mad panic special

(My Thursday post about the websites and interweb seems to have reappeared - all very odd. My guess is they resorted to a back up or something.)

Wowser, what a horrible morning.

A bid needed to go away by 12 this morning and those can be a panic at the best of times, but this one was bonkers, as they'd given us a grand total of 3 working days to put together an entire ITT! That's totally insane - stuff that's marked urgent usually has at least a week turn-around time; 3 days for a full ITT is just plain unfair.

Of course everyone's in the same boat, but we're a small company. Big companies can obviously all on big numbers of people to veer and haul and do stuff, but that's obviously not a possibility for us. Luckily for me I was only peripherally involved, so I didn't loose my weekend.

Not that I was uninvolved, but my mad panic was this morning. The bid was via an electronic portal (uploading files, basically) and these are always horrible. I was responsible for putting together the final versions for upload and doing the actual upload.

It was a little nerve-wracking as the 12 'o'clock deadline rolled closer and closer and bits and pieces were still not quite finished. But we got it all uploaded and done in time.

My weekend itself was okay - nothing particularly exciting. One thing I did do was clean my car. I've not had much opportunity to clean it recently and what I though it was about time. I did it on the Saturday and the weather kept looking like it was about to piss down, but it held off while I was actually cleaning it.

The main thing I focused on was cleaning the inside (giving it a real good hoover out and wiping down the surfaces), the glass and the wheels. Obviously I also generally washed the car and the inside and alloy wheels are fairly obvious areas of attention, but the glass is also something I really needed to sort.

For some reason I find that most glass cleaners give very streaky results after a few weeks. Basically, dirt seems to slowly build up on the glass in the pattern of how the cleaner has dried. What I therefore do when I give the glass a proper clean is use a 'polish'. It smells quite a lot of turpentine and what you do is apply it and leave it to dry. Much like the polish you put on a car's metalwork it dries to leave a white chalk like substance that you then wipe off.

Although this is quite a lot of extra effort, the results are excellent - it gives a surface that remains streak free and completely "even" because the drying thing doesn't happen in the same way. It does also have the disadvantage of being quite expensive. In fact, actually all the stuff I use to clean my car is quite expensive, as I buy the Autoglym stuff.

It isn't cheap, but it really is good stuff.