Phrontistery

Chasing up an email recently that I hadn’t had a response to I received the following reply: “I am currently out of the office. My emails are being forwarded to my assistant who will revert back to you as soon as possible”

REVERT ? ~ I looked at this for quite a while and wondered what I should do. I’ve had property revert to me from time to time, but never a human being. How would I know that the assistant had reverted back to me, I’m pretty sure I would recognise if they got back to me.

Clearly a Thesaurus had been consulted during the composition of this automated reply and in an attempt to ‘big up their importance’ they had looked for something that sounded far more impressive than ‘get back to you’ or simply ‘reply to you’ and revert was the unfortunate result.

I confess to using the thesaurus myself, not to look for more difficult words but simply because, increasingly so, I can’t remember the simple ones.

I was talking to a friend on the phone last week and I mentioned a classical concert I had watched on the telly one afternoon last month, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra doing the…‘you-know-that–thing-quite-famous from Tristan and Isolde’. But I couldn’t think what the thing was called. This went on for a while and despite my repetition and prompts of ‘the bit at the beginning’ and ‘before it starts’ or ‘Tristan’s got a famous one’ he was none the wiser nor could I remember and so the conversation drifted effortlessly and comfortably onto another subject before we duly said our farewells and ended the call.

But it was bugging me and later that evening I remembered the word I had been searching for and called him back. ‘Overture’ I said feeling all smug.He kindly said he was pleased that I had remembered & not to worry when words slip away, but it’s hard not to.

I have never lost obvious words like ‘Lettuce’ or ‘Velocipede’ but there are numerous object in the house whose names so often escape me that when I invariably refer to ‘the wireless’ Jayne now automatically knows which of object I am actually talking about.

So perhaps the best thing is to visit the thesaurus, I just looked up ‘looked up’ as you clearly can’t rely on others as they always lengthen you (I just looked up ‘let down’).

The phrasal verb is the problem when made up of more than one word as generally it can have a variety of uses. One can ‘put up’ a shelf, ‘put up’ friends for the weekend, ‘put up’ a candidate and even ‘put up’ with a load of nonsense, thus you have to be careful about the range of meanings on offer before use. I suspect someone looked up the phrase ‘set back’ and came up with this ridiculous reminder I once saw on a hotel TV screen ‘upon retiring please retard your clocks by one hour’

Having checked my email I can find no evidence that the assistant did revert to me, nor more interestingly even ‘get back’ or ‘reply’ to me. Perhaps they also had read the automated reply and simply decided to safely lie low. But, that leaves me in a quandary as I have been ‘seriously extinguished’ so should I ‘emancipate’ it or write back to the sender and ‘accelerate’. I suspect that this is the sort of thing you are not supposed to ‘eructate’ and perhaps I am ‘exploding’ it out of all proportion.

Faulty Beer

I recon that hangovers can be blamed on beer that is somehow faulty or contaminated.

There’s so much that could go wrong that we should blame any after-effects of beer consumption on ‘dirty pipes’ or some other obscure fault as most of us are reluctant to accept that beer drinking almost inevitably leads to feeling dreadful; hence attributing the morning-after effects of alcohol consumption on your pint being somehow ‘bad’.

Frankly all pints are ‘bad’, but it’s the ‘bad’ ingredient than makes them ‘good’.

After drinking several pints of beer last night, I found my vision this morning blurry, thus delaying my departure from my bed by several hours, plus I had visible sweat patches on my forehead and a lingering sense of paranoia. Clearly this was all caused by the publican failing to correctly observe some aspect of beer maintenance, and now I think about it I probably had a dirty glass with bacteria in it. Or maybe I got the bottom of the barrel.

 There’s no way 9 pints of clean, pure beer would make me feel this bad.

"Greed is Good"

I’m a real hot shot now, having got my hands on a bargain share of a Royal Mail 1st Class stamp and potentially making a mahoosive profit. I wonder how many Apps I can now purchase.

“Buy low, sell high”, that’s my mantra not, dissimilar to Gordon Gekko in ‘Wall Street’….. “To the victor the spoils”, I’ve even bought myself a pair of those wide red braces from Asda.

” I am the lion you chumps and losers, hear me roar, time is money and money is power”

However, as a first-time investor, I have yet to ‘cash-in the chip’ from my high-stakes market deal, as I’m not actually sure how I do it. I’m going to Google it as I don’t want to get it wrong; I hope it’s not too complicated

Do Bears Sh*t in the Woods ?

Sorry I’m late but I wasn’t going to pay fifty quid for it so I said I’ll go elsewhere but the manager came out and let me have it for thirty, and it fits better so now I’ve got one for daytime and one for work, its colder today so I’ve got long gloves on, thought we’d go down past Asda and see Granville. Let’s go ‘commando’ - no GPS or Mini iPad. Sorry I forgot the chairs, I did 40 miles yesterday are you ready?

No wonder he doesn’t run out of puff on the uphills !!!!

Heading out past Sainsbury’s and then Wicks we crossed the M54 (thankfully via a footbridge) and from therein the route gets a bit blurred, as usual on these outings, but involved getting lost, losing each other, going round in circles, not being allowed into an industrial estate, a quick round on the golf course, a visit to the landfill site, being told by a member of the Pony Club to "Get orf moi laaaand", seeing a baby bear, and some  jungle path-breaking worthy of any David Livingstone expedition which would necessitate copious first-aid treatments for Leg Lacerations and Stinging Nettle Shins upon our return to civilisation.

Talking of which, after showering when I got home, and in an attempt to calm said lacerations and still burning shins, I smothered them in Savlon, King of Antiseptic Creams. However, it took an unusually long time to rub-in and was sporting a rather distinctive Minty odour.

It was a mistake any fool could have made whilst not wearing his spectacles.

Superfluous Bullshit of the Modern Workplace

Employers have warned that many school leavers are unable to pester colleagues into sponsoring them for a charity fun run, talk at length about their dinner plans or write arsey notes about unwashed mugs.

Local Businessman Arthur Daley said: “Too many youngsters enter the workplace unaware that at least 60% of their time will be spent chatting, bickering and engaging in juvenile politics".

“One young lass recently taken on from the Job Centre didn’t understand there was a rigid hot drink rota that fills people with smouldering resentment if every single cuppa is not reciprocated. Plus, having now been here a week not once has she been heard complaining about the smokers outside the foyer making the company look unprofessional". He continued, "They should have been taught the superfluous bullshit needed for the modern workplace before leaving school"

Business leaders like Mr Daley now want the government to change the National Curriculum to include skills ranging from hoarding White-Board markers to whining about the canteen not being a McDonald's and closing at 6pm, thus inconveniencing late-working staff with no social life.

A Department of Education spokesman said: “Business leaders have told us they want more petty-minded workaholic losers, and it is the duty of the education system to provide them. So we are proposing to mess around with the National Curriculum again this winter and replace the old traditional and outdated subjects like GCSE Maths and English and replace them with Proper ‘O’ levels in subjects like ‘Obsessing About How Long Your Colleagues Take For Lunch’.

Ultimately, our goal is that every pupil will be the sort of co-worker you really try to avoid getting the train home with.”

Schools Back

Parents across the UK are drunkenly celebrating the end of six weeks

 of hellish full-time childcare.

Here’s to the remnants of shattered sanity

 

Their shamelessly adult partying began outside school gates at 9.01am Monday morning after handing their offspring back to education professionals.

Mother of three Tamsin Rissington-Smythe said: “I waved a two-fingered goodbye to my little darlings, cranked Azealia Banks full blast on the stereo, cracked a bottle of Merlot right there in the car and sucked desperately at the bottle like it was a teat".

"Some other mums got in and we drove to a strip club, which made a refreshing change from overpriced pirate-themed attractions in castles.”

Risk manager Tarquin Jollyboy, who has spent half of the last six weeks pretending to be so bad at football that a five-year-old can beat him, said: “Freedom tastes so sweet".

“After a fantastic day of work where nobody mentioned Spongebob Squarepants, Despicable Me or Thomas the bastard Tank Engine, we hit the wine bar at 4.30pm on the nose. I can’t remember whose idea it was that we just not go home, but it was a damn good one.”

Grandparents have joined the party, elated at their release from a hellish round of local museums, sad farm parks and protracted negotiations with sucrose-crazed dictators just to get them out of their pyjamas.

 

The nation’s children greeted their return to school with equanimity. Eight-year-old Damien Trotter said: “If they’d taken me to one more petting zoo I would have strangled a hen, then pretended I didn’t understand why that was a bad thing to do.”

Hi de Hi

We went to Madonna’s 80^th birthday concert on Saturday evening, at a small intimate venue in Stirchley. Not usually the sort of concert I would attend so the Bad Lady Wife and I went in disguise, but I did feel a right “Wally”.

A liberal sprinkling of draught cider ensured a very pleasant evening for everyone and Madonna’s performance on the stage was actually very good and quite emotional, excepting when she asked us to ‘without further ado…. drink the food’ Talking of which, it is many a year since I have had a 'Spam and Jam and Sandwhich Spread' sandwhich. But it is good to see’ Hula Hoops will be a round forever’ !

The star of the show was undoubtedly the fella who dressed up as an eighty year old; to be fair I think he went a bit OTT as he looked about 90. I also noticed that Spiderman had a camel toe, saw Jake Blues was asleep at the table and it felt quite weird going for a pee with Slash.