Tag Archives: wasted time

More Soup and Mutterings

Woke early and alert. leaned teeth, checked emails, read blogs, checked comments. The whole day stretched out ahead of me, a totally blank canvas. Had breakfast, watched birds (it’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend), swore at squirrel as it (for the second time in two weeks) unlatched the peanut feeder and dumped them on the ground. Julia went out for a walk. While she was out I read a bit, typed a bit and then decided it must be time for soup. So I got up, made butternut squash and chilli soup with tuna mayonnaise sandwiches and finely sliced cucumber, just as Julia arrived back home. Thirty seven years and we are in faultless synchronicity. Or she has mastered the art of mind control.

She has bought a new peanut feeder. I was going to make a new anti-squirrel fastener with bent wire but she has gone out and bought a caged feeder that will keep squirrels out. The moral of this is that if you content yourself with regular small amounts you can take a lot over the years. But if you get greedy and try to take too much, people will take counter-measures and you may find you are locked out. for good. They had been annoying her this week by chasing birds away and this was the final straw. It looks like they will have to confine themselves to bread and fruit from now on, and we don’t put much fruit out. In nutritional terms they have done themselves no good at all.

Now, at 6pm, I have the last vestiges of my blank canvas ahead, virtually nothing useful done, and no ideas in my head. Tomorrow I will not be making that mistake. tomorrow I will hit the keyboard knowing what I want to do in great detail. It’s that or waste another day. There’s a lot more to not procrastinating than I thought.

Looks cute but is actually the antichrist with a fluffy tail.

My Reader Disappears

Yes, I know the title makes it sound like I only have one person who reads the blog, but there are more than that. I’m sure I have at least six regular readers plus another six irregular readers, and several thousand who once pushed a button to follow the blog, before fading away and never coming back. I’m actually talking about the tb that says “Reader”.

When I have run things, I have always thought that communication was important. I admit I’ve never run any big important things, so it may be that as you increase in size and importance you don’t need to bother with things like this. When I’ve been in charge it has always been something small and manageable so it has been easy to walk round and talk to people. If you are a massive entity like WordPress, you can’t do this, but you could email everyone. They seem to know how an email system works, as they always manage to send my invoices.

However, change the system in a major way, and all they send is silence. Take the most recent one – the loss of the tab that says “Reader”. I use it quite a lot and find it very useful. After a bit of prodding and pushing buttons I still couldn’t find it, so used the Help facility. I try to avoid this as it’s often more annoying and mystifying than the problem I’m trying to answer.

After a few attempts I found that I had to follow a link and press a button. I did this. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. So I did it again more carefully. Nothing.

Then I realised that the two circles which ahd appeared on the top bar, were probably meant to be spectacles. And you use spectacles for reading, so I clicked on that. What had been a useless pair of circles when I had originally tried it, now had a link attached to it and the reader function was restored.

Would it not have been easier to have sent everyone a message to warn them.? It would have taken somebody at HQ 20 minutes. Instead of that it took me 20 minutes, and I assume it took a lot of other people similar amounts of time. If a thousand people ll wasted 10 minutes reconfiguring that button (because most would be quicker than me) that is 10,000 customer minutes wasted. Or 166.66666666666666  hours, according to my calculator. I have left all the 6s because it amuses me to see 666 linked so comprehensively to the management of WP.

I confess I am easily amused.

Correct, the pictures symbolise my detective efforts to trace the missing reader.

Another Day

I’m off work today because I worked yesterday. It doesn’t, as I said at work, when being asked to swap, make any difference to me. Instead of bouncing round an empty house on Monday while Julia is at work, I will bounce around an empty house on Tuesday.

And that’s how it is. I have surfed the web, wasted my time and considered what to hve for lunch. It is now nearly 3pm and I have still had no lunch or done any proper work.

I haven’t written anything for ages, due to various illnesses and I really should get on with it. Same for decluttering. That never really got going, and then it stopped. In addition to that, I need to get some cooking done to ease Julia’s burden, as she’s been doing everything in the house for a month now.

Part of the problem is that I had a bad night last night. I meant to get a good night’s sleep, but ended up waking four times. I will be glad to get to Urology and get this sorted out again.

Meanwhile, I can remember one of my dreams from last night, something I don’t often do. Julia was on a voyage of Antarctic Exploration, and ended up forming a friendship with George Orwell. He hadn’t been in my mind when I went to sleep, and nor had the Antarctic, so I’m not sure where all this came from. As for the second, I remember having it but I can remember nothing about it.

I’d better do some work now, having enthused myself by blogging.

We have a lot of veg at the moment because we didn’t do a lot of cooking last week and I’m not good at cutting my orders down.

New 10p coins – typical British subjects?