April, fool.

Yesterday being the first of April there was a fair bit of pressure on us to try to do something "funny" at some point. This was a problem. I was trying to think of something that I could do but nothing presented itself.
I was running out of time.
I drove over to give a brief at one of the squadrons, got ready with the usual banter. They asked what April fools joke I'd be doing and I responded with the usual "I would but as a corporation we have no sense of humour" (Men in Black misquote FTW!)
Got to the end of the presentation and on the last slide it came to me.
"For Friday we've got a front moving in from the west; and next week we've got the TV weather girls coming up for their routine defence rotation."

I managed to dead-pan the entire thing and the pure joy on the faces of the guys was beautiful. They started planning to re-arrange time off and asking me details such as which girls, how long they were staying and would they be visiting the mess?

After a few seconds I looked up, smiled and simply said, "Gotcha!"

Much good natured verbal abuse ensued and as I left the briefing room I heard someone (might have been the boss) clearly enunciate, with a hint of begrudging respect, "Bastard!"
(Today the squadron boss admitted he had been hooked nicely.)

Didn't quite work as well with the other squadron, but then again I'm not sure if they realise it was a joke...
I'm not going to say which squadrons were involved but I think it's fair to say that I am pretty dang happy with that one.

On communication.

Two points mainly, it's been one of those weeks.
This week there's been a few extra aircraft up here, various exercises and the like. Most of them were up for Joint Warrior including the French Air Force and the French Navy. Odd thing is that we're not supposed to talk about them until they're finished and everyone's gone home but within six hours of the first plane landing the pictures were up on various aircraft spotting websites. Another exercise was also on, and as the details haven't been put in the public sector yet I can't say much but this one was a mostly British affair with one or two notable visitors. For this one we were asked to provide on site met in the form of a briefing, which is something that I enjoy but haven't really done much of recently. Hopefully we'll be doing more of them soon.
Even given the fact that we work pretty closely with the air force I was somewhat put out that after I'd done my little bit and was sitting through the rest of the brief (bloody interesting stuff) I realised that if I'd known more about what they were doing I could have REALLY focused on what they needed.
The whole reason that we're cleared and out in theatre with the guys is that we can give specific information rather than just general forecasts for wide areas; I've begun now to understand more how better knowledge of the way they work will allow me to do my job more efficiently and just generally better. It's not that I think I gave a bad brief, but if I'd done another one at the end of the mass brief I would have delivered a very different one. Knowing what they were planning, not just the general area they were working in, knowing the profiles they'd be likely to fly and the things that they'd be doing, it all gives me a better idea what they want and what they need to know. The way I did it I gave information that they didn't need and focused on things that were frankly irrelevant. I'm going to try and get some feedback about it and see if, in future, we can get just five or ten minutes heads-up with Ops to, yeah, focus more.

The other bit of communications I've had is the reason this is being typed on a Windows machine rather than a Mac. My Mac has died. Gets to the boot screen and just freezes. Tried clearing the PRAM and resetting to factory settings, nothing. Ran a couple of machine checks (including one from a command line - I'm sure Unix is great but I don't have the skills to do more than a basic check) and when running the check from the install disk the system couldn't find the hard drive. Now I'm a bit of a n00b when it comes to sys stuff but I know that not being able to locate the hard drive is a problem. Most of the stuff was backed up a few weeks back so there's a few pictures I'd be pissed off loosing but the big stuff is on the spare drive so re-installing shouldn't ruin my life. The machine is less than a year old so it's still under warranty; hence I started to dig out the documents for it. Found everything (including the bank statement) except the receipt. Bugger. I was sure I'd bought it from PC World (quiet at the back there!) so yesterday I headed over to Inverness to pop in. I was also planning to see Iron Man (brilliant!) so I was going anyway, which was good because when I got there I realised I'd actually bought it at Currys. We've got a Currys here, so I might not have had to drive 45 miles to the one there. As it was I got a copy of the receipt and the phone number for customer support. That's right, they don't handle Apple repairs in store, it's done through a phone contact. Fortunately a 24/7 number so a called a couple of times today as I'd got back a bit late last night. Twice I got the message "Due to circumstances outside of our control we are experiencing a high call volume and cannot take your call. Sorry." Click, buzz. Automatic cut off.
Waited until about 2200, called again, got told, "sorry, we don't do Apple on this number, here's their customer service number, they don't work weekends." I'll try again on Monday but I'm betting they don't work bank holidays either so it'll be Tuesday and I'm just hoping that they won't object to the fact that I didn't buy the care package - they shouldn't, it's within it's first year so still under warranty. We'll have to see.
When wandering through the store, all I could think of was "Nerd Herd! Nerd Herd!" Liking Chuck and Reaper.

Soon to be another internet meme

The Bad Astronomy blog had a post saying "I'm updating the server, don't comment until the update is up as all comments will be deleted."
So, of course, all of us put all the stupid silly and funny things we could think of down on the comments. Some were bad (the link to a bad music site) but most were brilliant, and now they're all gone. You'll just have to believe me that my comment was witty and well observed. :D

In a similar vein, amazon sell pens, and Neil Gaiman's blog pointed over to the reviews of the humble Bic pen.

And finally....
The squadrons at work have phone based briefings and at the start of each one they call us up and count down to the time check. For most of the groups when they reach their own number (eg for XV, when they count down to 15 seconds) a cheer goes up.
T'other day at the end of a shift I was briefing 12 and heard the count-down get to 12. All was quiet to I went, fairly quietly, "Yay."
All I could hear for most of the rest of the count was cheers and laughter from the aircrew. Still makes me smile.

Giggle loops

From "Coupling," a giggle loop is the reaction when it's a serious occasion and the worst thing you could do would be to laugh. So you supress it and think, "how bad would it have been had I laughed then?" so it gets worse, and worse and worse...
I'm briefing a squadron in about 45 minutes, so this is slightly preying on my mind.
Meh, to quote the Simpsons.
Not much else to say, this is my last shift down here in Leuchars, got some time off now.
That's about all that's happened, except for going mountain biking in the Trossachs and walking in the hills behind T and C's place - both good fun but knackering. I'm going to have to get much fitter and I've only got a short while to do it. Not sure if I should record progress here, it might help motivate me, or it might expose my obsessive optimism.