grumpyf1

Who doesn't like a list? Only weirdos, right? Right..? Oh, come on. I was furloughed at the end of March. Suddenly faced with an unprecedented (*over-used word klaxon*) amount of free time (my partner was still working) and only being allowed to go out once a day, I had an amazing opportunity to fin out what it might be like to be retired. Bit rubbish, it turns out. I'm hoping that when I eventually retire I'll have more opportunities to go to places/drink coffee/mooch about in shops, but the no-plan-for-today thing is still going to be there. It takes some getting used to. I'd normally get up at six to get ready for a day in the office. Strangely, my own internal alarm clock means I'm generally staring at the ceiling and and considering a variety of randomness somewhere between 0630 and 0700: Do I need to pee, or can I carry on lying here for a while? Why does my back hurt? I. Need. Cappuccino. I wonder if I've won the lotto? Is Lotus biscuit spread the single ...

Fire? Just down there on the right... If someone more senior than you at work does or says something that you feel isn’t respectful towards you, what do you do? Point it out to them - they shouldn’t be allowed to do that? Brush it off – it happens? Sulk for a bit? Light a fire and cause £8 million of damage? The latter was exactly what Amazon employee Adris Ali did back in November. He had been working as a picker in their warehouse in Rugely for around three months. Feeling disrespected by a team leader, he set light to a pile of papers and wandered off. By the time the subsequent blaze had been successfully extinguished, £7.3m of stuff had been damaged. Add in nearly three-quarters of a million to clean up and sort the mess out afterwards, and that’s one expensive episode of feeling a bit slighted. Ali will have a bit of time to ponder the damage, and risk to life, his actions caused, during the 48 months he’s going to be spending behind bars. I’m sure he’ll get lots of r...

Once upon a time, you decided you wanted something, went to a shop, and purchased it. Soon it might be delivered by unmanned stealth aircraft. When Tim Berners-Lee got fed up with TVs not being interactive enough, he decided to hook them up to some phone wire, attach the gubbins out of a couple of digital watches, took a few visual clues from Teletext, and the next thing you know, you’re watching an entire series of The Sweeney on your tablet from the comfort of your train seat, whilst annoying other passengers. Alternatively, you might be complaining vociferously on facebook about what an absolute chore it is doing the Christmas shopping, when you have had to look at literally several websites, before adding something to your basket and clicking ‘buy’. One the biggest companies to rub its hands in glee at all of our online shopping is Amazon who, despite some questionable ethics regarding tax (non) payments, and a documentary singling them out as particularly unpleasant clock-...