Newport Gwent and other Miscellanea

As per usual I have been out and about around this pleasant country of ours. This time I have been to Wales, land of song, an up and coming Rugby team or so I’m told and Tom Jones. There is an Old Welsh joke which goes something like:

What’s the best thing to come out of Wales?

I don’t know, what is the best thing to come out of Wales?

The M4!

Funny eh!

Anyway, I went to Wales, Newport to be exact. I have never been to Newport and drove into town, after dumping my stuff at the hotel, with a rising sense of expectation. Well I guess New port was once New but it now seems to be a little down at heel and not yet seen much of the redevelopment that’s going on in other towns. It also seems to be Chav Central. Newport must have some of the highest levels of truancy in the UK if the number of kids roaming the streets was anything to go on. They were being shadowed by large numbers of police too. Here in Plymouth one hardly sees a policeman in the city centre, they’re all off somewhere harassing asylum seekers or something, but in Newport they were roaming around in groups of two. I didn’t stay long and spent the evening reading in my hotel in case I was Happy Slapped!

But yesterday we had a team day, I’ve written about team days before, this one was great.

What we had to do was various exercises all to do with our jobs, it was meant to be a ‘fun’ day in the same way as dentists try to brighten up their rooms to make your visit to the dentist ‘fun’! Yes the Boss was there in his ‘casual’ clothes, making sure he had a word or two with everyone, making jovial quips that we all tittered to and then wished that either you or he were somewhere else.

Now the exercises, all carried out by someone from personnel, a South African women, can somebody tell me why all the trainers we use are from the Southern Hemisphere? Is it because they are lazy bastards and running a group is about one of the easiest things they can manage apart from running a bar?

Anyway the sorts of things we had to do were to ‘brainstorm’ good ideas about various aspects of the departments work, these were all stuck on the wall and we had faux prize giving for the best ideas and so on. All done in a ‘safe’ environment, where we could ‘think outside of the box’, run ‘flags up the pole’ and other bollocks.

Now this might be fun, but you know that the ideas under ‘cost cutting’ and ‘work environment’ will immediately be plagiarised by the bosses who will take the best ideas and present them as their own to their bosses, who will take the ‘fun’ ideas for cost cutting given in the ‘safe’ environment and implement them. So basically our team day out is an exercise in cutting our own throats.


A French hygiene update:
We have two French Boys staying with us, they came last night. They are about 13/14 I would guess. The left the house this morning WITHOUT washing or going to the toilet. My thesis is at last proved. The French don’t wash! I suppose however, as I am a scientist that it could just be, at the outside, maybe it’s because they are boys of 13/14 who only wash when they are told too, the world over.

Hmmm, my investigations continue…..