30 June 2021 (Wednesday) - Rise of the Machines (Pah!)

As I wandered to the bathroom this morning I was conscious of a rather odd sound coming from the dishwasher. Usually the only sounds it makes are those of plates getting a good seeing to. Which is as it should be. There are two schools of thought when it comes to dealing with dishwashers, as expounded on the "Extreme Dishwasher Loading" Facebook page. There are those who pander to the machines, filling them with salt and rinse aid and regularly cleaning the filters and generally sucking up to the devices. And there are those who feel that the machine should know its place and do what is expected of it (or face re-programming with a mallet!)

I am firmly in the second camp. Trying to keep the dishwasher sweet is just prolonging the inevitable collapse of humanity when the machines eventually rise up. I maintain that if we rule the machines with a rod of iron they will know their place.

However, overnight the dishwasher had suffered some sort of malfunction. Five minutes with the thing in pieces soon revealed the problem. Its out-pipe was blocked absolutely solid with congealed fat. I can only assume that er indoors TM” had tried to wash half a pound of lard in it.

With fat scraped out and chucked down the toilet (let's hope that don't block up too) I set the dishwasher to the "hyper-scrub" setting with a triple dose of dishwasher tablets and left it to do its thing.

 

I watched half of an episode of "Fresh Meat" then peered into the Internet. The photo I had posted last night of my Lego piccie had got nearly ninety "likes" on Facebook.

There were a lot of comments about "it's coming home". Presumably "it" being the football trophy for which all sorts of teams are currently competing. "It" might well be coming home, but I thought better of making the observation that it is a shame that the same can't be said for shipments of fresh fruit and vegetables.

There was also a minor squabble kicking off on the Facebook page for fans of the  1970 TV show “Upstairs Downstairs” in which some people had become rather abusive toward each other – over “Upstairs Downstairs” !!! Some people go onto the internet to follow their hobby, others just go to argue… Mind you I think that for a lot of people, arguing *is* the hobby.

 

And talking of arguing about hobbies, it is no secret that I’m not a fan of keeping geocaches going for ever, but there is one just round the corner from home that I hid seven years ago and it is still going strong. It is a liar’s cache. In order to claim a find you have to make up a story (in your written log) making out how hard and difficult the thing was to get to. It is a good bit of silliness, quite a few people follow it, and over the years it has garnered sixty favourite points. A few years ago someone from central Europe asked if they could copy the idea. I was very happy for them to do so. To be honest it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I shamelessly blagged it from someone else. And liar’s caches are allowed for in the official rules anyway.

Yesterday someone else asked if they could use the idea. Again I had no problems with it…

This morning the first person sent me a message saying that the second person lives just a mile down the road from her, that the second person’s geocache is a load of crap, that the second person is a b*stard, and that I should tell her she can’t have a liar’s cache.

I’m tempted to say “not my circus, not my monkeys” (because it is not my circus and certainly isn’t my monkeys) but I suspect the phrase would lose a lot in translation. I shall keep quiet and hope it all blows over.

 

I set off to work. For all the talk about shortages of lorry drivers, they were out and about in full force of the motorway this morning. Is it my cynical imagination, or do they *really* slow down and bunch up in the slow lane as they pass the slip roads? Are they deliberately not letting cars on to the motorway? It certainly seemed that way on the M20 this morning at junctions nine, eight and seven. And since when have they been allowed to drive at fifty miles per hour in the motorway's fast lane (as they were this morning)?

 

I got to work, did that which I couldn’t avoid, and came home again. I came home to a letter from a landowner who is quite happy for me to put geocaches on his land – provided I told him exactly where I put them. I spent a little while fiddling about with maps. It struck me as odd that the chap wasn’t interested in a precise set of GPS co-ordinates or plots of locations; instead preferring a best guess hand-drawn on a pdf. 

er indoors TM” boiled up dinner, and with it scoffed I set the dishwasher going right away. It worked as it should… which is just as well for it bearing in mind that I won’t take failure from it lightly…

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