Anything I write that has to do with writing will be in From Pico's Pen, my author's blog. Everything that doesn't fit any of the sites I write on will be here. This is my practice. I could have kept it private and farmed out the good stuff but I found my readers like too much of it to do that. It isn't a diary because there are things I keep to myself but you can learn a great deal about me from the randomness you will find here.

Tuesday 27 October 2015

Grill Glove Love


Generally speaking, I'm one of the easiest to get along with people you'll ever meet. I do, however, have a sense of humour and that means that just sometimes, I can be a pain in the posterior. This was one of those moments.

I sometimes work in the kitchen at my place of employment. Favourite post is working on the grill. Most of the other work stations are less than perfect for my tall skinny frame. I can work them but my lower back will start protesting.

Grill gloves are plastic disposable hand gear with some heat resistance for handling raw meat. After handling the raw meat, they're peeled off and thrown away. This is to avoid contamination of the finished product. If you take them off just right, you can trap a significant amount of air in the glove especially the fingers and then pop them. I've gotten rather good at it.

One of my co-workers finds the pop sound annoying and I find his reaction amusing. I was having fun popping the gloves when I was finished with them. Anyone who's ever gotten into popping bubble wrap, can understand my mind set. Hey, it's therapeutic. Don't knock it.

I managed to get three pops out of one glove, three separate fingers, a personal best. This was when my co-worker's requests for me to stop went from polite to more hostile demands.

“Pop! Pop! Pop!”

“Arrgh! Just stop already!”

I gave it a rest for a little while. Didn't want to rile him up too much or too fast. I waited for him to forget about it before doing it again.

“Pop!”

“Hey! What did I say to you? Don't do that anymore!”

“It was just thumb. Relax.”

“Just stop. Okay!”

I knew I was starting to push his buttons but I had a great way to finish this and I had to have one more go.

“Pop!”

He turns glaring at me, but before he can say another word, I say, “That was the middle finger.”

The rest of us laughed our heads off over that.

Beating the Facebook Algorithims


Little irritated with the folks from Facebook. I appreciate that they're a business and they can do whatever they want but I have an account in the hopes that it will be useful to me.

I have an artist friend that I tried to connect with several weeks ago. Because I sent him a friend request and he confirmed it immediately, I thought we were successful. I was puzzled in that none of his posts were showing up on my feed yet my son was seeing new posts from him daily. This a common occurance with some of my Facebook connections and I find it more than a little annoying. Usually going to my friend's wall and liking a few items just to give the system a kick will rectify the problem at least temporarily. My kids go a step further by tagging their friends in comments regularly. I find that inconvenient but I couldn't even do that in this case because Facebook somehow unfriended us. We'll try to rectify this when I get home this evening. I know that this instance is not an isolated one and I don't think it's a glitch. I promote my writing on Facebook and at times it seems to be getting more and more of a challenge. I know that they prefer I spend money to promote stuff on their site but I haven't got much in the way of funds.

I have two purposes for being on Facebook. Number one is to try to keep up with family and friends. The other of course is to promote my business efforts including my writing. This isn't the first nor the more upsetting incident. The worst was easily loosing track of a good friend and finding out they tragically passed away and I didn't find out until several months after the fact.

In the face of their mysterious algorithims, I have a plan. I will be going through my friend list as I have time and try to kick the system back in gear. I will also begin tagging people regularly. I will try to do it without sounding weird, annoying or inappropriate. It's a daunting challenge