MarkW

So you're saying I need to get a night vision scope? Cool!

In which case you remove or otherwise deal with any access to a food supply so the rats are forced to eat poisoned bait. And tell your warehouse people that doors must be kept secure when not in use or unattended. if rats can get in so easily then so can thieves and Im sure you wouldn't hesitate to take steps if you were robbed. if equipment walked out the door. Sounds good, but just not practical I'm afraid. A lot of what is stored in the warehouse is equipment for a commercial apiary, which is in itself a food source for rats: they chew the wooden frames and eat the wax combs and any residual honey in them. We keep them racked, which is about the best we can do as we have hundreds of them. Keeping the roller shutters closed isn't practical either, as at certain times of the year we have telehandlers in and out all day. Theft during the day isn't a problem, as nobody can get on site unless they have a gate fob or we remotely let them in (imagine the gate to the Tyrannosaur paddock in Jurassic Park - it's not far off what we have). The only way in at night would be to cut the fence or come across the fields, neither of which would go unnoticed in daylight.

gotta love it when the most obvious answer has already been ruled out. try harder.. Trouble is the warehouse is often open for extended periods whilst equipment is moved in and out - especially apiary stuff or equipment used in field trials. Once a rat gets in, there are a hundred and one places to hide undetected.

Right - that's it. I got a call from the office alarm monitoring company at 2 o'clock this morning to say the intruder alarm in the warehouse had been triggered. Our usual key-holder is on holiday, so I had a 90-minute round-trip (25 minutes there, 40 minutes trying to evict the rat that set it off and stop him getting back in, and then 25 minutes home) before I could crawl back into bed at just after 3.30 this morning. On the plus side, I had turned up there expecting to deal with a completely different type of vermin. Anyway, the office is surrounded by farmland, and as you'd expect there is plenty of evidence of rat activity. We can't exclude them from the warehouse, and in addition to the mess they leave behind they have also chewed their way through several bits of equipment we store in there. We use a commercial pest control company, but despite all the traps, bait-stations and fluorescent tracking powder they have put down they have only managed to catch two rats in the last five months. I could have done better than that sitting outside one of their burrows with an axe. So the time has come to dispense with their services and take matters into my own hands. I'm far too insubordinate to have lasted five minutes in the army, but if I'd been forced to join up I could have quite fancied being a sniper - partly because blowing someone's head off from half a mile away sounds like jolly good fun, but mainly because you get to lie down a lot. So that's the way I'm thinking: stake out a good spot, entice them out with something tasty and then blap them with an air rifle. From my visit last night there's no shortage of quarry. Generally speaking I dislike the idea of killing things, but these buggers have got it coming. So, if anyone has any suggestions I'm listening!

WTF [mention]Six30[/mention] is our new HR Manager.

Cheers Fro! Our insurance is extensive, and we're hot on H&S paperwork due to the pathogens and nerve agents we have on site.

There is on all our big automatic lab units, none of which will open until they've completed their cycle, but this was a much older model with a completely manual closure that we were using for the purposes of an inter-laboratory validation - essentially running the clients internal protocol (which uses the old autoclave) alongside ours to show that the data were comparable. What I don't understand is how she managed to open it before it had cooled down, because the pressure jams the lid tight shut. When the paramedic asked her what had happened she said she had seen the steam coming out of the pressure release valve but had thought it was safe to open ( ) and had cracked the handle, at which point it went bang. According to my wife, who travelled to A&E with her in the ambulance, the paramedics could find nothing wrong except the two superficial blisters (combined area less than the size of a new 5p) on her cheek. When they asked her how bad the pain was on a scale of 0-10 she said 8, at which point they concluded that she was just being a drip.

We get inspected fairly frequently due to the nature of the stuff we work with, but from what we can tell this was operator error: she manually disengaged the lid whilst the vessel was pressurised. The lid landed 20 feet away on the top of some 6-foot high racking: if it had hit her in the face it would have been a whole different story. The ambulance driver said they'd take her to A&E for a check, but they couldn't find anything wrong and thought she was just being a bit melodramatic. The hospital discharged her on the same basis and we told her to take tomorrow off. She's a great worker, but seems very accident-prone. She wrote her car off on the way back from her interview 3 months ago, and then did the same to the replacement a few weeks later by slamming into the back of a queue of stationary traffic on the A1 exit slip.

With my playing that might be just as well!

...let's fire up the W*nk-o-Meter and see what today scores: This morning started with four of us on a conference call for two hours with an awkward client who wants us to repeat £56k of lab studies free of charge because they don't like the results. There is nothing wrong with the studies whatsoever, they just want us to show that their product performs better than it does. Much unhappiness when I refused. Then an email from another client saying they don't require the £30k of studies we quoted for yesterday after all, as they have decided not to change the product specification. Then confirmation from one of my colleagues that we haven't got the £250k project we tendered for, on the basis that the client thinks we're too small a company (22 people and counting) to handle US work. The fact that we have been successfully handling US work on behalf of all their competitors for over ten years apparently passed them by. Mid-afternoon I got an email from a client who got right up my nose with his shitty attitude, and I was just composing one of my special email replies (toxicity level 7) when there was a massive bang like a bomb going off from one of the labs downstairs. I shot down there to find that an autoclave (basically an industrial pressure cooker) had exploded and blown the lid clean off the pressure vessel, ejecting molten agar and glass into the air. One of our lab staff, who had been standing next to it at the time, was curled on the floor, covering her face and screaming in agony, and I instantly went into full-on first-aid mode whilst an ambulance was summoned. Unfortunately the word 'explosion' seems to get emergency service despatchers quite excited, and the air ambulance was touching down on our car park in under five minutes with an ambulance and paramedic car close behind. Luckily she was suffering from little more than shock and an acute attack of mard-arse, and just had two tiny superficial blisters on her cheek. My wife accompanied her to hospital in the ambulance (no ride in the helicopter, unfortunately) and has just returned with confirmation that there's nothing wrong with her. She is somewhat accident prone though, having written off two cars in the three months she's been with us. I now intend to drink an obscene quantity of pina colada, stick some cock rock on the iPod and beat the shit out of the drum kit.

I was thinking of putting on 'Squeeze Box' by The Who in the hope it encouraged her to get on with it.

...for totally inappropriate songs to play as our neighbour (who has inexplicably opted for a home birth) is currently in the latter stages of labour. I'm not saying it doesn't smart a bit, but Jesus - anyone would think she was giving birth to a donkey.

Everyone flounced. It's a ghost town now and this is all just happening in a dream I have never really existed - I'm Hoggs' alter ego. No real person would post swarfega-related sex advice.

I re-surfaced here a few weeks ago after a work-induced absence of several months, and it seems as though lots of the old guard have disappeared: Tiggie, Oasis, Mr Brightside, Mawsley, Shorty, Gautrek, Psychybikey... where'd they all go? They can't all have scarpered just 'cos Six30 was angling for the mod gig...

Love La Rochelle - the aquarium is one of our favourites! We had our best family holidays with the kids on Ile de Re, but we've not made it down there for the last couple of years.

All of the above, plus try to stay relaxed - especially with your upper body. Gripping too tightly because you feel wobbly will make you more wobbly. And trust the bike - it can go a lot slower than you think and still stay upright.

Huh-huh... huh-huh... you said 'member'...

The question I'd love my kids to be able to ask when they are older is "Can you remember what you were doing the day Cliff Richard was shot?"

I can't stand football, but if you were doing Gary Linekar's job instead of him I'd tune in to every match just for this sort of analysis!

How long have you been on here?

To be honest I was relieved when I realised it was tea - for a moment I thought something else entirely had happened. Not that there would have been much difference if I was an Earl Grey drinker...

Don't come in from work and fall asleep sitting on the sofa with a mug of tea resting on your thigh. I've just boiled my balls!

Having the responsibility for keeping a roof over other people's heads as well as my own has made me even less tolerant of bad payers. It's as though they think that the bigger they are, the more prestige attaches to their debts. "There's good news and bad news, guys. The bad news is we've gone bust because we're carrying a million pounds of debt, and so unfortunately you're all now unemployed. The good news is it's a really big company that owes us the money."

I have been running my own business for the last 11 years. Until recently there were just 11 of us based in the UK, but we have just opened new offices in Europe with nine of the top people from our biggest competitor. As well as the obvious national differences in culture, there is also a big difference in business culture. I've spent years fighting for survival against huge competitors who are several hundred times bigger than us, getting us to the point where we are now universally recognised as the global experts in our field, and doing battle with massive multinational clients who think they can push us around because they are multi-billion dollar giants. I have seen enough industry 'big guns' crash and burn when they try to set up their own companies to be completely unfazed by these people - many of whom are no more than pseudo-businessmen with grossly inflated egos. My new colleagues, on the other hand, have always had the luxury of a guaranteed pay check every month, and take a much more subservient 'customer is king' approach. Last week we had a meeting with a huge client that we had last worked for a couple of years ago, and when they asked what discount we'd offer if we were 'lucky enough' to win the contract the new guys were a bit surprised by my response: "If you give us the contract I assume it will be for one of two reasons: either we were the cheapest, in which case a discount would be unnecessary, or we were the best, in which case it would be an insult. Either way, there is no discount. Frankly, I'm astounded that you have the audacity to sit there and ask for a discount given that in my 11 years of trading yours is only the second company I have had to threaten with legal action to get my money out of: the first was a tiny three-man outfit that didn't have a pot to piss in, so you're not exactly in august company. And let me also disabuse you straight away of any notion that a small business like mine is going to beg and plead to do business with a huge multinational like yours. Overexposure to big clients who don't pay their bills is fatal to small companies, so before we talk any further about this project I need some assurances that you intend to honour your contractual obligations this time. If you do, we'll be happy to do business with you, but if not we'll be just as happy for you to take your debts to one of our competitors. And before you ask about discounts for prompt payment, we don't offer any. We work on the negative reinforcement principle: we don't reward people for paying on time, we punish them for being late. Last time we worked for you we were still chasing big invoices eight months after they were due: this time we'll pull the plug on your whole project far sooner than that, and leave you to explain why to your bosses. I don't want to appear completely intransigent though, so I am prepared to leave our late payment penalties at the same rate as last year." We got the contract.

Based on my bike history I'm not sure how to respond to this: ZZR1200 Covered in fiddly plastic trim with flimsy fasteners that broke every time you removed anything, necessitating hours of f*cking around with epoxy. Hated every minute I spent working on it. I even managed to get epoxy on my knob once - Christ knows how I managed that. ST1300A Decided not only to service it myself, but to completely overhaul it as a project. That was three years ago. Most of it is still in a bucket. Electra Glide Dead easy to service, and loved every minute of working on it. K1600GT Far too expensive and complex-looking for me to fiddle with, and I'll be buggered if I'm pissing around with all that plastic just to change spark plugs. Especially as there are six of them... Make of that what you will.