Sunday, November 26, 2006
Bookcase 'trap' killed US woman
Mariesa Weber, 38, is believed to have fallen over and become trapped as she tried to reach behind the bookcase to adjust the plug for a TV set.
Her family spent nearly two weeks searching for her, fearing she had been kidnapped from the house she shared with them in Florida.
Ms Weber may have died of suffocation, a local police spokesman said.
Her death was not being treated as suspicious, the spokesman said.
Ms Weber's parents last saw her alive in the family house on 28 October.
Unable to locate her after that, the family contacted the police, fearing she had been abducted.
Her body was eventually discovered when her sister noticed a foot protruding behind the bookcase in her bedroom.
"I'm sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her. And she's right in the bedroom," the woman's mother, Connie Weber, told the St Petersburg Times newspaper.
The family told the newspaper they had noticed a strange smell from her room but had blamed it on rats.
They told the paper their daughter's light weight and petite frame may have contributed to her death.
"She's a little thing," her mother reportedly said. "And the bookcase is 6ft tall and solid. And she couldn't get out."
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Doncha just love authority?
Monday, November 06, 2006
Make meetings exciting with the new and exciting Bullsh*t Bingo!
Synergy
Strategic fit
Core competencies
Turbulent environment
Out of the box
Pushback
Bottom line
Revisit
Take that off-line
24/7
Out of the loop
Benchmark
Value-added
Proactive
Bandwidth
Win-win
Think outside the box
Fast track
Results-driven
Paradigm
Empower (or empowerment)
Knowledge base
At the end of the day
Touch base
Mindset
Client focus(ed) or Customer focus(ed)
Ballpark
Game plan
Scenario
Leverage
Cascade
Sequential or sequentially
Blue-sky thinking
Get our ducks in a row
Brain dump
Think outside the box
Joined-up thinking
Drilling down
Push the envelope
The helicopter view
Low-hanging fruit
Stakeholder
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Drivers cannot leave roundabout
New traffic lights on the roundabout on the A444 have No Left Turn signs to stop drivers exiting onto entry roads. But the same signs were also put up at the correct exits meaning that once drivers were on the roundabout they could only leave by breaking the law. Coventry City Council said it was covering the signs in the short-term before their permanent removal. A council spokesman said the signs had been installed together with traffic lights as part of a road safety scheme that is not yet complete.
"The current advice on the installation of traffic signals at roundabouts does suggest that where the entry and exits are separate that No Left Turn signs are installed to advise drivers not to drive down the entry arm of the roundabout, however the advice is not always relevant.
"In response to the concerns that have been raised, the city council is proposing to cover the signs in the short term and eventually remove them."
The BBC Again
The Virtual Bonfire
Now some rugby club down in Devon applied for a licence for a public display this year. The council said that due to H&FS requirements, they would have to hire a multitude of properly certified stewards, hire two fire marshalls, keep an exclusion zone around the bonfire that was so immense no-one could feel it's heat and fill in copious amounts of paper work. So much paper-work indeed, that the rugger-buggers came up with a plan that was so cunning, it could have been thought up by a wiley fox....
They went round a mates home, had a fire there, filmed it then projected it onto a big ole screen on the night and still managed to have the fireworks. No H&FS crap or forms then...beggars believe it really does.
I'm with Boris
I live in a row of terrace houses and my neighbours and I share a driveway. Our houses are on the route from the Co-Op to the estate. As me and a neighbour happened to leave for work at the same time we spotted a bunch of flowers that looked like it had been dropped on the way home form the shops.
I suggested she take them into the house and shove them in water. Being old school, she said she'd leave them by the wall and then whoever had lost them had a chance to find them. If they were still there when she got home then she would take them in.
When she got home there wasn't her bunch of flowers...oh no...there were around 12. With cards saying 'Sorry for you loss', 'With deepest sympathy' and so on. Even though we live in the middle of a village where a thing like a road traffic accident might have been noticed, people took it upon themselves to lay flowers.
Up the road in the OAP bungalows last winter, an old dear was only found when the paperboy moaned to his boss that he couldn't get to the door for milkbottles. Is it me or the world f***ed?
Oh and with the flowers...something else happened involving the local constabulary but they came back to apologise so that's staying secret...(lol...didn't tell them PC W, you're safe!!!!)
Why oh why oh why...
Now yesterday, old-soldiers aged 70-90 had a chink in the rope of their flag-pole which meant they couldn't raise the Union Flag on Rememberence Day. The local 'grunts' at the firestation offered to come over with a ladder and sort it out....until one of their senior officers cited H&FB (Health & F***ing Safety) as a reason to not help....what if a fireman fell off the ladder. FFS. An old 84yo sergeant offered to shin up and get stuck so they'd rescue him and as your here lads...
In a well known supermarket by me, okay Tescos, some poor punter managed to drop a bottle of wine by the till. Luckily he hadn't paid for it, but it landed in it's base and so wine was spilt and glass was over the floor. Now you and me at home? We'd delicately collect the glass, we may put on gloves to do this - cos being safe is different to H&FS - pop it in a dust-pan the mop up the wine with a cloth and then clean the floor.
What did the Stripey Ninja's do? Close the till (fair enough)...the till to the left, the till to the right and moved on about 80 people trying to pay to other overcrowded tills and fenced off all three tills and had about 12 people keeping punters out of the area.
They then sent some bloke with what looked like a baby-roadsweeper down. This think is motorised but he pushes it (or does it pull him?) and it basically is supposed to Hoover the floor. A tannoy went out that due for reasons of H&FS tills 9, 10 & 11 were closed for essential maintenance. Oh and Hooverman? He went and got a dustpan, squeegy and mop & bucket. By the look on his face, he felt fencing off 100 sq feet of store for a small spillage was overkill too...
Aaaaaaaaaah!
