Huh? No calenders allowed in an all male space (but of course allowed in the all female place)? And what has this to do with SAFETY?

Everyday I really wonder....can it get any dumber? Apparently it can...

So men are used to this sort of thing, which is why they pose for calendars... but aren't feminists telling us that we men view women only as sexual objects?

I have got into the habit now of pointing out blatant inequality to people when I see it - then I give a chuckle and remind them "Oh yeah, it's only equality when it benefits women..."

I think I lost her about the time when I said "Where is your PPE (Personal Protective Equipment)?"
But hey, she went to University to learn her stuff, it means nothing that I'm a Line Mechanic that works on live lines up to 66,000V, if I can't keep a few pictures hidden away.
Feckless said it all though, WTF does that have to do with us guys doing our jobs in a safe and proper manner.
In the 15 years I've been with the company in question, we've never had an accident that warranted hospital treatment, which is quite an accomplishment, given the energy levels and some of the weather conditions we have to work in.

I was told though that the "Workplace assessor was under continuing evaluation so that she could do her job better in future, blah blah blah"

I hope your email made note of the blatant hypocrisy to her superiors.

is only in the office between the hours of 10am and 2pm

That figures. Elf days are as short as they are.

But don't call between 12 and 1.30 cuz that's her lunch hour.

I see this kind of thing all the time, and it makes me sick to my stomach. Of course you can't reason with these with these idiots. Logic just doesn't apply.

Take careful note: another example of useless job-creation for a useless woman who doesn't want to work but still wants to believe she is doing something important and should be paid accordingly. How many hours does MikeT have to do a real job in order to pay taxes to keep this parasite in her non-job?

And they wonder why the economy is in collapse. You have the nub of the reason right there.

Just like in the Industrial Revolution days, Little Britain leads the world in jobs for the girls.

Here is a despatch from Beelzebub Mansions:-

http://barrybeelzebub.blogspot.com/


I BET that when you bought your Lottery tickets on New Year’s Eve, you didn’t think that your hard-earned cash would be going towards paying almost £40,000 a year to a Community Space Challenge Co-ordinator in the London borough of Southwark. But it did.

That’s just one of the many non-jobs highlighted in the end of year report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and by no means the daftest.

What a Community Space Challenge Co-ordinator actually does is described as “Telling young people ‘at risk of offending’ how to use public spaces”. Quite what that entails I’m not sure, but presumably it involves wandering around the local park telling hoodies not to polish the slide with bread paper and to perhaps try not to stab each other while queuing for a go on the witch’s hat.

We should not belittle this job. Southwark is a tough patch, where even the area’s top clergyman is liable to get legless at an Irish Embassy reception, clamber into a stranger’s car and throw the owner’s children’s toys into the road shouting “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do”.

So who else is on this Roster of Nonsense? Well, there’s the £42,000-a-year Head of Participation and Inclusion at Hertfordshire County Council, whose job description seems to be “encouraging people to play musical instruments”.

What about the £37,000-a-year Head of Communities and Partnership in Charnwood, tasked with “ensuring that community issues are resolved with lasting solutions”?

And then there’s the £20,000-a-year job of Street Football Co-ordinator at Moray Council in Scotchland … err … organising and promoting street football. Actually, I quite agree with that one. I can think of no better use of public money than getting kids away from their computer screens and out into the fresh air … as long as it’s not my wall they’re kicking the ball against.

The problem with this explosion in the number of State apparatchiks is that public sector workers used to be rewarded with generous pensions for all their years of lowly-paid toil for the benefit of others. But no more. The average public sector worker was paid £21,413 in 2008, more than those on the private sector average of £20,715.

Furthermore, despite the economic implosion engulfing us all, their jobs are still regarded as much more secure than those of the rest of us. It’s the Turkey Army principle, where NuLabour must create safe jobs for the people most likely to vote for them next time around.

The place to see this obscene snout-in-the-troughery to full effect is in the jobs section of Wednesday’s Guardian. There, despite the recession and jobs losses already in the thousands, the number of public sector posts up for grabs has increased by 14,000 in the past three months. In the past three months. Something to think about when your new council tax bill drops through your letter box this week.

By the way, Mike, you didn't mention if the 'Elf 'n Safety Arsewipe looked at your light bulbs.

In Oz we are phasing out the sound and effective incandescent ones for highly dangerous - but 'Green' - mercury filled ones.

Barry has a few words of wit on that too.

Through a glass, darkly


SO I turn on the television and there’s a middle aged man in sensible shoes standing on his patio saying: “Just remember - an anagram of ‘garden’ is ‘danger’.” He then goes on to demonstrate how plant-supporting canes can be lethal if you are stupid enough to bend down and ram your eye onto one. What a prat.

This was Channel 4’s documentary about the people who work in our burgeoning Health and Safety industry – a special breed who tiptoe through life as if every manhole cover was a land mine. Step on a crack and you lose a leg. As you might imagine, five minutes in and I’m already frothing at the mouth. I was just about to get up to go and run around the kitchen while holding a pair of scissors when ‘pouff’ – the light bulb in the drawing room goes kaput. And that’s another thing.

Rummaging in the boot room cupboard, I can’t find any normal bulbs. All we seem to have is packet after packet of these new-fangled low-energy things, most of them given away free by supermarkets or, for some strange reason, by the Gas Board. So I stick one in, turn it on … and nothing happens. So I turn it off and turn it on again. Nothing happens. After a couple of minutes of this I give up in exasperation and go to walk away when, as if by magic, it comes on. It appears that there is some kind of time lag between you turning it on and the bulb actually illuminating. Well, that’s progress, especially if you’re standing at the top of the stairs half asleep.

And what a grim, grey, mean light it is. I’m immediately transported back to my days in Kruschev’s Soviet Union, or somewhere in Wales on a winter Sunday afternoon. Reading the newspaper is impossible; groping your way around the room is just about possible if you wear one of those head-torches popular with cyclists, pot-holers and midnight gardeners.

The next morning I’m off down to the hardware shop in search of good, old-fashioned, 100 watt bayonet bulbs. And that’s when I come up against the might of the European Union. The man in the brown coat behind the counter informs me that 150w bulbs have long been regarded as worse than crack cocaine while, as from the end of this year, normal 100w light bulbs will also be banned by the EU. We must all now use the energy-saving version, like it or lump it.

He then starts winking at me, in a passable impression of Ronny Barker’s Arkwright. I finally catch on and, 10 minutes later, leave the shop clutching a box of Number 3 self-tapping wood screws, a magnetic device for cleaning one’s outside windows from the inside, four bottles of Cillit Bang and, crucially, a brown paper-wrapped package containing half a dozen illicit 100w clear glass, bayonet-ended light bulbs.

I go home, draw the curtains, replace the idiot bulbs with the proper thing and then flick the switch. I’m like a junkie who’s just hit a vein; happiness floods through me as bright, white, coal-burning, carbon-unfriendly, dolphin-killing, polar bear-murdering light floods the house. I bask like a Page 3 girl on a Barbados beach.

But why should it have to be like this? As far as I can establish, the alleged ‘ban’ on proper light bulbs is merely voluntary. So why have most of our shopkeepers rolled over and given in to the iron fist of Europe?

And don’t be fooled. These environmentally-friendly bulbs are nothing of the sort. They contain mercury for a start. If you break one, you’re supposed to evacuate everyone from your home, seal up all the windows from outside, take out your dedicated ‘light bulb’ brush and dustpan, clean up the mess and then ship it in a nuclear-safe container to the nearest dedicated dump where men in chemical suits will carefully take it from you before sealing it up in a lead-lined rocket and firing it to the moon. Except you won’t. You’ll just chuck it in the bin with everything else.

And what’s the biggest argument against them? Well, they’re so dim that you’ll need twice as many bulbs to yield the same amount of light. And doesn’t that somewhat defeat the object?