What are the best tools ...

I think we have a winner!

I was rewiring a house for a work colleague mumble mumble years ago, and at the same time there were lots of other workmen in the house - plumbers, builders, decorators etc.

After I'd finished a week or so later I tipped out my toolbox at home to give it a clear out and clean. And found a large flick knife in the bottom.

We had guys in to lay a very large carpet on Christmas Eve a few years ago (we'd finally finished the 'big' living room after years of storing about 40 PCs in it!).

It was their last job before Christmas, and they were in a good mood and did a good job. One of them lost a rather nice tape measure, and unbelievably couldn't find it in a totally empty room. We all looked, and in the end he said he'd get another one and to keep it if we found it.

We found it, an hour after he'd gone...on the floor in the empty room! :-)

Good thing it wasn't in *your* bottom!

This sounds like something a lot of people seem to have for no apparent reason except for the fact that the insulators seemed too interesting to leave there. I collected a few when the area was wired in the mid sixties and loads were left in hedges and ditches.A couple still in dads shed now. I suppose there is a limit to what you can use them for. I have seen a stack from a High voltage application reused as part of a Water feature in an ornamental lake owned by a famous Builder.

G.Harman

Oh I say.

.. and here was me thinking that rural Bedfordshire had achieved a greater degree of sophistication (as in Margaret Rutherford, wooden hill and all the rest of it.)

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Plowman (News)" saying something like:

Ah, the gift that keeps on giving. On a related note - a job I was at last year, the guttering blokes left behind a brand-new cased SDS DeWalt. On phoning their HQ, they said it wasn't theirs. Householder very happy.

not quite the side of the road ...

Previously when decorating the hall I'd wondered why there was such a huge gob of filler as the base of a wall, but had just decorated over it, then later I decided I wanted to improve the junction between the hall and the built-on porch, so I knocked that wall down, to find that within the crap at the foot of the cavity was a nice old cold chisel, and then realised the hole must have been made in an attempt to retrieve it at the time the house was built :-)

I knew it was there. Cow-orker had lost it the day before and I had to walk about a mile of grass verge before I found it (couldn't see it from 6 feet away). As this avoided having to explain to the boss that he'd lost it, there was considerable beery gratitude involved.

What the heck where you doing with one of them out in the sticks?

different Andy

That's where the BT cables live.

Way back when I worked for GEC, a couple of collegues were off to site to investigate an X.25 problem. Just as they went round a sharp bend in a motorway slip road, the back door flew open with £20k of X.25 protocol analyser test equipment leaning on it. They only just managed to prevent it tumbling out.

I recall another case where someone who was about to leave for another job suddenly claimed to have lost an X.25 protocol analyser (this was a cheaper £2k HP one). His boss rang up his new company and said if they happened to find an HP protocol analyser, it belonged to GEC. Apparently the guy never actually got to start his new job after that call.

Ah I see. I tend to think of them in terms of LAN cables. A bit shortsighted I suppose.

Andy

I assumed you were using it to check her pulse in the hope she wouldn't impede your output/input. ;-)