Best laid plans

It's nice to see that I have some followers who read this crap. At this rate, we're going to get underground cult-status. At least this way when you feel you are having a bad day, you can read my ramblings and realise things could be worse.
Take this morning for example - I got up, fed the dogs, had a mud-out, had some breakfast, got ready to go shooting and got a phone call. It was the company who were meant to be delivering a load of pre-cast panels tomorrow but decided to send them today instead...
So, that knackered my days shooting while I had to go and unload the panels and get them on to a trailer ready to transport to the far end of the site next week. Okay, it's good that the panels are here but why on earth they couldn't carry out delivery tomorrow like we arranged I don't know. The result is that today I have a very disappointed dawg who was looking forward to going out to scare some pheasants and get very snarly in the process. Now he's just laying there looking all sad.
On the other hand, the lorry load of timber which I was promised yesterday has yet to appear. It was meant to have been sawn, treated and delivered first thing Tuesday but didn't materialise.
I suppose they're waiting for the leaves to fall off.

Hopefully I should be going to look at a couple of tractors later this week. It's never as straight forward as you would hope and although price plays a big part, dealer back-up and warranty are crucial. I can see a lot of sitting down and scribbling going on to work out what is the best deal overall.
I wonder if I'll get a free pair of overalls and a nice hat ?
Who mentioned arseless chaps ?....

You do have to wonder sometimes why you bother going out to work. Yesterday, I had a phone call from one of the guys doing a fencing job. The final invoice was due to be paid yesterday for some fencing which we did at a property some city types have just bought. My chap called me up to say the customer wanted some money off the invoice because (this is a classic) "We took 2 days longer than we said we would to complete the work"
This is a first class example of clutching at straws to get a reduction in cost.
Now, the reason for this is that the customer asked us to divide the field into 4 paddocks, not the 3 we originally quoted to do. This was not a problem and he was happy to pay for the extra material but obviously this took us another couple of days to do what with the extra fencing plus two extra gates etc.
I told my guy to thank the customer for reminding me that we spent an extra two days there as I had only charged for material (I hadn't but he didn't realise this) and said that we would therefore need to charge for the two extra days. I got a call straight back form my guy saying the customer wouldn't pay anymore than what was on the invoice.
I said that I was happy with this.
Of course I was - he's just convinced himself to pay the original f*cking invoice I sent him !
People are strange.

Salman Rushdie invented the Toblerone.