James D. Stallardblog

I've written extensively here and elsewhere on the job of the TA and reading back some of these articles I'm struck by the fact that it all sounds quite glam.

It isn't - much.

My current job at Mercedes-Benz World gives me responsibility for delivering the network and everything connected to it and (apparently!) most of the kit plugged into the mains too. During this difficult and highly complex phase, we are putting in network cabling, fibre runs, building a computer room and a thousand other jobs. The site is still a live building site, so I have to deal with Method Statements and Risks Analyses, as well has the rest of the plethora of Health & Safety legislation concerning construction sites.

As usual, there are a good dozen suppliers, all with different needs and all interdependent on each other and on the state of the building works at any one point.

Scary.

So, at the moment, and for the next 4 months, my so-called glamorous job involves everything from herding labourers (AKA labradors!) to their site induction meeting, to buying breakfast for the BT chaps for doing a particularly good job (really!) to coning off a hole in the floor to hopefully stop one of my team from becoming a statistic. Sometimes I get to design or even document something, but not this week.

Deep joy.

I'll remember this the next time someone asks me for advice on how to break into this job. It's not all the fun it's cracked up to be.

This job is characterised for me by many of the decisions made before I joined, which with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight were not always spot on - common in any large construction project. With this in mind, I leave you with my current, most-used phrase:

"We are where we are. Now we deal with it."

Supposedly, this is an 'A' grade answer given by a student during a University exam. I don't believe it for a second, but I am a fan of lateral thinking and this made me laugh. Enjoy:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

It follows from this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct, leaving only Heaven and thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

Entertaining stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. However:

Many religions state that proof of the existence Heaven or Hell lies in the existence of the other extreme. In other words, Heaven can only exist as the place where the souls of the good end up if there is a place (presumably equal and opposite) where the bad souls go. With this in mind, one can theorise that if Hell has indeed frozen over, then Heaven has boiled away to nothing and also ceased to accept new souls.

In which case when did this happen and where do we go from here?

It's been ages since I had a good rant. Because of my current client's impressive non-disclosure agreement, I can’t easily rant about the job, so I'll keep it in the public domain to things that irritate me about television.

Adverts are intruding evermore unpleasantly into our life.

Everyone is trying to sell us something and in more and more aggressive ways. Television adverts annoy the most because they are signifcantly louder than the program they interrupt, increasingly designed for brainless zombies and with the exception of very few are totally lacking in interest or humour. It is so bad that adverts are almost the sole reason why I bought a hard disk video recorder (PVR) - I can pause the program when the adverts come on and leave the room, allowing me to fast forward through them (in blessed silence) when I return. Even if I ever need any of their services, I will never buy a loan, car insurance or a no-win no-fee lawsuit service from anyone that doles out such crass dumbing-down of our airwaves. Furthermore, I shan't dignify their low-brow brands by mentioning the worst offenders here.

I have antispam on my email and I avoid commercial radio. I joined the telephone and mail preference lists, so why can’t I have adverts removed from my television by technology?

Actually I can, but not in this country.

The technology to screen adverts from hard disk recording equipment has been around for a while. But the licenses to receive encrypted satellite signals are owned by a company whose revenue depends on us watching those adverts. The likes of BSkyB will never grant licenses to equipment that allows us to remove the adverts entirely until they have replaced that revenue with higher price subscriptions from us.

So we're stuck and in the meantime we buy PVRs and fast forward by hand.

Interestingly, sooner or later, when the take-up of PVR's is high enough and enough of us are missing the ads, the advertisers will have to come up with a new way of getting our attention. I can only hope the new methods are as easy to avoid and less irritating.