How many of you have a strange person in your workplace? I’m not talking about the guy who *gasp* doesn’t want I’m A Celebrity…Who Gives A Fuck?, but someone that is so bizarre you get ‘this-guy-could-end-up-as-a-psycho-rapist-murderer’ vibes from him? The sort of guy who you’d expect that one day you’re going to walk into the toilet and see him taking a crap on the floor?
There’s a guy in my work, called Dave, and he’s giving off those vibes. I can’t even bring myself to describe his wierdness…it really freaks me out. I know we’re supposed to accept people for who and what they are, but thsi guy disturbs me.
Ach, fuck it, I’m going to try to portray what I’m seeing to you with some situational examples.
* We’re signing our timesheets at some point during the day. Dave’s off somewhere else, I think hovering around someone else, trying to interrupt them with some useless piece of made-up information (yes, he makes stuff up, probably because if he told the truth he’d be locked up. :-P). One of the trainers comes in and takes the folder of timesheets away before Dave can sign his sheet, so as she’s leaving, and with her back turned, he lunges forward and flips the old two finger salute. WTF?
I can’t think of any other particular scenarios bar that one, but the whole vibe he gives off is *very* creepy. Child-molester-esque. *shudders*
of course, he’s from Newton Mearns, so he’s probably in-bred, so that’d explain it.
This entry was written by , posted on January 28, 2004 at 10:02 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Umm….what can I say here? Don’t want my readers (all, ooh, twelve of you or so) thinking I’ve dropped off the earth (even though many of the folk that read this blog are on the #ukmg IRC channel at the moment 😛
* I’ve ordered Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution from Play for a tenner. With that dropping through my letterbox, I shall own versions of all four VF games. Wahey!
* Work is…..meh. It’s money.
* Been playing Morrowind again after getting a few new mods/plugins from a PC Zone CD. I’m currently attempting to become a Lich.
* I’ve seen pics of the OLP Petrucci guitar. The polepieces looked misaligned on the photos, but with any luck the one at NAMM was just a pre-production concept prototype and the production models will be a bit tighter. If so, I’m buying one, especially if they do a 7-string.
* Uh, Chris Benoit won the Royal Rumble. YAY!
Hmm…..not much else to say. Here’s a picture of me at a gig last year. Here’s hoping it works.
This entry was written by , posted on January 26, 2004 at 10:51 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I got moved *again* at my job today, this time to the new accounts project thingy that I got hired for in the first place. I could tell you more about what I’m doing, but the thing doesn’t get launched until next week, so if I did say anything, you’d all have to die. Sorry.
But yeah, training all this week and a bit of next, and it looks like we might be able to get away a tad early most days. Hurrah!
Still, I can’t imagine this job will last more than a few weeks more if the training today was anything to go by; we were taking stuff out of envelopes and sorting them into trays and I was a fair bit slower than everyone else, even though I felt like I was going along at a fair clip. Meh, we’ll see how the other stuff goes.
This entry was written by , posted on January 21, 2004 at 10:29 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Okay, here’s the situation. I get out the house at 7:20 AM to get the train at 7:40. To cut a long and unpleasant part of the story short, a train doesn’t show up unil about an hour later than it should (at about 8:40-8:45AM), due to a cock-up with the signals in Kilmarnock, some 15 miles down the road. Now, seeing as I start at 8:30 AM, this means that I’m going to be an hour late, all told. So I finally get into the NSB building at about 9:30 and I tell Brian, the team leader that I was sorry I was late, what the situation was and that, obviously, it was due to circumstances beyond my control.
“You could have done something about it,” says he.
Excuse me, thinks I, but what the fuck are you on, you fucking retarded jobsworth? I reiterate the ‘circumstances beyond my control’ part again, hoping that it’ll register this time.
“That’s not good enough,” he continues. “You could have made it in, I come in from Irvine, so that’s no excuse. You’d better watch yourself.”
All right, fucko, thinks I, Point 1: YOU FUCKING DRIVE TO WORK, DICKFACE. Point 2: Under the circumstances where you do get the train, IRVINE IS ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TRAIN LINE, YOU MORONIC LITTLE TWATBASKET CUNTSNOT!
Jesus H. Christ, where do they get these people? I’ll be damned if I’m going to have my employment threatened by some too-big-for-his-boots team leader and the ineptitude of Network Rail.
This entry was written by , posted on January 19, 2004 at 8:08 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Okay, folks, here’s my big review of my first ever Dream Theater live experience. I’ll be posting this in a couple of places, just so’s ya know. 🙂
Okay, it all kicked off at 7:30AM when I left the house to meet up with my friend Steven. We headed up to Glasgow and met my online amigo Mark, scant moments before our train for Manchester was due to leave, so that was fortuitous.
About 3 and a half hours later, we hit Manchester and started towards the Apollo, to pick up the 11 tickets for the rest of the posse of peeps from the uk.music.guitar newsgroup. We got along there and the box office wasn’t open, so we walked along to the hotel we were staying at (the Sportscity Quality Hotel in West Gorton: there was a few other DT fans there, as we noticed this morning at check-out). We were hoping to meet uk.music.guitar’s Paul Simpson there, who was recently turned onto DT having been shown the Live Scenes DVD. He wasn’t there (turned out he was stuck in the M62 logjam like a load of other folks. Good thing we ended up taking the train rather than driving as was our original travel plan.) so we headed back to the Apollo to pick up the UKMG tickets. Did so, and we headed around to the side door, as a big yellow bus was pulling up. The three of us stood and nattered for a bit, debating over wether we should join the 10-15 fans waiting for the guys to show up when we heard a cheer. I turned to see John Myung’s gig-bag disappearing rapidly out of sight. Guess he wasn’t in a talkative mood, shock-a-roonie. Close behind was Mike Portnoy, who was wrapped up like the Michelin Man, because it was frankly fucking freezing. He stood about, shook some hands, kissed some babies etc, and James LaBrie came out too and schmoozed with the tr00 h@rdk0r3 fans for a bit.
In case you were wondering, we didn’t go up and join in. Even now I’m not sure why. I would’ve loved to have shot the shit with Mike and James a bit. Don’t know if Petrucci and Rudess appeared, as we left just after James went inside, but we did hear the guitars being soundchecked as Mark was picking up the UKMG tickets. Could’ve just been JP’s tech noodling around tho. (Who’s teching for JP these days anyway?)
So, after being feet away from The Brie, The Man, and a passing breeze created by a speeding Korean, we decided to make our way towards the Tribeca in the town centre, where we were supposed to be meeting the rest of the UKMG guys (Final UKMG rollcall was me, Steven Clark (honorary UKMGer for that day ;-), Mark McGuigan, Ian Myatt, Adrian Foden, Rick Booth, Trev Ridney, Mike Whitaker, James Screaton, Paul Simpson, and Blues-Core and his dad). After the UKMGers showed up (apart from Paul S, due to the “M-bastard-sixty-fucking-two”. He showed up just as the intro tape was going) we jumped into two taxis and headed down to the Apollo. By this time we had come to the conclusion that John Rimmer and his wife, who were originally supposed to be part of the UKMG party in the balcony (me and Steven had tickets in Row FF stalls, which is nearer the hotel than the stage), we got to take their seats, Balcony Row B seats 11 and 12. SCORE! Damn near perfect stage view!
Then….THE GIG!
It all kicked off with a frankly FUCKING AWESOME intro video on the centre of the three video screens, running as a timeline from 1986 to the present, leading up to the last part of SDOIT, the big chord and…
THE ENTIRE TRAIN OF THOUGHT ALBUM, START TO FUCKING FINISH! HOLY BABY JESUS IMPALED ON A RABIES INFESTED KEBAB SKEWER!
Yes, I *do* like the new album. *grin*
And that was just the first SET. They cam back after the intermission (where they played Opeth’s fantastic ‘Damnation’ album over the PA. Not surprisingly, as it’s Mike Portnoy’s personal album of the year, and one of my faves of 2003 too) and busted out a more straight ahead set of earlier DT stuff, covering all of their previous albums, apart from When Dream and Day Unite, but that’s their weakest album anyway. Highlights were The Mirror, Fatal Tragedy (the cheer after FT was off-the-charts, easily the crowd pop of the night. I guess Manchester loves Scenes From A Memory. :-)) and, well, basically the whole damn thing. It was totally mind-bogglingly cool.
Afterwards we hopped on a bus to Rusholme for a curry, then back to the hotel and bed. Got up the next morning, went into town with Paul, Mark and Steven, had some grub at a pub and got the train home. And here I am now, writing this as the ‘King Crimson’ bit in Stream of Conciousness plays.
All in all, totally fab. BRING ON THE NEXT UK DATES!
Oh, and someone should slap the promoters until they put DT on in Scotland again. Twats. 😛
This entry was written by , posted on January 17, 2004 at 8:04 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Yesterday I discovered that the National Savings Bank (where I work, natch) has a CD/Video/DVD/Games library, that rents out the above items and sells stock they’re finished with. It was open today, so I checked it out after I had lunch (BBQ Spare Ribs and Satay Chicken & fried rice: another perk of my job is the great, ludicrously cheap food), to find they were selling promo versions of PS2 games. Very recent PS2 games, like WRC3, Moto GP 3 and A Dog’s Life. Turns out the guy that runs the CD library does stuff for kids at Yorkhill Hospital, and one way or another manages to get lots of promo disks off Sony to sell at the NSB to raise money for the hospital. It’s all above board and cool with Sony, apparently.
(Clarification: Promo discs are the full games, sent out to magazines etc. for review. The only difference is that there’s no packaging or a manual, just a blue jewel case.)
The best part? These promo discs are going for a FIVER EACH. Holy shit! The £40 that most games cost will buy me EIGHT FUCKING GAMES!
Needless to say I’ll be expanding my collection of PS2 games next week. ^_^
This entry was written by , posted on January 14, 2004 at 6:28 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Got moved to the mailroom today, basically because I was below the required level for book processing, and there was too many people and not enough books.
Now, I spend my days stacking application forms for premium bond claims, or something. it’s about as easy as breathing, and about as interesting as a seminar about watching paint dry. With slides and everything. And a laser pointer. And the guy taking the seminar is in a clown suit. So, to put it another way it’s as boring as fuck. And I got a sore shoulder from moving my arm in the same way about a thousand times.
Meh, at least I’m seeing Dream Theater on Friday. Woohoo! \m/
This entry was written by , posted on January 12, 2004 at 7:06 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
…And, well, it’s not exactly fun & japes. I hate the bleak, bland office atmosphere, and the people just aren’t my kind of people, really. It makes me realise how much I miss college. *sigh*
It’s hardened my resolve to get myself involved in the music business one way or another tho. I’m going to fire off letters, CVs, CDs, and whatever else seems appropriate to labels, music shops, publishers, promoters, venues and whoever else seems like a cool place to work in the music biz. I invested three years and several thousand pounds of debt into getting my HND, and I’ll be fucked if I’m not putting it to good use. It’s not like a degree in something like ancient Egyptian (sorry Steven. *grin*), where the degree won’t really be any use to a certain field. I’m trained to work in the music biz, so that’s what I’m going to do. Hell, I’d start my own record label if it wasn’t so bloody risky to do so. Ah well, maybe I can do some more promotion. Anyone fancy gigging in Glasgow and letting me take a cut? *grin*
This entry was written by , posted on January 5, 2004 at 8:00 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Erm, wow, it’s been 9+ months since I updated this. Shit. I guess I’d better recap.
* Finished college, got my HND in Music Performance & Promotion.
* Played Stereo and the 13th Note weith The Reverend Neil McDougall (we were going to play Feederfest in Wolverhampton as well, but that went tits-up at the last minute). Stereo was a cool venue; great stage sound, nice atmosphere. Shame James broke the bass drum skin halfway through the set tho. Ah well.
* I’ve also delved into the world of gig promotion as well; I wound up putting on a gig at the 13th Note last week that originally was to be promoted by my mate Chris and was to have an English black metal band headlining. We wound up with Tempercalm (Modern post-whatever grungy rock, kind of like Feeder meets Nirvana), Blue Movie (kind of a cross between Soundgarden and Led Zep), and Brainchild (imagine Travis, but not shit and depressing, with the resurrected John Bonham on drums) A good night, and we turned a profit. I’ll be doing that again.
* I start my first real, legit job on Monday; I’m a data entry clerk at the National Savings Bank at Cowglen. With any luck this should finance driving lessons and an amplifier. Maybe a guitar or two if I’m lucky as well.
* Still single. Fuck. Or not, as the case may be.
* I need to put a band together as well. Could be tricky with work and all. Probably a bit easier to do once I’m driving and have a car.
* Going to see Dream Theater a week on Friday. Yay! Unfortunately, me and Steven are in Row FF, seats 2 and 3. We’ll probably be sat behind an enormously fat bloke wearing a Rush t-shirt, who’ll sing every song a quarter tone out. Bah. Maybe we’ll hook up with the Voices UK guys after the gig and see if we can meet MP and JP.
* Erm, I have an exponentially-increasing DVD collection. I got Transformers Season 2 Part 1, LOTR: TTT EE, Spinal Tap and Rush In Rio all over the past two weeks. I’m sure it’ll be worse once I start getting paid. Well, actually, I really need to buy more CDs. The last CDs I bought were Number of the Beast and The Mars Volta’s debut, and that was months ago. Hmm. Maybe some death metal. I have MP3s of Bloodbath’s album and a Death album and they’re great.
Anywho, maybe I’ll update this mofo a bit more often. Maybe.
Neil
This entry was written by , posted on January 4, 2004 at 12:00 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Follow Me!