My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

For some reason or another the other office manager has set up an automated account to respond to all emails not in his address book - it must've seemed like a good idea at the time, however, he's replied to every email that has ever been sent to him, including, ones that were years old that he still has on his system - 63 of which just happened to be mine :|

If you have tried sending an email to (insert other office managers email address in here) and have received this message instead, please read the following, and try again:

This is a strategy to eliminate unsolicited "“SPAM"” email. This message has been generated because your email address does not currently appear in my address book of known contacts.

Please resend your message, and include the password in the Subject Line.

To protect the password from being detected by scanning software and used by spammers, I cannot spell out the password, but it is very simple:

My name is (insert other office managers name), and the password is the first, third and fifth letters of my name, in that order.

If this fails, please call me on (insert office phone number) and I'll happily add your name and address to my contacts list.

Thanks for you patience.

Now if only we can eliminate his poorly punctuated spam. I am tempted to set up an email loop - but dare I?

I was walking around staring at TGSI (tactile ground surface indicators: used by vision impaired people to help find their way around on footpaths etc) all day on thursday with a seeing eye dog trainer, a vision impaired person, a designer, and a builder.

The designer and builder kept saying how difficult it is to get these things right:

Designer/builder speaking almost in unison: "It's so difficult to get them right in the different non-standard situations..."

Me *thinking to myself*: "It's a freaking square intersection!!!!! There's nothing more standard than this!!!! There's a simple diagram in the Australian Standard!!!!"

Designer/builder again speaking almost in unison: "What do you mean it's wrong?"
Me *thinking to myself*: "It's because you're directing the vision impaired person into the middle of the freaking roundabout! of course it's wrong! if you were blind you'd end up dead!!! dead!!!!!".

I felt like killing them. Three (3) hours of walking around looking at situation after situation that were all standard and straight out of the book and yet all messed up. The designer would mess up the design slightly...the builder would do whatever he wanted to and the vision impaired person was too vision impaired to get anywhere with them at all.

They're simple. Either the situation is standard and you don't need them or the situation is non-standard and you follow the TGSI standard. The TGSI standard covers all situations with diagrams - you copy the diagrams. You use commonsense and a bit of empathy. Sorted. Next time I'm taking a baseball bat to the site meeting.

There's all this craziness going on at the moment. The Corby case still isn't over after they've decided to appeal. For some reason or another they flew over two (2) top profile barrister from Ausrtalia to help in her appeal - her lawyers instead chose to ignore the barrister and enlisted the help of an Indonesian soap star to try and make the rest of Indonesia feel sorry for her because they all know that Indonesia wants blood due to her getting off so lightly during her original case.

Now there's Douglas Wood the Iraqi hostage who may or may not have been rescued by Australian forces who may or may not have been rescued by Iraqi forces who may or may not have been rescued by American forces who may or may not have been rescued by the Australian Muslim cleric - and to top it all off - they've released footage of him in "the missing" hostage video where he's in good spirits, perfectly fine, and is laughing with his "kidnappers". What in the hell is going on? The guy actually put on weight when taken hostage! How in the hell do you put on weight? Apparently we'd not feel the slightest bit of sympathy for him if we knew he was being treated well - so the fact he was living it up was never made public at the time.

It makes me wonder what games they're playing with our minds - and for what purpose? Both of these issues are obviously a smoke screen for something.

AND guess who else is in trouble - again - our good friend Adler, the ex executive whose dodgy dealings brought down two (2) corporate giants, was caught sending out secret notes to run businesses while in gaol for corporate fraud! Even behind bars he can't be stopped running amok with other peoples money!

I'm so exhausted at the moment. Still getting over the weekend of driving. I should be out with everyone watching the state of origin - but alas here I am shivering, typing here, and listening to it in the background.

It, the state of origin, is going according to script - NSW is winning and will win or otherwise there is no ticket sales for the 3rd and deciding game and we all know Qld won't want that. Qld is losing 26-16 but they're on the come back trail - or so the over excited commentator claims. 30-16 to NSW - if Qld keeps on this come back trail they'll be losing by 100-16 by full time.

They're trying to talk me into doing some personal training sessions at the gym - this worries me a bit. I'm making reasonable gains from my current program - but they're wanting to "push me that bit further". For some reason no matter how good your gains are they try and stress that you can push it further if they yell at you while you train. The idea is for me to do two (2) total body workouts per week and omit my current program. This is meant to continue for eight (8) weeks and supposedly I will have gains that are "beyond my wildest dreams". The only thing I don't understand is that if they're pushing me to failure with a total body work out twice a week - how in the hell am I meant to make any gains what so ever? There'd be no recovery time and you'd be constantly depleted of all energy.

I've been going up and down Scone Road so many times while doing my road safety audit I can almost drive it blind-folded - the only problem is that without guardrail along the edges of it and a lane-width of 3.5 metres total if I happened to go over the edge I'd pretty much fall down about 100 metres onto the roof of the car and need to be rescued by helicopter!

Road Safety Audits are a slow boring experience - stay well clear of them if you can.

I'd been getting these calls that I always just missed the other day. It turned out it was Optus. The fuckers must've had me on auto-dial or something- they called every ten (10) minutes for an hour and a half until I actually picked up the phone before it rang out:

"Hello! You're the first to be told about our new exciting offer...*Adam hangs up phone*"

Could they not have just sent an SMS after the first failed attempt? Would have been a lot less annoying and finished the job there and then.

Today I was at the Car Swap Meet - until now. 5am - until now. All day - until now. I am exhausted!

It was the most surreal experience as i walked past all of the stores at 5am this morning. It was like some type of post-apocalyptic Mad Max world (or downtown Washington). Each of them had their wares, car junk parts and the like, strewn all over the ground. It was dark and there were garbage bins set alight everywhere - rugged up people hugged the firey warmth in droves. The people came in and out of the shadows grunting hellos to familiar shadows who they seemed to travel to every car swap meet with like family. Part Mad Max and part circus.

I just hope someone tells them that you can't burn CCA treated timber without poisoning yourself.

Maybe Cheryl was right afterall - or maybe i'm just getting old but Monk isn't that bad of a show in moderation.

Was out road tripping for work doing a road safety audit in the middle of no where. It was freezing, frost all over the road and the like, but the most exciting part was meeting the locals.

ME: "Are you open for dinner here yet?"
LOCAL: "Yes - but we've been booked out - there's 180 people here for a dinner"
ME: *looking around at an empty room* "Are you sure?"
LOCAL: "Yup. Surely Am."

I have no idea what the 180 ghosts were eating - or where they were coming from.

MY MOTHER: "Do people always ask you what LGES stands for?"
ME: "Not usually - most people either don't notice and if they do they don't care"
LOCAL: "What does LEGS on your shirt stand for?"
ME:" Local Government Engineering Services"
LOCAL:" That's the same thing that's written on your car!"
ME: "Yeah. It is."
LOCAL: "So it's not LEGS at all?"
ME: "No - it's written with the word staggered so it's LGES"
LOCAL: "That's stupid"
ME: " Mmhmm."

I hadn't bathed for an entire day. I hadn't shaved for two days. I smelt bad. I looked dishelved. I had mud all over me. I still smelt better than the locals - but they had their revenge on me - they had the last laugh. I ate at the only place in town open past 5pm - the chinese restaurant in the Bowling Club, which was owned by Thaiwanese Australians, and I was the sole person there. The locals obviously knew something I didn't.