to Mrs Rhino, and suddenly realising I'd been rambling on for about a minute on a subject so boring that I can't even remember what it was.

[Reed John]

Can anyone beat this?

I actually went 48 hours without even stepping outside the front door, never mind meeting another human being.

I actually do this on the weekend quite often. Usually I do go out once or twice to acquire more Diet Coke or a sandwich. I never stock-up properly whenever I go to the grocery so I have to go a lot. I think I do this just so I'll have a reason to leave the apartment. I may give a soft "Good Morning" to someone else on the elevator and I say "Hello" and "thank you" to the cashier person at the supermarket, but that's it. Otherwise I stay in. I watch movies/tube, read, do laundry, shower, surf the web, sleep at weird hours, graze on what little food I have in the place and drink lots of Diet Coke - caffeinated in the day and decaffinated in the evenings.

Especially since I got a GPS navigator I've been compelled to sometimes drive around the suburbs of Montgomery County aimlessly for a while. I'm always hoping I'll discover something useful - like a 7-11 that doesn't have that weird 7-11 smell or a hardware store near my apartment that actually sells hardware. But this never happens.

I don't regard this as a sign of good mental health.