A not so "bright" colleague & what else! The weather!

At work (the local sainsbugs) the other day I seemed to be getting a veritable flood of what I call "can you tell me's".  This is when a customer approaches you and asks where something is.  Mostly they say, "Excuse me", or "do you know where" a particular item is.  Some just walk up and will say the name of the item like "sugar!" to which my reply is "never use it".  however i digress. 

People were coming at me like I was the only one there!  I was going through the list of items that needed to be reduced and looked up in time to see a new guy who works on the fresh department, with a customer but pointing to me.  Ah ah! i thought that's whats going on.  I sorted out the customer and carried on watching him and sure enough 10 minutes later he did the same thing.  I questioned the customer when he got to me and he said the young man had only just started and didn't know where anything was.  From talking to a colleague from that department, "lets call her Debs" I knew this to be incorrect. 

As I went to clock out I collared him and put him straight about what he should be doing.  His reaction was one of surprise!  Mmmmmm, but he promised to take it on board.  I get the impression he might not be with us for long!

Now to the weather, what a rain lashing the south of England has had!  We had a very wet start to Wednesday but as the sun left the valley the sky was a wonderful colour, as can be seen from my saved weathercam pic

Thursday dawned a complete change in as much as it was very windy and once the predicted rain did start at around 1500hrs it hammered down.  My weather station recoded nearly half an inch of rain between then and when it stopped around 2300.  The pic below shows 0.42" in the 24hr period.

This would normally mean the the River Derwent, across the way from our house would start to fill up.  Thankfully we have around 12-15 feet of river bank before it starts to slop out onto what in effect is an old flood plain. 
One problem we have here is that upstream is the huge Ladybower Reservoir and if that fills too quickly, as it probably is doing right now, Severn Trent Water Authority will lower the spillway and this floods the river. 
There is an emergency procedure which telephones all the people living close to the river that the water is coming but sometimes the result can be pretty alarming.

This picture was taken in Feb 2011 and shows a track alongside the river covered with just over a foot of water.  The normal level would be some 12 feet lower at the base of the large tree on the left of the pic. 

So here we are, a pic taken a few minutes ago shows the river at pretty well its normal level.  If it starts to flood it can get to the top of the bank opposite and eventually into the flood plain field as well. 
With more rain forecast for the weekend it could be a different view come Monday. 

The pics and more can be viewed on our website at http://hakuraman.gotdns.com