Fullerene

Fear? Fear of having a better life? Fear of having a job you actually enjoy? Actually I understand. I have been self employed for 19 years. Best decision I ever made. Did I know it at the time? Hell, no. A month before I resigned I had no idea I was about to go. The people I was working for were driving me crazy. Every day a different crisis. I decided if I didn't leave then I would still be talking about it a month later. The situation was NEVER going to fix it itself. I was offered a job in Aberdeen but on my way to the interview I thought "hey, I don't want to live in Aberdeen". So that is when I decided to go self-employed purely as a temporary measure until I knew what to do next. I was quite excited about the whole thing. "When I get back to Inverness, I am going to resign next week. No not next week - tomorrow". The next day I went to work, resignation letter in hand. It was the big day! Actually it wasn't. The boss wasn't in. So I tried again the next day. Actually what happened is I went to work and sat in my office for two hours staring at the letter before I found the courage to hand it to the boss. Enormous relief when I did. So suddenly I was out. Overjoyed. Relieved. Originally I planned to be self employed for 3 months until I could figure out what to do next. Then another 3 months. Then 6 months. Then I realised it was the job for me. I walked out of my first job too! Obviously your circumstances are different but that is my story. Maybe it will give you ideas of your own.

Its not really managing someone though if you need to resort to threats and intimidation. More like incompetence. As you will have noticed you are not getting a lot of sympathy here although I do recognise your situation. Here's the thing. Why do you resent not being part of a gang you don't want to be part of? Also - I suspect you will be making the same moans and complaints about your job in a year from now (maybe ten years from now). So why stay? They are not going to change. So what is going to fix things? The best person to change your life is you. Stop complaining and do something about it.

I had one boss who was always unpleasant. He even accused me of being the cause of everything that was going wrong. Then I resigned and he was angry about that too. He was absolutely furious when they had to bring me back in as a contractor working fewer hours for more money. When I was staff it was awful. Even Saturday was too close to the following Monday. Once I was a contractor he continued to be a bully but it was like water off a duck's back. Some people have a management style like that and they will never change.

I remember Tory MP Nigel Evans complaining about the last election. "43% and we haven't got a majority. 43% should have given us a landslide." He said it with a straight face and as usual he was not challenged on it either.

Henley-on-Thames! Could make the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a bit more interesting.

You know he never tells us what his work actually is. I am guessing he plays in a band and he doesn't like the singer.

For me Question Time is almost unwatchable now. Very similar to the Jeremy Kyle show - if you got something to say then adopt an outraged tone before you say it. Depressing.

So more than half the population earn more than £80,000 a year. That's amazing. .. or maybe he has got his facts wrong!

I think Corbyn has always wanted to distance himself from Britain's imperial past. He sees nothing glorious about the empire and would not approve of going into any country and taking over. The IRA would obviously have agreed with this. The unionists probably not. His approach was unlikely to succèed since it challenges the unionists' right to ever have been there in the first place.

Presumably she replied "no sweat" - or at least her husband would have said that.

Just be speaking to my local florist. "It's terrible - you just can't get the staff these days. Some new flowers arrived yesterday. Tom was there to receive them but he is thick as mince. Didn't bother to count them or anything. All he can recall is that was four lots of white roses and one lot of red. Not a problem, I will count them when I get the chance. Too late, Dick added in the ones we have already got. Fortunately I know how many that was 76 white and 48 red. Still no problem. Actually no. Before I got in to work, Harry, the third idiot sent the whole lot to a customer without checking anything. All he can remember was that there 3 times as many white roses as red. Now I have to work out how many roses I received. It's not easy."

I wonder if some idiot in North Korea lives in fear of Britain nuclear deterrent.

Be careful. As the story goes, somebody once drew a giant dick in the box for the UKIP candidate and according to election rules it counted as a vote for that candidate.

Went to see a film called Monos which was set in the South American jungle. Initially I was not sure what was going on but after twenty minutes or so it does become obvious and it was actually a really good film.

This is the puzzle for me. I had always regarded the Lib Dems as a mixture if people who were not quite Labour and people who were not quite Tory with possibly more of the first lot than the second. When they opposed the Iraq War they seemed to be to the left of the Labour Party. Then the coalition government came along and it seemed the Lib Dems were mostly people who preferred the Tories to Labour. News to me. Why do they object to putting Corbyn into number 10? If they are required as coalition partners to Labour then Labour would have to moderate its agenda to something the Lib Dems could live with. Maybe they already acknowledge that they would be poor negotiators as they were in 2010.

For me it looks likes the confession of a dyslexic bank robber.

Oh dear. Looks like somebody really hates roses.

Your two paragraphs contradict each other. Does Sweden get to do its own thing or does the EU dictate to Sweden?

I hope you are not a Maths teacher.

Maths lesson in North Korea. Yesterday in defence of our great republic I captured X capitalist pigs and locked them away. 80% were blond and rest were redheads Today in honour of our supreme leader, I valiantly captured yet more of these swines. This time 76 had blond hair and 48 had red. My patriotism knows no bounds. Now my prisoners are 75% blond and 25% redhead. So now the question , my dear comrades, is this. How many of these verminous shits had I captured yesterday? Long live the DPRK. Long live our glorious leader.

Down in Lancashire and Yorkshire they had their War of the Roses and made a big thing about red roses and white roses. Not sure if they still do but it is a good thing you asked us and not someone from down there. You might have come to some harm I suspect.

I remember doing Maths at college. A lot of algebra was exactly as you say. Students had to memorise theorums and proofs and often these involved x and y and z. One lecturer changed an exam to a and b and c and some people could not deal with this. Also most examples involved numbers less than 10 so the definition of a mathematician was someone who could not count higher.

Don't be daft. Let x = f, y = l and z = g. Then write out the solutions that you already know.

I suspect it is actually bottles of wine.

He did chop down an innocent cherry tree.