The Bluestocking - Invoking Split Pea Annexe B

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome all, pull up a gerbil and make yourself comfortable!

I have occasionally been asked how much I earn. I usually answer that I get paid about one tenth of what I earn.

Slightly sideways on occupation, but i thought peeps here might like it.

We moved in to the centre of a village where some of the residents required a seven generational connection to the area before one qualified as a proper resident.

Sitting in the pub (conveniently located opposite our house)

With newish freinds, local two bit millionaire joined us, and asked me (not my husband) what i did for a living.

I suspect it had something to do with my vintage leopard fake fur.

Anyway, it just came out of my mouth with little conscious thought.

I told him i worked from home as a dominatrix, and that i specialised in men who dressed as babies, i bulk ordered talc, my customers were wealthy judges and the like and i made a shed load of dosh.

My friends told me later that they could not shake him from the view that this was true.

As long as he didn't ask you how much you charged!!

Swash, hope you're doing OK

💙

The last time someone asked me what I did for a living, I told them I was a phrenologist. It was a lot more fun than trying to explain the bizarrely niche work that I actually do.

Not one of my originals, I'll admit. I lifted it from Charlie Sheen in Men At Work, a movie that I'm thoroughly ashamed of having watched.

@Boiledbeetle as it happened it tuned out he had a particular penchant for shagging other peoples wives. Perhaps i put him off.

I need to go bed, but one more. I ran quite a large women’s DV service. Organising the Xmas doo was rotated.

one year the head of therapy services was responsible , she booked a corporate table at a local Hilton.

Obvs our table flag was an issue, so she proposed that we book as a group of sex therapists.

hilarity ensued, what i remember was her suggestions of our pretend names, she wanted me to register as Suckdeep Singh.

i have never laughed so hard.

i know, i know, not very PC.

😂That's what I asked for, but I didn't recognise it. I guess their fat little legs don't lend themselves to the can-can (& neither do mine).

💙

Sympathies @MyrtleLion - better luck next time. When people ask me what I do I tell them I’m a poet. It has the virtue of being true and also tends to prevent further discussion. I leave out the bit where nobody makes money from poetry.

I used to reply to the 'what do you do?' question by saying that I worked in an office (which these days is true for pretty much any job, at least part of the time) to avoid tiresome juggling people's imagined notion of what archaeologists do.

In later years after I'd retreated from the trenches 'the council' was fine - it had hundreds of employees, and everyone interacted with it one way or another.

My next door neighbour in a previous house was a dominatrix. She was one of the best neighbours ever. Ex social worker.

Sorry the interviewers are continuing to miss out on you @MyrtleLion - hope Friday goes well.

Oh and NDN and I used to have very interesting "what did you do at work today?" conversations! 😉

I like that. I'm going to steal it.

Not that I get asked very often. Given that I typically show up in public in a huge flappy men's shirt with paint on the hem, and which cost me £3 from Primark, I guess most people don't feel the need to ask.

Where is that laughter emoji? though even a laughter emoji wouldn't be the full reaction to this😦😁

About 20 years ago I was a software engineer installing the software for councils that handled council tax and business rates payments. One of the group of us said we'd be paying our bills via the internet one day, and I just imagined a web page with a big Pay button. It turns out I was sort of right, but we hadn't imagined we would pay on our phones, let alone with them.

Anyway I drove an average of 1200 miles a week, which is why I left in the end, but whenever I was asked what I did for a living, I used to say that I drove the length and breadth of the UK. A lot of very boring men assumed I was an HGV driver, which thrilled them no end.

Sometimes I played along.

Hello DustyWindowsills, are you new to the Bluestocking?

I've seen your name elsewhere but I don't think I've seen it here, so if appropriate: welcome, and a gerbil will be along any moment now to take your order, she's just bringing a mint tisane to somebody who's feeling a little peely-waly today.
[the picture is a recycled one by somebody else, from a previous thread, recycled AI]

Ignore the ammo pouch she's wearing, she just think it makes her look tough. Which as you can see from the picture, is never going to work for a Bluestocking gerbil, they are just too cute

Turning up in a Primark shirt with paint all over it isn't as unequivocal as you thing - do you paint things, or pictures of things?

As a beetle that has an aversion to healthy stuff I've just been forced to look at the most horrific photo in my "memories" photos that ai decides to generate from random old photos on my phone.

A) what the fuck was I thinking? This is way too healthy!

B) can anyone tell me what is to the right of the mackerel? As I have no clue.

😁

There's a sci fi short story i read a few years ago that I wish I could remember the name of the story and the writer.

It was written probably in the end of the 19th century and it envisioned a world where everyone was just an unhealthy fat blob sat in their own homes living life through the screen in front of them, never having to move, only communicating with others through the screen in front of them, food ordered through the screen, everything was done via the screen in front of them. Etc.

I read it thinking that the writer must have time traveled to the future then gone back and written it.

And if anyone can work out and point me to a free pdf (i think it was a free pdf file) of a random short story written over 100+ years ago that i have given very little information about that would be great.

That is a disturbing mess, Boily, your phone should have a sensitive image warning when it shows things like that😱

That poor mackerel doesn't look very healthy at all😕or maybe it's just pining for the fjords...

I realise I sound like The Ancient Mariner, but I remember as a child looking out from the beach [east coast Ireland] and seeing parts of the sea shimmering silver with shoals of mackerel.

My guess as to the ID of The Blob is red cabbage coleslaw.

Marie, I don't ever remember seeing shoals of mackerel, but I do remember that on a clear day I could see Scotland.

Narrator: there weren't very many clear days

The lads on the shrimp boats seemed to understand the sea, but for me it's always been quite mysterious, as it must have been for our forebears on the west coast who sometimes saw Hy-Brasil. History does not record whether they were blocked when they saw it.

AI Overview

The story you're likely thinking of is "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster, published in 1909. It depicts a future where humanity lives in isolated underground cells, entirely dependent on a global machine for all their needs, interacting only through mediated screens. People have become blobs of flesh, physically weak and mentally isolated, their lives dictated by the machine.

If that's the one, then this is weird, because someone recommended it on twitter recently.

https://stephango.com/the-machine-stops

(I haven't read it yet.)

🎵'On a clear day/You can see forever Scotland'

I believe people used to row across from the Antrim coast to Scotland for Sunday services.
I think it may have been certain variants of Presbyterians rowing across to worship with their coreligionists in Scotland.

There's a clever map, I'll see if I can find it online, which shows the 'Gaelic World' that existed between NE Ireland and SW Scotland, by tilting the orientation of the map and centring it on the narrowest sea crossing between the two.

Pre-internet I tried to track down a sci-fi short story (though I at least had the title, but not the author). It took forever, & then one day I found it, standing in a charity shop & checking all the titles in an old collection of sci fi stories by various authors. It felt like I'd already checked a million books with no luck, & - there it was!

The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree Jnr (who is, in fact, a woman)

Wow - I'd never seen a photo of her, & had no idea she was such a looker. She wrote a good essay on getting older, too.

AI Overview

"The Man Who Walked Home" is a short story by James Tiptree Jr., the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. Sheldon, a woman, adopted the male pseudonym to explore themes and gain a readership in the male-dominated science fiction genre. The story, like much of her work, is known for its exploration of complex themes, including time travel, loss, and the human condition, often with a dark or bleak undertone.

"The Man Who Walked Home" tells the story of John Delgano, a time traveler desperately trying to return home, his journey marked by a struggle against the forces of time and space. The narrative emphasizes the physical and emotional toll of his journey, with the protagonist battling against the "timerush" and the loss of his message and equipment. The story is a powerful example of Tiptree's ability to blend science fiction elements with profound human experiences.

Marie, don't do that to me! My geography's bad enough already, & now I'll be thinking that's real & holding it in my memory, ready to embarrass myself (yet again, sigh) on some future occasion.