Radio Suarvé is born

I've spent all week up to my neck at work dealing with a wide variety of stupidity. From the guys who can't do their job without being reminded every 5 minutes, the helpdesk agents who can't type their own name without a detailed work instruction, and finally to the server engineer who's sat quietly watching his server's utilisation shoot through the roof, but not actually thought to report it till the CPU actually melted through the disk array...

Any of this sound familiar? Yup I work for a large corporation which decided to 'best-shore' most of its staff, and in a stroke of genius got its remaining staff members to detail everything they did in work instructions, then slowly replaced them with cheaper, less qualified staff... Basically your bog standard off the shelf US Corporation, obsessed with short-term share 'value' and little else

End result of the above - What I like to think of as 'Monkeys with Work Instructions'. If you have one monotonous task to do which requires doing x to part y over and over then great, in fact fucking A, absolutely the cheapest way of doing it. As soon as you need to be doing more than 1 monotonous task, or use something not absolutely identical to the aforementioned part y, then the whole thing turns in the kind of nightmare you'd get if George Orwell directed the Marx Brothers - in short an absolute clusterfuck

Well that's basically been my week, and yet I've been smiling through it...

No mum - it's not finally happened, I've not lost it completely - I was venting away on Techdirt.com and spotted a post mentioning www.last.fm, so I started playing

At this point I should warn you this is going to sound like a plug and I guess it is, but it's an honest one. Basically you type in your favourite artists name and hit go - then the very clever electro-web-hingumy goes away and starts to play a whole radio station of similar artists

I've spent all week rediscovering lost bands and encountering music I love but have never heard, basically I've had a DJ on my desk whose entire reason for being has been to scour the vaults of music history for tunes I might like - ace

I strongly recommend anyone to try it, you get the Dynamic DJ for free for a tiny fee you get to create your own online station of tracks you love - at the bottom of this blog is now my personal last.fm station, enjoy

PS I make no apology at all for my eclectic (crap) taste in tunes