Goal Reached!

In your face deadline!

And that's how it's done people. We were lazy and unmotivated all month and we still managed to complete 10 days of work in a couple of hours. Truly a mighty example of the lazyview way of life.

I'm exhausted now. Creatively and emotionally spent. I'm going to go have a good cry.

Special congratulations go out to the Dallying Dutchman on his first post. It couldn't have come at a better time. And it's spot on too. And he didn't even both capitalizing the title. He's an inspiration to us all.

Ok, he went and edited the title. I'm going to have to take back some of the kudos.

Morning Persons

Slowly I'm turning into a morning person. That means getting up early, not enjoying getting up early. But until recently I managed to avoid getting up early. When at university I set up a rule that I would not get out of bed before it was light outside. Seventeen years later I still manage it, but the tide is turning. Only because of the summertime is it still light when I get out of bed these days, and soon it will be dark when I rise. I feel fear when I think of those days to come.

I hate alarmclocks and I hate getting out of bed. So why not go to bed earlier, you say. Because I'm lazy. I'm too lazy to go to bed. Hanging on the couch, flipping the channels, there's no stimulant that makes me get up and go to bed. I have spent many nights on the couch, sleeping in front of the tv in my clothes, just because I couldn't be arsed to go to bed. When I'm tired, I want to close my eyes and doze off, not stand up, get upstairs, brush my teeth and get into bed. Sleep has tricked me into doing all that and then have me wide awake in bed again.

But I'm a dad now, and I have to grow up, so that little screammachine can expect a normal dad when he awakens the house. All I have to do now is wait until the day when the kids tiptoe out of bed in the morning in the hope NOT to wake their parents. But even then they won't be seeing their daddy sleeping on the couch, unless of course he screwes up with mom. But there's comfort in the thought that I can handle the couch if need be.

New option in Blogger!

We can add polls to the sidebar of our blog. We should probably look at blogger's home page more often to see what functionality they've added. They don't exactly make it hard. Still, we really are that lazy. The topic for our first poll is an easy one, which one of our regular contributors is the laziest? For info, the number of posts per poster since we started

1. Drek - 1
   
2. DV - 9
3. Mike - 14
   

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be an astronaut. Why? Well, this is why.

This supports my long standing theory that we can all do our jobs a little drunk or hungover. Some of us, like airline pilots, try to do our jobs as drunk as possible.As a matter of fact, I might argue that I didn't become an astronaut because I didn't think I could be as drunk as I wanted to be. Instead I chose a useless job where I would be just another cog in the machine. A faceless desk jockey riding his empty career into oblivion.

Now maybe I can dare to dream again. Maybe I can still fulfill my life's ambition...To drink myself to death on the moon. Whatever happens, I make this solemn promise to you, good people of the internet: I will drink myself to death somewhere. And there will probably be a moon involved somehow, because I'm betting my pants will be around my ankles when it happens.

Random Fact that you may not have known about me

I'm right footed. I can use my left foot, but it lacks the power of my right foot. It is however nicely accurate and able to provide a somewhat useful cross.

Need a word for your new Superstring Theory? Use the Simpsons

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS REFERENCES TO VERY HARD PHYSICS I'LL DUMB IT DOWN BUT IT COULD HURT YOUR BRAIN

Shamit Kachru, a Stanford University physicist needed a word to describe how one type of superstring changed into another type so he decided to use the word "embiggens" which was first used in the Simpsons episode about Jebidiah Springfield in the following passage:

Jebediah: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield
Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Very Hard Physics is always discovering things that it doesn't have words for and it's very good at just picking something arbitrary. Quantum particles have properties called things like Charm and Colour for things that are barely understandable and most likely just made up to get research grants. I actually did a Physics degree... well, when I say I did it, I sometimes attended the place where the degree happened and barely scraped through with a drinkers degree in the end, anyway, the opening sentence of our opening Quantum Physics lecture was "nobody understands Quantum Physics" so I gave up trying. Anyway, stealing a term from The Simpsons is very clearly in the LazyView spirit so we salute you Shamit.

If you want to read the story about what kind of strings embiggen into what other types of strings then you can read the full story here, but see the big red warning above first.

Trumpton

If you really want to succeed, you’ll have to go for it every day like I do. The big time isn’t for slackers. Keep up your mental stamina and remain curious. I think that bored people are unintelligent people. Donald Trump

Or instead of working yourself into an early heart attack through, you could just play a bit of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training on your Nintendo DS and drink yourself into an early grave instead? Maybe bored people are actually the intelligent ones because they can operate successfully using only a fraction of their brain power? I mean, when it comes down to it, what have you ever actually achieved Mr Trump? On the other hand, I'm not really interested in the big time, so maybe he's right.

The Kevin Harrington Award for Post of the Week

As part of today's spam train it's time once again to throw a delicious bone to the masses and give out the prestigious Kevin Harrington Award. As many of you know, Kevin Harrington was a great patron of the arts, and a big supporter of this site. He was tragically killed in a zipper accident in a pub bathroom late one Friday night.

Thanks to what I'm sure is some continuing internet difficulties among our legion of loyal readers, comments remain few and far between. So I've had to go way back to 11 days ago to find this breathtaking, and award winning comment. So here it is, with no more ado, the winner of Kevin Harrington Award is.......Pee! PEE PEE PEE PEE! PEE! That's right. I'm 9, so pee is hilarious to me. Pee shocked the world with his breathtaking insight into the human condition in this electronic missive.

Congratulations Pee! May you always pee pee pee PEE PEE!

Deadline Day

We set an unofficial target with LazyView that we'd try and do as many posts in a month as there are days. Not one a day, you understand, but enough so that the little archive thing that tells you how many posts there were has at least as many as there were days in the month. Currently we are on 22 for July. This one will make 23, we've known that we were about 10 posts behind for most of the month but, being lazy, we couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. Now it's the last day and we've got to do another 8 after this one to hit our quota. Don't worry because as Lazy experts we're great at leaving everything to the last minute and then somehow getting it all done.

Lazy DIY

Why didn't anyone warn me? The literally endless list of minor tasks on the house is getting longer every day. My gf's parents are coming for the weekend so we've had to build an entire spare bedroom's worth of very cheap Chinese pine furniture from Argos. My view was that when they arrived we should present them with the flat pack and say, "there's your bed" but apparently that wasn't on, even though I'm sure they'd be more than happy to help and it'd give them something useful to do.

Having built the cheap Chinese pine furniture from Argos at the weekend we're now in the process of varnishing it. We're using extremely environmentally unfriendly quick drying plastic varnish because it's the easiest. Spending time varnishing seems justifiable because it should mean that we don't need to buy (and assemble) any more cheap Chinese pine furniture from Argos for longer than if we left it as untreated wood. It turns out that varnishing furniture takes way longer than painting the equivalent area of wall because of all the little fiddly bits. Very annoying. Maybe next time we'll buy the slightly more expensive Chinese furniture that's pre varnished. Curse the fact that getting more money to spend on the slightly more expensive Chinese furniture would involve working harder. Or is there another way to do this? Possibly involving some kind of CFC based spray gun, the garden and killing all the grass other than a bed shaped shadow?

As predicted I've become a home maintenance bore, and I've only been in the house for 10 days. Bugger.

Story Time

Today I'm going to tell you all a little story. It's an adventurous tale starring a hunky hero of the people. A man's man named D. That's right, I'm the hero! This harrowing tale starts as so many of my tales do, me drinking with my two pals Fathead and Joe the Jew. Don't worry, he's just cheap. He's not actually Jewish so I'm not being offensive. Or is that more offensive? I don't care, you're all assholes anyway.

So, it's my birthday earlier this very year. My gang and I are drinking and we decide to go down to a bar/club called the Longbranch. As some of you might guess this place is known to bring in the redneck clientele. We had a non-redneck purpose for going there, even though Joe the Jew is a bit of a redneck. We're going because a band is playing there called Chairman of the Board. And wherever they play, the women are sure to flock. So we drive 20 minutes down to the 'Branch and go inside and begin the heavy drinking (heavy drinking is classified as no fewer than 3 drinks of any kind in a 1 hour period). Apparently my reputation as a world renowned ladies man had preceded me, and no women will talk to me. They will look at me scornfully and occasionally with pity, but alas I am left in the cold with only my sweet, precious alcohol and my burning rage to comfort me. It's hard out here for a pimp. And for fat, ugly losers like me. So after about 3 hours of looking like a fool and drinking heavily the band finished up and we left. At this point we had 2 problems. #1) We were far too drunk to drive. And #2) We were hungry.

To remedy #2 we did the manly thing and went hunting! No, not the redneck hunting. The walk across the street hunting for Taco Bell or something suitably gross for late night consumption. So we're crossing the street and for some reason the need arises to run across the 5 lane road blocking our path. I break into my breathtakingly agile and graceful stride. Gliding across the road like a overweight gazelle with 2 bad knees and a severely inebriated equilibrium. Upon reaching the other side we continue manfully striding down the road until I reach for my hip, and I feel something missing! Is it my keys? My weed stash? Am I trying to cop a feel off myself to replace the action I missed out on? No. It's my cellphone. It's gone! Where could it be? Did I drop it inside the 'Branch? If so, I'm fucked. That thing is gone and the bar is closed. Is it in the grass between the bar and road? Maybe, but how the hell am I going to find it in a big field in the middle of the night?

"Shit," I say to my two comrades. "I lost my fucking phone. I have to go back and look for it." They don't care because they're my friends and, like most people, they don't like me very much. So I begin retracing my steps. I recross the road and begin looking in the grass on the side of this shockingly busy for 3am road.

Suddenly, my spider sense begins tingling. Yes, I do have to piss I tell myself, but we can't stop the search......As my head cranes up, back across the road to my intrepid brothers of the beer, a green car goes racing by....What's that I see there in the road? Is that...could it be? It's a small black rectangle. It sure looks like it might....*SMCRASH* is the sound the green car makes rolling over the black rectangle. The tiny shape flies up into the air and comes flopping back down to earth. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!" Is my cry as I run out into the street to confirm my fears. Yes. It was my phone. Happy fucking birthday to me. I collect the pieces of my phone and walk, dejectedly, to a bench where an overly pleased Fathead and the Jew laugh until they can laugh no more.

We call a cab, not using my phone obviously, and as we sit on the bench I work on my phone. The cab arrives and Joe the Jew forces the Congolese driver to take us through a McDonald's drive-thru. Hearty laughter is all my faithful friends can muster as support while I attempt repairs. I am not hungry. But as we roll down the road, a flicker of hope dimly glows on this dreary night. The phone powers up. Will it work? Yes, it will. And it still works to this day.

Cyborg!

"Imagine a jetline with a pilot that never makes a mistake, never gets tired, never shows up to work with a hangover." Dyson, Terminator 2

I just watched a BBC report about a soldier back from Iraq has just been fitted with the world's first commercial bionic arm. If we can't have fully automated robot slaves doing all the stuff we want to then isn't the next best thing being a cyborg? You'll be stronger, faster, have no lactic acid build up in your muscles when you're doing stuff. Brilliant. I'm sure sooner or later they'll develop internal organs that can process the alcohol out of your body so you don't get a hangover either. That might be a long way off but if it is then at least watching that film you can learn the soldier's pin code so if you steal his wallet you can get all his cash. Woo!

Harry Potter and the Amazon Cock-up

This is a cautionary tale, about the problems you can cause yourself if you don't correctly follow the fundamental principles of laziness, as I recently didn't. I, like 11 million other people in the UK, wanted to get the new Harry Potter book the day it came out. I was generally feeling a bit sorry for the poor post men and women of Great Britain so I thought I'd just pop to a shop on Saturday morning to pick a copy up. Then I got lazy and thought, we'll be in the new house, I'll just order it from Amazon and have them deliver it then I don't need to go out. So I did that. On Saturday, it didn't come. Grr. Annoying. On Monday I went to the website and they had a big notice on the website about Harry Potter saying "almost all copies should have been delivered now, if not click here" so I did what they said and filled out a "where's my stuff?" form. Yes, I mistook a standard "do nothing" situation for a "a little bit of work will be better in the long run" situation. The latter really is the exception not the rule. Stupid me!

It turns out a 'we tried to deliver this but you weren't in' notice was pushed through my door on Monday afternoon, after I'd submitted the Where's my stuff? form. Ok no problem... I hadn't heard back from Amazon anyway. Just forget the whole thing.

Then today I go to Amazon and order something else only to find out that I've got an £8.99 gift certificate applied to my account. Huh? OK how do I contact them to tell them it arrived... er... hunt through their 'help' menus trying to find something useful. Eventually find a "refund information" auto e-mail thing and send off a message saying that they'd incorrectly applied the refund as it arrived in the end. I almost immediately got a reply saying they were very sorry and the refund had been applied incorrectly and they'd fixed it, but it had been redeemed against my new order.

So now, I have to jump through hoops to give them their money back... or I could do what I should have done in the first place and 'do nothing' until they sort it out. Hmm.

And the real sting in the tail? My girlfriend popped to our local Co-Op on Saturday to get some shopping and said "They had Harry Potter in there, I could just have got you one but seems a waste if you have one ordered." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

New Deal for Washing Up

So, the new house has no dishwasher and my laziness when it comes to washing dishes is a well acknowledged fact between myself and my girlfriend. In order to prevent her getting so annoyed with having to do all the washing up that she actually explodes I susggested we should work out an arrangement in advance. Otherwise I'd just weedle out of doing the washing up all the time.

A short debate later we decided that she hates drying up, but doesn't mind washing, I'm the other way round so every night after dinner we'd do all the washing up and she'd wash up and I'd dry. Fine. We're just about a week into the new house, new deal and it's apparent that this system is even more brilliant than I could have anticpated. The first thing I hadn't thought of is that I only need to dry stuff that won't fit in the drying rack. Once we get the washing up down to a level where the rest will fit in, I can stop, it gets better though. I've also discovered that on quite a lot of days, there's not even enough stuff that needs washing to fill the drying rack. So I don't have to do anything! The down side is that I suspect that the division of labour is so unfair that the New Deal will come under review fairly shortly. Probably as soon as she reads this blog. D'oh!

Actually, considering all the non dishwasher safe stuff we have and the general crapness of our old dishwasher we're not missing it at all and we're saving the world by using less energy. On the downside, even if we had one we could no longer theoretically poach a large whole salmon in a dishwasher, anyone got a large fish kettle?

10 things I learnt moving house...

1. If Britain's about to have the biggest rain storms and most extensive flooding for 50 years, move at least the day before.

2. If you are moving a very short distance and choose to do a deal where you pay your removal people by the half hour, it could well end up being much cheaper (1/3 the cost of our best fixed price quote in our case) but you'll end up helping them move boxes etc. to speed things up and save money. If you are an overweight desk jockey, this could be v. tiring. Especially if the day before Britain's biggest rain storms and flooding for 50 years is a really hot sticky day.

3. Packing is really hard work. Do a little bit each day in advance (but don't tell my girlfriend she was right about that). Even though we'd done quite a lot before we had our packing day it took us a solid day of hard labour. On the plus side apparently you can pay people to pack your stuff for you.

4. Be organised.

5. Have a little bag to take with you with easy to eat food and drink for when you get hungry.

6. Have some kind of chairs (eg. comfy camping chairs) handy to sit on to eat the above / have a rest.

7. If you are going to pack the tea/coffee and kettle in a very sensibly labeled box so that you can easily make a nice cup of tea when you get to your new house, it'd really help if you put some mugs or cups in the box, it seems my girlfriend forgot that they are an essential part of hot beverage making.

8. Keep all the packing materials and tape unpacked until the end in case boxes start falling apart. "Oh, the rest of it is in one of those boxes on the truck" is not a useful thing to hear when a box starts collapsing.

9. Keep all your tools, alan keys etc. handy. This was invaluable when we had to disassemble stuff at the last minute to fit it in the truck.

10. When you own your own house you instantly gain a never ending list of DIY projects.

Conclusion:

The only lazy solution to moving house really is never to do it, ever.

Random thought that occured to me at lunch

You know what's really funny? At least to me. Fat people in hurry. It's funny on two levels.

First, it's funny to see fat people waddling around with their tubby legs working overtime to cover distances at more than 1.2 miles per hour. All the while blubber jiggles and sways to and fro with all the rhythmic grace of a whale having a siezure.

The second level is more of a metaphysical level of humor. If that's even the right word. It probably isn't so I'll just throw out another word I don't really know the meaning of: Existential. Yeah, that shit is so existential zombie Voltaire just crapped his pants with excitment. Where was I? Ah yes. Staying with today's nautical theme, seeing a fat person in a hurry (when they're not eating) is truly like seeing a fish out of water. Chances are, if you're a fat bastard, you're probably pretty lazy. So what the hell are you doing in a hurry? Take your time. No need to get sweaty(er). Everyone will understand why you're late and why you have ketchup on your shirt. Pants. And socks. It's because you're fat. You've got a Be Lazy for Free card. Use it well. Take some strain off your overworked heart and be the lazy bastard that got you to your current hefty place in life.

Oh I remember now. That's right. It's glandular. Sure it is. And I'm a world renowned ladies man.

Being a little less lazy so you can be lazier in the future

We often get comments from some of our thousands of readers complaining that we're not truly lazy because we have been known to apply effort at certain times. Because our readers, and especially our commentators, are mentally challenged they never listen to one of the most important points of the lazy way of life.

Again I will reiterate this point. Sometimes you have to be a little less lazy now in order to get maximum laziness later. It's not always easy to identify these situations, so when I experience them in my own life, I will post them here in order to enlighten you, the unwashed masses.

I ran into one of these situations tonight at dinner. I had just gotten home with my takeout (LAZY FTW!) and was preparing to sit down and eat. ALAS! I had no place to put my plate on the coffee table because my plate from last night was still there! OH DEAR GOD! After a long day all I wanted to do was sit down and stuff my fat face with some cheap, low grade Chinese food. But no, I had to clean up from last night. If only I had applied a little effort last night when I had plenty of time, my life tonight would have been so much better. Instead, I broke 2 plates and punched my neighbor in the face for ringing my doorbell.

Remember, being a little less lazy now could pay off big in the future if you play your cards right.

Going to the lake?

Maybe on one of these nice summers weekends you might fancy a nice trip down to a local lake or river to do a bit of boating. Normally you'd have to pay for somewhere to store your boat by the lake or hitch up your speedboat trailer to the back of your SUV. No longer, for some bright spark has solved this by creating the Humdinga, a combination Hummer and speedboat that can do 100mph out of the water and 40mph on water. Awesome, and probably really good for the environment too, because you don't have to manufacture both a boat and a car.

Pizza prices set to rocket?

One of the most convenient of home delivery foods, the wonderous pizza, could be about to see prices rise rapidly. According to yesterday's Observer there's a global dairy shortage that is causing cheese prices to rise rapidly and cheese makes up 40% of the cost of a pizza. According to the article in the US a pound of Mozarella has gone from $1.25 wholesale to $4!

This combined with a global rise in the price of wheat means that we could soon be seeing fairly hefty price hikes on our pizzas. Boo.

I might have discovered the ideal job.

I think I will become Prime Minister. You might think initially that it's a difficult job, and probably not one that's suited to a lazy lifestyle but today I read this story about Tony Blair. Imagine having got through the last 10 years without using a mobile phone or ever having to stop at traffic lights? I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. He probably never had to cook for himself, in fact he was probably waited on hand and foot. He also probably had assistants to do the kind of tedious admin and accounting that I'm currently having to do buying this house. He never had to book his own flights anywhere. He works from home in 10 Downing St. There's plenty of free foreign travel. The pay is really good. All you have to do is convincingly lie to a few million people to get them to vote for you, make a few decisions now and again and sit back and enjoy the ride.

Obviously it'd be even better to be royalty, but you have to be born into that and my ancestry stretches back to some Irish guys who's only claim to fame was dying in drunken accidents.

Our new recruit's first blog, status update.

So, I was asking our new recruit Drekkus if/when he was going to blog. He said he is preparing a really brilliant post about the art of laziness. At the moment he's doing some fundamental research but he feels he can't really complete his post because he needs a book, Catch 22, which he has leant to a friend and is too lazy to go and get. He then suggested that he could post a pre-entry letting our blog readers know that. And then he asked me to post it for him. So here it is.

We are in the presence of a master.

Brilliant Idea

I'm an idea man. I like to think up stuff. Partly because thinking of stuff is easier, and lazier, than actually doing stuff but mostly because I'm really not good at doing anything. Those who can't do, teach. And those who hate people can't teach so they get drunk and think shit up.

I also like bizarrely awesome animals with strange powers, huge teeth, odd looks, and/or a penchant for human flesh.

I have combined these two "likes" of mine into another brillant idea. Potentially the greatest cartoon in the history of mankind and potentially martian kind. I wish to combine a Honey Badger and a Pistol Shrimp into the greatest superhero duo of all time. I haven't really worked out all the details like names, designs, or powers and abilities but I'm sure it can't fail. I'm fairly certain the Pistol Shrimp will ride the Badger into battle and dismount with some Matrix-like manouver blasting away enemies with his Powerful Pistol of Pistoliness.

However, as I said, I'm really useless at actually doing anything, so if anyone out there is not lazy and wants to draw, or contribute ideas, to this world changing idea go ahead and leave a comment. If you do not want to do so, you can ride off straight to hell in this fine little handbasket I've put together for you.

Yes... I am too lazy to blog

Or I haven't got anything to talk about. I know you are probably on the edge of your seats wondering what the outcome of some of my earlier blogs were so here you go: We decided not to paint the bedroom (woo) and I still haven't started packing.

I need something almost effortless to make for dinner because I really can't be bothered too cook and my girlfriend is going out swimming. Suggestions in comments please. If it happens to be made out of generic store cupboard stuff so I don't need to shop, even better.

Our New Recruit

Our new recruit is apparently so lazy, he's made us even lazier. This could be a problem. If I get any lazier, my heart just may give up. Either that or the bacon grease will bring it down.

Maybe we should fire him?

Introducing LazyView's latest recruit

We at Lazy View have worked tirelessly to scour the world* for the greatest lazy talent available and have been lucky enough to secure the services of one of the world's laziest men to contribute to this blog. A man who, even if he's sitting at his own computer hooked into the internet will phone a friend to google something for him. A man who would rather e-mail someone else photographs to put online than try and find the e-mail that has the password for his free webspace. His comment won the inaugral Lazy View Kevin Harrington award for post of the week, which he posted as Anonymous because he was too lazy to log in or leave a name. So without further ado we would like you all to welcome the Dallying Dutchman himself, Drekkus!

Obviously the chances of him actually contributing anything very regular to the blog is very slim. I suspect that even if he can muster the effort needed to blog about anything he'll try giving a friend the password to his google account and dictate his entries over the phone to them rather than posting anything himself.

*ie. drunkenly chatted to people we already know

I have transcended ordering

We've blogged in the past about the proper way to order food and about the process of becoming a regular. Now the subject must be revisited as I have crossed the threshold into a new phase of human laziness. My powers of laziness have reached their pinnacle. I am the Kwisatz Haderach of laziness. I'm also a giant nerd for referencing that in my blog.

So what happened to me today that led to my ascension? Well, it happened like this: I'm calling in to a local restaurant to get some take out for lunch. Now, I've called in to this restaurant a bunch of times, but this is the first time I've called in in about 3 weeks. So I start placing my order in my usual efficient fashion when the guy on the phone interrupts me and says, "Is this that motha fuckin' pimp, gangsta D?" I replied in the affirmative and the guy says, "See you when you get here."

That's right they recognized my voice. Over the telephone. After 3+ weeks of not going to this place. And they hooked up my order, even remembering the way to cook the meat. I'm at or at the very least, incredibly close to the pinnacle of lazy ordering. I don't know how I could have applied less effort for lunch today. The number of the restaurant is stored in my phone and I didn't even have to finish speaking to put my order in. I guess they could have delivered it too, but it was actually nice to get out of my crap hole office and scream at the shitty drivers on the road.

I guess there's only one thing left to try for a living god....Next time I'll try ordering telepathically.

Good Work Fantasy Premierleague!

Today is the opening day of the new Fantasy Premierleague online fantasy football season. They have made some excellent improvements, including the fact that this year, for the first time in about 5 years that I've been playing it, it remembers what private leagues you were in last season. This means you can log in, pick your team, reactivate any leagues you were the Administrator for in the past and then everyone who was in your league before gets added to your league again without doing any work whatsoever. There's no need to e-mail invites, send round the league joining code etc. Good work!

Delivery

We just had a printer delivered to work. One of those big freestanding ones. It came delivered on a truck without a tail lift, driven by 1 guy. This thing came in a box that filled a pallet and was 5 feet high. It took 6 of us to lift the thing off the truck, there was no chance the driver would ever have been able to do it on his own without a forklift truck. We're only a small company and a lot of days there wouldn't be that many people here. As it was there was a mention that we might have to send it back for redelivery because we weren't sure it was safe to lift off. It's not the driver's fault, I'm not sure exactly how companies expect a single person with no tail loading truck to deliver something like this. Of course, inside the big box were loads of smaller boxes so they could have solved the problem by just sending 6 packages on the same truck, or if we'd known before we opened the big box we could have just unpacked it on the truck.

A guy I work with had a similar problem with a dining table and chairs he ordered. The delivery guy turned up to deliver the table, again just one guy on his own in a truck, to where my co-worker's heavily pregnant wife was waiting to let him into the house. Of course, one driver and a heavily pregnant woman can't take a big table off a truck and into a house so the table went back to the depot. When you order something, and get it delivered, especially when you pay to get it delivered, shouldn't the delivery company send enough people to do the job? Or at least have a tail lift and a truck with wheels on to move heavy objects. It's probably all down to the consumer's drive to get the cheapest price possible, but it is very annoying that you need to ensure you have strong able bodied people available to receive a delivery.

My tip for delivery companies: If it takes a fork lift truck to get something onto the truck, you are quite obviously going to need the equivalent at the far end to unload it.

The Kevin Harrington Award for Post of The Week

Judging by my watch, it's that random time of the week to once again award the prestigious Kevin Harrington Award. As many of you know, this award was named for the great Kevin Harrington who died in a tragic steamroller accident at the blowup doll factory where he worked nights to support his crack habit. We miss you Kevin. This rock is for you!

Now for the award. Once again, it was slim pickings this week thanks to a general malaise among our legions of readers. As a lazy bastard I can only support this malaise, but as a content generator it makes me have to work harder so I also condemn it

Luckily, one comment stood out above all the others. This week's winner for Post of the Week goes to........chililady in this blog by DJ Magic Mike.

This comment rules for several reasons. #1) Because it got a link to our blog posted on another blog. #2) Because it was a comment by someone other than Mikey Mouse or I. And most importantly #)3 Because, at the time, it led directly to pictures of a girl in a bikini. It did lose points for mistakenly identifying Mike and Ike as cool, however.

In any case, congratulations chililady! Hopefully this award will be your springboard to fame and fortune. Although I'm somewhat doubtful you'll ever read this.

New House

I am currently in posession of 2 homes. The flat we are renting and living in and the house we have bought, but haven't moved into yet. (No, I still haven't done any packing). This gives us the opportunity to do stuff with the new house, like decorate, before we move in. We had said that we didn't need to do any decorating type stuff before we moved in, the kitchen and bathroom are newly done, everything's nicely painted etc. Unfortunately, as predicted by absolutely everyone we spoke to, as soon as we actually got the house we started thinking about little tweaks we wanted to make. I should have known better really. I have seen many of my friends change when they buy a house. Their conversation instantaneously changes from nights out, music, films, girls, boys etc. to paint, conversions, extensions, gardening, furniture and even frikking curtains overnight. At our flatwarming party when we moved into the flat I had 5 seperate conversations with homeowners about how convenient it was that we had laminate flooring because it was so easy to keep clean. In fact, one memorable conversation went something like this...

Friend's wife: "If it was up to me we'd have it on the floor, all four walls and the ceiling".
Friend: "I don't think that'd look very good..."
Friend's wife: "Well you can fucking clean it then."

Some of my friends have even transitioned to the next phase, talking about vomit, sleepless nights, nappies, nurseries and other baby related nonsense. I always vowed it'd never happen to me but here I am blogging about the colour of our new bedroom, and yesterday I had a disagreement with my girlfriend about loft conversions. I hang my head in shame.

Right, so what was the point of this? Oh yeah, the master bedroom in the new house is currently blue (girls may say it is turquoise) which I reckon might feel a bit cold for a bedroom, so I kinda want to paint it. Painting is easy, if you've got a roller and decent paint, it doesn't take very long at all couple of hours per coat for that room I guess. So, I mentioned this yesterday and now my girlfriend has offered to go and get some paint this weekend so that we can paint the room next week even though she's perfectly happy with the current blue/turquoise. I am now in a bit of a quandry, I definitely would like it painted, it'd be much, much easier to do it before we move all our stuff in but I'm really not sure if I can be bothered to spend 2 evenings next week painting. I suspect my gf will be exasperated (again). Anyone got any idea tips for getting this done quicker?

I have been talking to Danny about our posts here and we've decided to widen the remit a bit. Our strict interpretation of the 'lazyview' has been too restrictive.

Business Class

Yesterday my girlfriend and I had one of those situations where you find that making a small amount of effort in the short term pays off massively in the long term. We set off for Heathrow Airport at a ridiculously early time in the morning for our 7:50am flight to Rotterdam. Shortly before it was supposed to take off they announced that our plane had been grounded due to a technical fault and KLM were going to have to send out a team of engineers from Amsterdam to fix it. As you can imagine, this didn't mean it was going to be a quick job. The guy who told us the flight was grounded said we should go to the KLM service desk where they'd try and re-book us onto another flight possibly to Amsterdam, but he said it didn't look good because all the flights to Amsterdam were already fully booked. I didn't need to be told twice, this was one of those clear situations were a very small amount of effort was going to pay off immensely. I wasn't wrong.

We rushed recklessly through terminal 4 to the KLM service desk, opposite gate 19 where a KLM flight to Amsterdam was boarding. There were a few business class passengers already being seen but we were at the front of the queue for normal passengers off our canceled flight. WOO! They started to trickle in behind us as we stood slightly flustered but happy at the front of the queue. The flustered attendants tried their best to find business class passengers and gold and platinum card holders to board onto the flight to Amsterdam. There were only 4 seats going. They couldn't find any business class passengers and eventually the attendant who looked fed up of being harassed by the back of the queue turned to us, standing patiently at the front of the queue, and booked us on the Amsterdam flight that was boarding behind us. WOO!

I didn't realise until we actually got on the plane that we were now going to be sitting in business class. I sat down, had a nice glass of water (in a glass, of course) and assured the stewardess that a Financial Times would be fine as they'd run out of Herald Tribunes. Our breakfast snack was a very nice selection of cheese on a fig compote with a freshly baked bread roll and fruit and rice pudding for desert. As it was still before 10am at this point I did not abuse the free booze. That said, as nice as Business Class is, and as much as I enjoyed it, it's certainly not worth the money on a 40 minute flight.

Once we landed in Amsterdam we got a train to Rotterdam (one happened to be waiting exactly as we got to the platform) and we arrived in Rotterdam a mere one and a half hours late. I am very sorry to the people behind us in the queue who didn't get on the flight we got on, and who apparently had also had their flight to London from Rotterdam on Friday canceled, but not that sorry.