this and that

I should have known it was going to happen this morning even though I reminded myself not to forget last night; I forgot to poo pick the mares' field shelter when I went out to do what I fondly call "earlies" at 5:45am, and had to go back out there post-shower, dressed for the office on the top half and the farm on the lower half, resplendent in a nice little black blouse, jogging bottoms and wellies respectively. I quite enjoy the juxtaposition of being a complete scruffy article at home and having to make more of an effort at work - though even then in my case it's less the Nicola Farhi suit and more a second hand Next suit off Ebay.

I wouldn't ordinarily be poo picking their field shelter at that hour in the morning on a school day, but today I felt it was warranted on account of the fact that Chart Stables were coming to change the non-removable partition for a removable one, so that when the girls are ready to pop next spring, we will have a nice capacious area in which they can do so. This has now been done and I can't say enough about Chart - they've been excellent. Our next task - which I would have done tonight had I not been so bone numbingly weary - will be to weed the area where the shelter sits and put down a nice bed of straw. These are the sort of jobs that make having horses such an eminently rewarding thing: even the certain knowledge that their lovely new straw bed will be defiled within moments cannot take away the momentary yet all-encompassing sense of fulfilment at seeing them wandering in there and happily browsing over it for the very first time, then perhaps standing fetlock deep in it while enjoying a nice bit of hay. It's best not to spend too long considering how the next time you see it there'll be poo and hay all mixed in and how you're the poor sap that has to try and make it all nice again.

All of this is eminently more satisfying than wrestling with the implementation of a new IT system, as I am having to do at the moment. WHY everything has to be such a royal pain in the arse defeats me. So LDAP doesn't have all the info we need to pull into it (it's a new Helpdesk system) in terms of user location and such, so we must perforce use our general database and get the stuff in via ODBC. Only thing is it's a Firebird database and doesn't understand SQL so there's some fuckery needed to get that sorted, necessitating the reliance on others to get it working. The server needs to be on the domain (I'm not sure whether the fact that this is news to me is evidence of my technical inadequacies or whether it really should have been mentioned earlier; it could just as easily be either) and this too might be problematic due to server OS version and network infratructure "incompatibilities" which I had understood would only be likely to cause an issue were we to attempt to set up network shares, which we're not. So two days of training and brain overload finished today not with a nice little cherry on top of the cake but a steaming pile of particular effulgent effluent, a substance which has perhaps first passed through the digestive system of a polecat only to be expelled at speed all over the top of this hitherto relatively straightforward and pleasant albeit capacious project - a bit like having a nice bun only to discover that it's fully of candied peel, or sultanas. WHY. There are those people who enjoy these challeges but me, I'm not one of them. It was this aspect of myself that led me to conclude that I'm not and never will be a real techie, cos I just want stuff to work, and so I became a manager.


The whole thing was almost adequately offset by the fact that the trainer had a slightly hysterical giggle that was exactly reminiscent of Herbert Lom's excellent Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther films. I did wonder afterwards if he wondered why I was grinning at him so much and whether I ought to begin practising the phrase "'ave you got a rrrrheum" in a terrible faux French accent, or whether Kato was going to burst out of the stationary cupboard and karate chop me upside the head.