Two unrelated events and a mad coincidence nail home the hypothesis that all is not well on our planet. Firstly what is going on with the weather? I know it’s autumn, streets disappearing under crinkly brown carpets, significant lack of light during morning and evening and the strengthening of cooling winds. Fine with all that, no meteroligical issue at all with standard seasonal conditions, but the rainfall, well that’s quite another matter.

It never rains all day anymore; oh no, instead we get torrential downpours more suited to a tropical storm, and then just as the rain is properly lashing down, it stops and the sun comes out. Ten minutes later, badoom, huge crack of thunder, rain bouncing off the street to eye level, creation of inland seas. Sorry, it’s just not right and a strong letter of complaint will whiz off once the correct government department to whinge at has been established.

Secondly, Chiltern Railways have unbelievably been awarded a prize. Suspend that disbelief for a second to reconcile their being first at anything except shoddy service, when you realise it was voted for by holiday makers“. As a friend at work says i.e. old people who only ever travel off peak, have all day to kill, enjoy the scenery out the window when the train stops for hours, and rate any experience as preferable to an imminent death!“. He’s right of course but either “ and I can’t credit this “ every other train franchise is somehow worse or they’ve blackmailed the judge’s with heavily photoshopped pictures of deviant sexual practices involving goats. Goats I’d wager.

Now to the co-incidence, as the horror of Chiltern Railways being awarded anything but custard pies to the face sank in, I was reading this:

The three toed sloth rests or sleeps on average 20 times a day” [CR trains] It’s only real habit is indolence“[CR staff] The sloth is busiest at sunset, although using the word busy in it’s most relaxed state” [CR ability to get two trains off in one hour about 7pm]. It moves at a speed of 400 metres in one hour” [Yep, sounds about right unless Rickmansworth Signals are involved]. When motivated it can crest speeds of 250 metres an hour on the ground. Unmotivated it covers four to five metres in an hour” [See previous point re: Rickmansworth signals]

There’s more, oh yes. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it” [CR ticket inspector]. It will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. As for hearing the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound“[sorry mate, no idea, can’t help you”]

It finishes with a jolly “How does it survive you might ask?“. You might indeed. Un-bloody-canny or what?

A small prize for anyone who identifies the blatant plagiarism of which book?

To pull together the strands of this world gone bonkers, I’m increasingly turning to the rather splendiferous bullshit generator which spits out such gems as:

Do you think he’ll mind if we repurpose the synergistic interfaces and redefine the granular channels so we can innovate global infrastructures? We’ll probably need to harness cross-platform relationships, expedite distributed mindshare, empower revolutionary convergence and scale extensible architectures to achieve our goal of world domination through the structured agenda, but it may just be possible if he gets on board!?

I’ll not let on who provided this mastery of nonsense or the original link; suffice it to say he occupies a lofty and senior position in our organisation.

Today I’m feeling a. bamboozled and b. ready for a drink. Option b, I think.