h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You could try

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We've got loads of whistles. They turn up in the oddest places. My husband's not a sports teacher, but he has one for class outings I think, just to call order if necessary.

Just buy a handful of Kinder eggs. There's always a whistle in some of those (though you could be unlucky and end up with half a dozen pea-shooters )

Who would have thought you lot would be such a fount of knowledge about whistles?

PH: Slugs and snails that unseen and go for my seedlings

Scare them away with your whistle!

Sainsburys has them in big multipacks for not much money intended for kids party bags, presuambly bought by people who hate their kid's friends' parents.

PHoTD - my phone has decided it doesn't want to do caller ID any more - am having to learn everybody's phone numbers again. Hadn't realised how much I rely on it!

Automatic updates to programmes which change the programme and delete settings. Worse still, they simply chuck out useful bits of programme which I use daily (quote from IT chappie who seems to spend his whole time just fiddling with programs, but never using them: -"what do you want to do that for"?)

The latest is our new telephone system. The things that an office worker has to do dozens of times a day (speed-dial, put calls through to another desk) are much more complicated and non-intuitive on our brand new telephone system than on the old "out-dated" one.

Badly thought out user manuals...

In my last job the phone manual kept referring to blue and green buttons, but they weren't blue and green on the phone itself, just in the manual. It even had a paragraph explaining that the physical buttons were not blue and green, and how to identify which buttons they actually were.

I just had to install our new franking machine and one of the steps told me I should now install the headset. After pondering for a few minutes on why a franking machine would need a headset, I looked at the accompanying quick-start guide and all became clear when I saw a picture of the ink cartridge beside the instruction to install headset. So the headset is the ink cartridge. OK then.

Deb

Deb, that´s par for the course when the eejit translating the manual doesn´t have a clue about engineerese in either language. Some 40 years after my first Japanese motorsickle I still haven´t found out where the ing thing had an "air cow".

My first Japanese motor cycle used to HANDLE like an air cow!

PP

Shared misery, my friend. My second one was a Mach III - you gave it some wellie and the chain pulled the rear wheel out of alignment. Interesting, to say the least.

PH: finding a dry cleaning receipt and not being able to remember whether you've already collected whatever it was you left in, and what it was anyways....

PH: People moaning about a little bit of forecast rain, when we've just had a completely cloudless fortnight. Whaddaya want, a desert?

Depends what's on the trolley - got any profiteroles?

Oh sorry, DESERT!

Profiteroles, eh? Do they have to be good-carb ones?

Extremely well-behaved carbs, they must be!

(Oh dear, Yoda I appear to have become. May 4th be with you)

KB, we have bloody forest fires all over the place in N. Ireland now. S’pose it’s too much to hope they’ll wipe out the government but it should be on its way out anyways.

PH: when I download stuff. Argh. I had set downloaded stuff to automatically go into the Downloads folder so I could download whatever and sort through it when I have time. Now it does not, it just goes into some obscure folder buried under layers of whatever- I have to click “show containing folder” to find it. Does anyone know how I can set this right?

I use Windows Vista and recently updated my AVG virus protection.

PH 2: not sleeping well and getting headaches when there is thunder in the air. I don't think the storm here has broken yet.

I can see the Mournes smoking from here, hope it does rain soon!