If there is one thing that will rub me up the wrong way on the job, it's 'gawpers' - more so if they insist on providing not so helpful advice.

A case in point - yesterday I attended a call to a young lady who had suffered an epileptic fit in her hairdressers. Now epileptic fits are not pleasant things to have happen to you, and it's embarrassing at the best of times. Often you can vomit or become incontinent. You can injure yourself if you fall over onto something hard and when you do stop fitting your behaviour is often bizarre and aggressive.

All in all, what you don't want is twenty people standing around the door of the shop staring at you and pointing and talking about the patient.

Nor do you want members of this crowd kissing their teeth and commenting that the ambulance staff who are getting their equipment from the motor should "hurry up".

When a certain ambulance person tells you that you should leave the area as it isn't a public circus, you really shouldn't get arsey with them.

It's just a damn shame I had to look after a patient rather than have a blazing row with some jumped up girl who thinks it amusing to mock the defenceless patient.


Breathe...and relax...breathe...and relax...

It's why, when in a public place, I always try to get the patient in the back of the ambulance as quickly as possible, you have just got to love our tinted windows for patient privacy.

(Once I did have a teenager push his face up against one of our windows to try and see inside. A quick bang on said window with an oxygen cylinder soon stopped him and gave him a sore nose into the bargain).

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I had a look at the changes to 'Da Book' suggested by the copy editor - all of them help the posts work better as a book rather than as a series of blogposts over time. Things seem to be happening really rather quickly at the moment.

Yesterday I had a nice little trip outside of London to Basingstoke.  Why there I hear you all ask – well, I went to visit a warehouse, the warehouse that my book will be distributed from.  MacMillian Distribution to be precise – the people that handle the Harry Potter books.

I went along with two of the editors from The Friday Project, Clare and Heather who are as lovely as they look.

To be honest, a lot of what was talked about went over my head, MIDAS and Vista are apparently some electronic way to order books, although that is just a guess on my part.

The real fun for me however started when we saw the server room – I’m enough of a geek that I had a small ‘nerdgasm’ over seeing two miniframes running in a heavily air-conditioned room and hearing about their off-site backup and disaster recovery procedures.

We were then shown the warehouse floor, where there are absolute tonnes of books all being moved around by forklift trucks.  It is here that the books are stored until they are sorted out into the orders that are shipped out to various shops.

Did you know that if you ship a wooden pallet of books abroad it has to have been impregnated with an insecticide?

And did you know that China won’t accept any wooden pallets at all – they all have to be made of plastic.

I also discovered that prison labour is used to process any returned books, and that recycled books are used to build motorways.  Yes – motorways are partly made of paper (which might explain a lot about the state of the UK’s roads).

We saw the system that they use to make sure that every book reaches it’s right destination (they weigh every book in their catalogue, then weigh the boxes as they go out – if there is a discrepancy then the box is re-checked).

Luckily we avoided the busiest time to tour the warehouse, all the forklift drivers were having lunch – otherwise we would have been dodging between these pallets being moved around at high speed.

I learnt about the way that Weatherstones orders books, and why they might not have a book you want in stock (apparently it’s called ‘C’ stock, which means that they only have one copy in stock at a time – and it takes three days to order a new copy).

It was great – it felt like a school trip.

Here is the thing though – at some point in July, one of those pallets is going to be full of my books – with my book title on the pallet sheet, and with my words written on bits of paper inside the shrink wrapped container.  Then they will travel down the conveyer belt where they will get sealed into boxes and sent on their way to bookshops around the country (where I shall be obsessive-compulsively rearranging the shelves to make sure my book is at the front…)

It makes me feel weird in my tummy.

(Oh – and when they are due to be released they don’t keep the new Harry Potter books in Basingstoke – it’s in a top secret location and they have security guards sitting on top of them…)

Back to the real world of ambulance work tonight.

 

All pictures can be seen in Hi-res on my Flickr Page.

For those that are interested – I’ve recovered from about a month of near terminal email failure.  So if you have emailed me in the past month or so – don’t be surprised if you suddenly get an email in your inbox.  The problem has now been fixed.

On 22nd of April at 23:59 and 45 seconds I had my last alcoholic drink for 1 year and a day.  It’s something I occasionally do – give up alcohol.  This will be the longest ‘fast’ so far.  The reasons are many and varied, but include…

• I’m getting fat.  With a beer belly.  This is easier to do than that thing called ‘exercise’.
• I have a bad memory – if I have two pints then I may as well write off any hope of remembering the night.
• Alcohol is a depressive – I don’t need any more help in unblancing my ‘bad brain chemistry’.  I have more reasons than ever before to be happy – there is no need to wreck it now.
• I’m always moaning about drunks – time to remove that bit of hypocrisy from my life.
• I’ve found myself having a drink after each shift – this is not good.  It might be alright for others, but experience tells me that for me this is a bad idea
• Bottles of soft drink and water are cheaper than beer.
• I have a bad memory…hold on…Didn’t I just…oh…yes…
• For those in the know – I’m aiming for some inhibitory gnosis.

Tomorrow I shall hopefully be having a little day out – I’ll let you know more on Thursday if I manage to wake myself up a 7am in time for the charabanc…

Apart from tomorrow I’m working pretty much continuously for the next fortnight.  My sense of humour may fail at some point during this period of time…

Just a few things to get you caught up on some of the things that have happened/will happen before I write a ‘proper’ ambulance post.

• I’ve had the dreaded lurgy for the past couple of days (which is why my blogging has been so light).  I could fill you with disgust about the symptoms – but I’d rather draw a veil over them and just let you know that I’m finally managing to cough up huge gobbets of green mucus at the moment.
• However – this illness comes at the right time.  My mum and brother are heading on holiday in the next few days, so I’ve taken a week of annual leave in order to housesit (or rather video record ‘Neighbours’ and ‘Doctors’ everyday for my mum).  They are having a couple of days in Toronto, a day in Niagara Falls and a couple of days in New York.  Any suggestions for must see things would be gratefully received.
• As this holiday coincides with my week of off-duty, I have a whole fortnight off work.  This will make me both happy and bored.  While I have a few ambulance stories stockpiled, you may notice me going a bit ‘off topic’ occasionally.  I’d just humour me if I were you – I bite when I get upset.
• I have new business cards.  They are a lovely shade of yellow and have one of Hugh’s cartoons on the back.  It says “This city is killing me but what a glorious death it is”.  The message just seems…right.
• This Thursday I’m meeting up with a friend for drinks and curry in the Brick Lane area.  If you want to come along you are welcome – just email me for details.
• I’ve been asked by the nice people at Londonist to take part in a multi-blogger talk.  It’s on Wednesday the 5th of April at the London Apple store starting at 7pm.  I’ll be chatting for twenty minutes or so on “Blogging as Identity – real and virtual”.  also there will be the lovely Annie Mole, the always interesting Tom Coates and the “I’ve not heard of them before – but they are the newest addition to my RSS feeder” Inky Circus.  You can get more details about it here (although I’m guessing that the Londonist chaps haven’t seen my Flickr stream…).
• I’ve just gotten the ‘blad’ of Da Book.  A ‘blad’ for those who don’t know (and I didn’t know until I was told) is a short sampler for an upcoming book.  It’s kind of rough and at a quick glance there are a couple of things that need changing, but…  It’s really weird to see things that I’ve written actually on a page, in a book, with a cover and everything.  It’s still strange to think that a jumped up taxi driver can get a book published.
• I’m currently listening to The Shortwave Set with it’s sublime “Repeat to fade” (You can get a smaller, but better quality video clip at their Myspace page).  I’m trying to get this out of my head…
• Erm…  I think that’s it.

I’ve finished the first draft of ‘Da Book’ and have sent it off to the publishers who will no doubt return it with lots of red marking all over it and a huge letter from the lawyers asking for a thousand and one changes.

I’m still not satisfied with it though – especially the introduction.

Oh well…

I’m also a fair bit nervous, will my publishers like it?  Will they laughingly throw it in the bin?  Will I look like a complete idiot with ideas above my station?  Who knows – the die has been cast.

My hands are now soaking in a bucket of ice and dreading the thought of a second/third/fourth draft.

Time for a little relaxation before I head off to work.

Someone (who I can’t mention on pain of death) pointed out an Amazon page to me…

Where Da Book is listed

Which means that I better finish writing it…

It’s definitely a weird feeling to see it up on a website I buy most of my books from.  I’m currently polishing the ‘final’ first draft before sending it off to the publishers so they can edit it into something approaching English.  I’m having a bit of a crisis of confidence at the moment.  Reading through my old posts I’m constantly worried that my writing skills are not good enough to be published.

One thing that leaps out when you look at a collected bunch of posts is how I seem to spend a lot of time trying to get a cup of tea, or worrying about sleep.

At one point we seriously considered subtitling the book “One man’s quest for a cup of tea”.

It’ll be finished before the end of the week, so I’ll see what my publishers have to say.  Until then I’m afraid I’m going to be neglecting this blog and email.  Maybe I’ll post something from work via my mobile phone, but unless I come across a job that I simply must write about, the next post might take until Wednesday to write.

So I shall leave you to ponder an important life lesson about ‘ass-hair’.

As Neil Gaiman just wrote…

Writing away on about three different deadlines right now, so the blogging is probably going to suffer for a week or so. (Traditionally I either follow a post like that by disappearing completely or by posting twice as much.)

I never thought I’d share anything with him, but the first draft of ‘da book’ needs to be in by the end of the month, so blogging may be a bit light for the next two weeks or so.  I’ve got some stuff to write about last nights ORG meeting, some in private emails, some of which may end up in this blog.  There also may be some scribbling over a little project I’m doing – this may however remain private.

If I get something really interesting in the next two night-shifts I’ll let you know, but I may be a little to busy to turn belly-aches into interesting posts.

The Amazon adbox (the only ad I’ll ever have) has been turned into a “what I’m reading now” box.  Do with it as thou wilt.