I am slowly clearing out remnants of my old [working] life, this morning I even de-cluttered my tatty old wallet. I chucked out my much-loved Global Call card, now defunct of course. I used to credit an account with £££s and then used it whenever I was in the States, something that happened quite a lot and communication home to my boys was very important to me. I guess this was around 20 years back and cellular and VoIP or MoIP technology wasn't quite what it is today, basically you could access your account from any payphone or hotel room and call home at a reasonable cost, my account number was the telephone number to my flat in Cheltenham. Distant memories.
Before I left work I gave a large amount of technical manuals away - I was a bit of a magpie - but couldn't bear to be parted with some and brought them home. I have no idea what I'm going to do with all these Cisco manuals, they're out of date anyhow and I'm pretty sure I will have no need for them going forward. Actually, thinking about it I'm not even sure why I bothered doing all that network training in the first place, most probably because a lot (not all) of the network engineers at work were capable of making life very difficult, so it was essential that I could compete on level terms or at least have the wherewithal to spot bullshit when it came my way, which was very often.
Other books I've bought home are more worthy, including my copy of JACKSPEAK - A Guide to British Naval Slang and Usage plus of course my good old Dictionary of Russian Obscenities, of which I fondly imagine myself to be an exponent. I might even litter future blogs with extracts from JACKSPEAK, though of course they will be massively non-PC and may well result in a permanent ban and removal from many people's reading lists! Here's some crackers:
Lumpy Jumper - Descriptive term for a civilian female, in contrast to a *Jenny Wren; can also be used to describe a WRNS *wooly pully. See also *Bumpy Jumper
and of course:
Mad Dog's Vomit - Sandwich spread; also described as MDV
Well, what do you expect? It's raining and I'm bored.
