Tuesday, June 09, 2015

backwards not forwards

hello there

no, not really, i am not being any more overtly nostalgic or sentimental than usual with this post. earlier today i was, look you see, looking for some pictures for a project. in doing so i stumbled upon some stored images that if i hadn't quite forgotten about it would be fair to say they were not at the forefront of my mind. as the ways of the post preclude me from sharing with you what i did today, for sharing it now would rather pre-empt the delivery, i figured i might as well throw some of these images up here. who knows, perhaps one or two feature in the images might get to see them by chance or design.

first off, let's get the exciting thing all done and out of the way. i am aware, and do appreciate, that a lot of the ladies out there read this in the hopes of seeing an image or two of me, purely due to my sexual magnetism. what can i say, the chicks dig me. also i am aware that a number of the gentry visit for the same reason, for they also find me rather butch, or if you like burly. i am very comfortable with a universal appeal across the borders of hetero and homo, and say to you all enjoy.

for the latter, however, here i am with a few men. yes, this is from my old place of verk in South Africa, or if you like the Africa of the South.



it doesn't really matter, i suppose, what i write here, for you are not reading. instead you are looking at that image of lovely lads, allowing your imagination to run wild in its pursuit of the passions of indulgent fantasies. and why not, as they say, and why not.

i think it's far too late in the evening for me to be doing this, so if this all gets disjointed it would be as a result of me clicking save and coming back to finish it later, perhaps tomorrow. in the mean time, though, a possibly vintage image of Richard and i, or if you like me and Richard. i would imagine the Richard enthusiasts out there will be delighted to see his return to these pages, if only as part of an odd historical thing.



if Richard looks somewhat maniacal  or menacing in that image, that's because he is busy trashing that computer of Dad's. that computer there is quality Windows 95 stuff, running on but a fraction of the memory and power the device you are using now has.

Richard was gifted in making that computer unusable. when he wasn't setting a then-massive 2MB picture as wallpaper, which took the computer some 20 minutes to render, he was installing Jimmy Whirlwind White's Championship Whirlwind Snooker in such a way that running the game was the only thing that the computer would actually do.

why did Richard torment and punish that computer so much? i have no idea. possibly because it was the machine that gave him his first encounter with the internet, which i believe still runs today, and so it was a device that brought him news of how completely and utterly sh!t Newcastle United were faster than any other medium he had experienced.

on the subject of computers, back to verk if you like, and a rare insight into my efforts towards fixing that whole "millennium bug" nonsense that crashed world economies and caused chaos everywhere, back at the dawn of 2000. here i am fixing it with Spiros, whilst Dan helpfully points out that we are fixing it.



did Spiros and i fix this year 2000 bug? well, i am not sure to be honest. if you can read this, i guess technology and, albeit to a lesser extent, humanity survived the coming of the year 2000. i appreciate that you are saying thank you to Spiros and i right now, and indeed Dan, and i appreciate that you appreciate that i cannot actually hear you. let me say, then, on behalf of team y2k, you are all very welcome.

yeah, as you can see, these pictures come from different stages of magnetic charge to my sexuality, what with some images showing me as man with beard, some showing me as man without beard. which do you prefer? not that it matters, for my (considerably) better half likes the beard and says it is staying.

for man with beard era enthusiasts, here i am with my dear friend Erick, or if you like Dumisani.



what can i tell you about Erick? i have nothing but fond memories of the many years we worked together, in particular the time he trashed the thought to be impossible to trash interest rate system and created many months of work for me to repair it. i miss my friend; i hope he is well.

a quick break from all this Africa of the South business to have a gander at me in England in the early 2000s, presumably after i had fixed all that year bug stuff.

this is me with my good friend Norman. as you can see, we have several Nokia phones on the go. this was a time before the evils of Apple, and everyone of note had a Nokia. peasants made do with a Motorola or similar.

i get the feeling that i have posted some if not all of these pictures before?

man, i really miss that shirt. if i still had it i dare say it would fit me now, but i seem to recall disposing of it at a time when huge steaks and tonnes of spare ribs got the better of me and it became rather a snug fit. hey ho, but still - look at how all shiny and smart it is. boss that shirt was. maybe i should have a look across the internet for shiny shirt sellers, see if i can't get my hands on a similar one. 

yeah, that's a watch i had on. as back then mobile phones pretty much only made calls, and text messages were in their infancy and not to be trusted, you didn't look at your phone all day so you needed some other means of being able to tell the time. no, all it did was tell the time.

did, you might ask, Romania ever give a gift to the world of southern hemisphere based corporate banking? why yes indeed that fine, fine nation did give a gift, and that gift was Gabriel.



Gabriel was just amazing, man. i think Spiros was the one with the foresight and vision to hire him, although also it might have been Sinbad. whoever it was, right, was just genius. a most agreeing and unassuming gent, Gabriel was and certainly hopefully still is. he was particularly gracious and understanding when we accidentally stole his car this one time, in a very deliberate way.

as Richard cropped up earlier, it is only fair, balanced and equal that i throw an image of Gillian up on to this post too. so here you go, here she is in one of my man without beard years, eagerly awaiting me to write her a cheque for some sort of amount of money.

quite wise and intelligent, Gillian is. when i commenced verk at the bank, she more or less immediately switched her bank to the one that i was working at, no matter how she felt about where i was or how happy she was with the service provided by her existing bankers.

why? she figured, perhaps rightly, that if anything ever went wrong with her account, as in so much as a cent going missing without her knowledge, she could unleash me to "do my thing" and make whoever was responsible, and several others, very sorry about it and get it fixed.

we did, of course, offer such a superior, exceptional and quality level of service that nothing ever, never hardly went all that wrong. besides, as and when something did go wrong, we always had that comfort zone of knowing that whatever money was missing wasn't specifically our money, so we did what we could to find it and put it all back as it was, but at the leisurely, considered pace that the fact that our wallets were fine thanks always suggested we should take. no point in rushing, after all. the money usually always turned up, anyway.

more men, you wish for? sure. this picture was taken at a point where there was probably wondering why their call wasn't being answered, as they were certain a team of dedicated professionals would be ready to jump right on the problem of their funds going missing.



we all sort of looked up to Spiros when things went wrong, really. he had done a bit of law and that, so we figured that whatever solution he had to any issue would be one that was least likely to see us do any prison time as a consequence of implementing. Spiros was an early doors adopter, and is to this day the strongest advocate for, people filling in participant resolution (viewing) forms. in most cases he determined, usually without even requiring a look at the paperwork, that any and all client problems were down to the client not having a participant resolution (viewing) agreement in place, and suggested they fill one in to see if that fixed whatever the problem was. as the world still has economies and banking systems, i think it's quite fair to say that he was right in this respect.

finally, then, a picture i am pretty sure i would have put up here before, but there you go, here it is again. it's not often that i actually like pictures of me, but here's one of my favourites from a man without beard period.



oh yes, i do indeed still have that class Taxi Driver poster, thanks. 

i would seem to have stayed awake long enough to do all of this in one shot. if, by chance, you've seen yourself here, or had some fond memories brought back, nice one. if any of the above has resolved any issues or problems you had playing on your mind in relation to a banking related incident from 12 or more years ago, well, so much the better.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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