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A work colleague had been born in the Northwest Territories of Canada. His birth certificate was handwritten on vellum. Vital statistics (this was in the 1940s) were recorded by RCMP officers on regular patrols through the area a few times each year.

I hope it’s nothing serious. Our gas-fired boiler let go at 1.30AM last Sunday. Our son, who was sleeping in the basement bedroom, heard water running and woke us up. There followed 3 hours of moving stuff out of the way of the flood and mopping things up. The boiler was one month short of its 10 year life - such precision! I phoned our ‘boiler guy’. As soon as he saw the caller-id, he asked “Boiler, Pete?”. This is the third one he’s replaced for us in 41 years. He’s from Sheffield, British Gas trained and we played soccer together here for several years. (I have asked him why they don’t do e.g. “20 year” boilers. He said they used to carry them, but people didn’t want to pay the extra cost, so they stopped.) Old boiler removed, new one installed and working by 2 o’clock Tuesday afternoon. Only serious damage as a result of this incident is to the bank account.

Illustrating one of the many (many!) peculiarities of the English language - you chop trees down and then you chop them up.

If he decides to stay, and you call him by his middle name, will he be “Blue by you”?

Just for fun, I looked at the east-west distance between the two extreme, named places I could find in Canada: Kiusta, BC to Saint John’s, Newfoundland. Distance is 5369 km.

It’s called ‘face time’. I know a Brit in the oil industry who moved to work in that industry in the US. He was accused of not pulling his weight based on the time (the required hours) he was visible in the office. He replied that the person accusing him should look at the amount and quality of the work he was accomplishing, compared with what was being done by people spending 50% more time in the office. Nothing more was ever said about it.

Happens in many organizations. Unless you’re lucky and manage to stay in a specialized technical hierarchy, most people top out in their technical area and, if they want promotion, have to move out into supervisory/management positions, as you describe.

So, once you’ve sorted out all the complete kits, can we expect multiple future posts in the “Show us your Pugbashes, Nellieboshes, Desmondifications, Jintysteins” topic, using up the spare bits?

As they say - sh1t flows downhill!

I once worked in a part of the UK civil service where the organizational structure was very pyramidal. There was a tradition(?) or directive (?) that people being promoted were moved out of the section in which they were working. That made some sense, as it meant that they would not be supervising people with whom they had been working on the same level - there would be less chance of any resentment causing problems. However, this could be used, and was used, to move awkward/incompetent employees onwards. I knew of one person who managed to be promoted 4 grades in this structure in this way. (He did have to have promotions confirmed in interviews, but he was very proficient in BS, so that was no problem.) As an aside, he once applied for a job in a different organization. By pure coincidence, the person who interviewed him was a good friend of mine. My friend couldn’t understand how the interviewee had risen to the level he had in his current organization till I explained the mechanism involved.

Class 17s would be easier - they self-immolate.

Were they under “Model Railways” or “Jigsaws”?

Loco Profile #33 “B.R. Class 9 2-10-0” has a square-on photo of the cab of an engine uncoupled from the tender. Unfortunately, it’s of one of the stoker-fitted trio. But I wonder if that’s the photo you remember.

While working in Germany, I was corrected on a point of English grammar by a young German fellow employee. I’ve long forgotten what the point was, so I’m probably still making the same mistake.

Same applied for ex-RN helicopter pilots. About 20 years ago, the required courses cost about 20K GBP. The demand for civilian pilots was such that RN pilots were resigning their commissions to take the civilian courses and go to work in the North Sea etc. The Navy eventually said that if pilots finished their commission, the Navy would pay for the civilian courses. I don’t know if that’s still the case.

Or “square slice”. As distinct from “round slice”: https://www.malcolmallan.co.uk/Uploads/2021/07/23/k7fjnvgv_round_slice_300g_23.7.21.jpg

As I’ve posted before, there can be limits to tolerance though. It depends how you handle the problem: https://www.rmweb.co.uk/forums/topic/229-early-risers/?do=findComment&comment=910526

So Glasgow was actually (pedantically) the “First City of the Empire”?

You get that in some towns in BC. They call it the smell of money.

Australian four n’ twenty pies and Canadian two-four beers - fusion cuisine! https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-expression-two-four-mean-in-Canada

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Glasgow was the “Second City of the Empire”, never mind the UK. Birmingham is now the second most populous city in the UK, but that didn’t happen until the 1951 census. The Clyde yards were building a significant proportion of new ships worldwide in the years up to WW1 - up to 20%. That meant all the mining, metal production, engineering etc. industries associated with shipbuilding were also concentrated in the area. Communication and travel between the political/financial centre (London) and Clydeside would be very important.

I thought a significant proportion of the ‘dust’ found around houses was sloughed human skin cells.

I understand the problem, and I sympathize. One of my sons was a junior university lecturer about 10 years ago, where the problem was ‘cut and paste’ from online sources. But there was software to detect that - the AI problem is something else. I’m not sure, though, that going back to written exams under controlled conditions would be fair. Many students found those pretty nerve-wracking and could underperform as a result, especially if the exams were end of term/end of year and counted for the large majority of marks for a course. Are you proposing many small exams throughout the course? Would that not significantly increase staff workloads? And how would things that are currently essay assignments (presumably one of the greatest problems with AI) be handled in a situation like that?

Notetaking in university lectures was what finally destroyed my handwriting. It hadn’t been great up till then - I had moved primary schools from one where we were still printing to one where the class had been using cursive writing for a year. I had never really caught up.

NOT FUNNY!!!!