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The good morning, good night thread

Started by Ed, October 22, 2007, 03:49:05 AM

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marc_chagall

He's just rang to say he can't come tomorrow to fit the part after all. Will have to wait tiill Monday. Why? Because he can't lift the part. It weighs 44 kilos. Needs two blokes.

It's only a tiddly little boiler. How can a part weigh that much?  :scratch:

Geoff_N

Quote from: delph_ambi on May 05, 2011, 11:29:41 AM
He's just rang to say he can't come tomorrow to fit the part after all. Will have to wait tiill Monday. Why? Because he can't lift the part. It weighs 44 kilos. Needs two blokes.

It's only a tiddly little boiler. How can a part weigh that much?  :scratch:
Tell him to let the water out  ;)

Ed

What a poof -- I was carrying bags of cement heavier than that when I was a sixteen year old weakling :grin:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

Strange and unique day. I spent most of the morning sending PayPal payments to authors who'd contributed to the EV antho - not done that before! It felt soooooo good adding the paypal message to thank them for their stories. Good too, to know that there are stories in there from at least 6 doomers, 7 including a lurker. This site attracts quality.
I was frustrated at not finding the paypal emails or addresses (for cheques) for some contributors - I'd sent emails requesting such weeks ago but no response. Tonight, I was still working on tracking missing authors and responding to facebook and email requests when my wife pulled at my elbow. "We're going to the pub." I tried to say no but remembered we'd arranged a retirement evening for a colleague. Damn. But it was great in the end to chat with not-wriitng friends. I've given up mentioning my writing to them and talk about our kids, holidays etc. One is an English teacher but although he enjoys our chats about Chekhov, he seems to switch off if I talk about science fiction or fantasy. Oh well, we are an esoteric lot, aren't we?

delboy

Finally made it to the weekend...  :cheers:

Alas, my garden is looking like something from one of Ed's stories...  >:(

So the weekend may well involve lots of pruning, mowing, cutting back, and watering  :/

On the bright side, I'm enjoying writing more than I have in months  :smiley:

And I'm even making progress with my guitar studies  :cool:

So, I'm just having some shortcake biscuits and a cup of tea whilst I submit my travel claims for the week and then go off to buy some beer  :afro:

TFIF!
Derek
"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

Robert B. Parker

marc_chagall

The biggest lorry in the world, emblazoned with 'Port of Tyne' on its lovely blue sides just pulled up outside my front door. How it got round the tight corner and into the street, I will never know.

The nice gentleman was delivering my new main heat exchanger for my boiler. There was nothing else at all in the pantechnicon, as far as I could see. Just this wee heat exchanger taped onto an enormous pallet. He asked me if I had a nice burly bloke to hand to help him lift its 45kilos into the house. I said... err... no. Just me. He asked if I could help. I said... ummm... no, not a chance. He looked at it. Asked me if I had a pair of scissors. Yes!

He snipped the tapes holding the wotsit to the pallet, and with much gasping and groaning managed to lift it out and into my house. What a hero! I've tried budging it along the carpet a little, but it really is quite the most incredibly heavy thing for its size I've ever encountered. I can understand why the heating engineer said it would need two of them to fit it.

Ed

#3051
I think men are getting emasculated by legislation -- health and safety says maximum lift for one man is 25 kilos, and if that's all you ever lift, that's what you get used to, and anything more seems heavy in comparison.

To put it into perspective, 45 kilos is only 99lbs. Up until everybody got careful, pretty much anything your bought in a sack was by the hundredweight, which is 112lbs, so your coalman used to sling a 112lb sack of coal over his shoulder, carry it through to your coal store, dump it down and go get another. No huffing and puffing, gasping or groaning involved. I remember my old man buying a cwt of spuds and chucking them in the boot of the car. It was unremarkable, TBH.

Same with cement, plaster, sand on the building. When I first left school, I weighed 11 stone (154lbs), and went to work as a plasterer's apprentice, carrying 112lb bags here there and everywhere, up and down ladders, over rough ground, etc. 44 kilos would have been a treat. It was hard going, for a while, but you get used to it. If you look back at what the stevedores used to carry, that was nothing. They bore incredible loads.

So anyway, the short explanation is we're turning into a nation of wimps. Another reason to hate the modern health and safety culture. ::)
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

You are right, Ed, though there are probably fewer back problems the NHS has to deal with now. Fewer hernias and pulled muscles. Delph, that truck driver must have forgotten to load his electric trolley, doh.

Pharosian

Well, I just submitted my Round Four entry for the Whittaker Prize AND my May Shock Totem Flash contest entry. I kinda cheated, and used the prompt for the ST contest for both, and just created a long and a short version to suit the different word count limits. Still. It was a lot of writing effort for today. I keep telling myself that life would be so much easier if I didn't wait till the last minute to write these things.  ::) Somehow I seem to require the pressure of a deadline, though.

The good news is that I will definitely have a story for next month's session. This one definitely falls into the "dark fiction" category, as opposed to some of the other things I've submitted in recent months.

Ed

Good luck with it all, Pharo :afro:

Geoff -- you could be right, but it might also go the other way, I suppose. On the odd occasions you have to move something heavy on your own, unused as you are to that weight, you might pull a muscle that you otherwise wouldn't have if you'd been used to lifting heavier stuff as standard. In some ways it is a good thing to impose a limit, but I think it should be higher. It's a damn nuisance that everything's in 25kg bags these days -- it takes so long to unload. The temptation is to carry two under one arm and another on the opposite shoulder, or two under each arm, which really is awkward, because they slip against each other. The main enemy in all this is 'rushing', isn't it :scratch:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

fnord33

Well, I got my four hours of sleep, so I'm off to work a 14 hour shift on the busiest day of the year. Happy Mother's Day everyone!
Life is an entanglement of lies to hide it's basic mechanisms. - William Burroughs

Geoff_N

Quote from: fnord33 on May 08, 2011, 09:53:10 AM
Well, I got my four hours of sleep, so I'm off to work a 14 hour shift on the busiest day of the year. Happy Mother's Day everyone!
Happy mothers' Day to American and Canadian mums. It isn't mother's day in the UK - it was on 3rd April. Though of course they get more than their fair share of chocs and flowers all year round.

fnord33

Update: I survived( thanks to two "Java Monsters"), but just barely. I made about 300.00, but I would gladly pay twice that to make the physical, mental and spiritual scarring go away. Does anyone have an extra pair of feet I can borrow for a while?   
Life is an entanglement of lies to hide it's basic mechanisms. - William Burroughs

Rev. Austin

My friend Ben's too tall so you can take some off his height.  Wah wah waaahhhhhhhh

Oh dear, that was AWFUL.
facebook.com/waynegoodchildishaunted
Stay in touch! I don't mean that in a pervy way.

marc_chagall

The heating engineers spent best part of five hours this morning changing the exchanger. They've now gone off, leaving it running full blast, and are going to check back in an hour or so to make sure all's fine. It's blissfully hot in here.

Of course they also left me an official document saying they'll disconnect the b*gger at the end of next year if I don't get a builder round to put in an inspection hatch for the flue, and before then if I don't get a carbon monoxide thingy. Bloody rule changes... this used to happen all the time. They'd come round one year and say the boiler was illegal because I didn't have a huge great vent in my door. Then another year they'd say my fireplace was illegal because Father Christmas wouldn't be able to squeeze through, or whatever. I know it's all sensible safety precautions, but it's still a flippin' nuisance.  >:(