Could be worse.
Once I got off a rig at 20:30 on a Friday night and had to drive through the night after a twelve hour day shift to get to a friends wedding.

Trying to explain to gf why it's unfair to play 20 Qs with a british person and be thinking of Rosie O'Donnell.

I was quite impressed that I'd guessed Rosanne Barr but then I had to give up because I was sure I knew of no more fat american brown-haired comediennes, with their own TV shows, who were famous in the 90s but whose careers had fizzled out after that era.

Also Will Smith is a great person to be thinking of because he has done everything.

Come on, postie. There's a new phone and God knows what else I'm waiting on!

almost forgot this, youre interested in my "prophetic" dreams arent you, heres a weird one i dreamt of the x404 forum actually and im not making this up, yourself was in it and another forum user name I recognise and he died of "70% alcohol poisoning" and it was your job to sort out the online funeral arrangements, I saw the letter and you wrote something like "BOOM lol, funeral....."

random as hell....

coincidentally the user that had "died" has suddenly stopped posting on here recently

Honestly dunno what to say to that

EDIT - Why did you have to post that before I go to sleep, Bratty?

I must of been on here way too late or something and brain recorded last moments of being online

I've had two dreams about this forum and fellow forumites in the past despite never meeting any of you. I can't remember either. I do recall however something that happened at the old DUMP site (I accessed it through computerbuyer and later pcpro because it was shorter to type). At the time, I recall behaving aggressively towards Churchcat and I believe there was some to-ing and fro-ing. Hence imagine my surprise when I went to log in to post and as soon as I typed the letter "C" for the username, the autofill box came up with Churchcat! For a while I was concerned I had a split personality and Churchcat was my alter-alter-ego (CW being my alter-ego).

now that poster that died in my dream has just posted in the alcahol ban thread, is that dream a spooky coincidence or what?

Wages apparently haven't arrived in my RBS account.
I know they've been having 'computer problems', but a part of me is wondering if they're deliberately holding things up in order to cream more interest to plug the vast hole of cash they've been sitting on?

Unlikely. Story I've heard (from someone in a position to know...) is they outsourced all their big system support some months ago, and The Men from Mumbai have been doing little more than routine tasks since. Now something has gone tits up and they allegedly didn't have a clue how to fix it because the specific bit that's gone down is quite old and esoteric. Allegedly, the RBS IT management have been frantically phoning round the techies they made redundant about 9 months ago begging them to come back and sort the mess out. Sadly for RBS and it's customers, most of those techies - being clever people with highly technical skills and lots of experience - have found well paid new jobs, were treated so badly that any loyalty they had to RBS is long gone and are very happy to be well out of it, so they've told RBS to sod off.

Looks like they managed to get someone to sort it out for them in the end, however I dread to think how much this has all cost them, both in terms of lost business and goodwill and the actual cleanup cost. Bloke In The Know told me his estimate was the repair cost of itself is probably in the £100K-£200K range, the vast majority of which will be in 'consultancy fees'. Now the question is how long is it going to take for the thing to catch up - if they don't have enough spare capacity in the transaction processing system, how is it going to be able to deal with all the transactions that are pending, as well as they new stuff that's coming in every day?

Jon

Interesting, cheers. That £100-200k figure seems pretty cheap.
I'm really hoping that they're taking the lessons on board from this.
Also - I'm not sure if I'm comfortable having a UK state-owned bank having some of it's critical software managed abroad.

How lucky England were to get to a penalty shoot-out.

Italy must have had 20 shots on target, and as many again wide of the posts or over the crossbar - they couldn't buy a goal! They should have had a comfortable five or six goal lead at the end of the 90.

England spent the last 20 minutes of normal time, and almost all of extra time, defending the 18 yard box. The midfield was pretty much entirely uncontested after full time.

Individually, there were some great performances - the centre backs were solid, and I thought Johnson was very good at right back. Parker has been a breath of fresh air - one of the few players who will run himself ragged, closing down midfield opponents - as was sorely missed during extra time; although he was probably knackered after 80 minutes. I thought Andy Carol at least made the effort chase the opposition down but, by that time, nobody else could be bothered. Joe Hart seemed comfortable in goal - not too many flappy attempts at clearing the ball, and didn't look terrified every time the Italians had a set piece - unusual for an England keeper of late.

Overall though, the team struggled to work together - a lot of ball was given away in most of the games, through poor anticipation of team mates' positions/runs.

Gerrard looked tired last night, and was cramping up long before extra time. Welbeck was almost invisible, barring a couple of trips into the Italian box. Ashley Young was a travesty, giving away the ball all match, and the missed penalty was no surprise at all. Why bring on Walcott and then spend the rest of the match feeding the left wing for Young to squander it? Cole would work better as a left mid, if they could find a solid left back to replace him.

Just as well we lost, because the Germans would have taken us to school in the semis. I reckon they'll win it.

I know most of you don't give a damn about football, but I needed to get it off my chest.

Completely agree that England's performance, on the whole, has been utter pants.

Also RBS - £100k is absolutely nothing. I imagine it would be at least £1m.

ION I'm not at work today. Booked it off as annual leave following the weekend's events.

Free ticket to Goodwood on Thursday?
Oh go on then.