It’s Not All Bad

GoldenEyes and I met BlondieBird for a drink on Thursday night.

She’s got a new job, starting next week.

Actually, it’s a better job than the one she had with us – more senior, and better paid.

And it’s not just her – we know that at least two others of the 21 let go from our place have jobs, that two of the others are at final interviews, and that one more is back doing occasional work for us.

It’s good to know that there are some jobs out there. It’s just, as BB says, that far more people are applying for each one of them.

I’m just so pleased for her.

The Goodbye Girl

D-Day was yesterday.

Twenty-one terrific people lost their jobs. Their individual stories would break your heart. Fiona has a gorgeous one year old who looks exactly like her. Tony’s partner is pregnant, as is Marcos’s wife. Eoin has been with the company for years, whereas Brendan gave up another job to come here just eight weeks ago. Luka is Croatian, and won’t be able to stay here if he doesn’t have another job by May.

Dear, sweet Mary (TallNeuroticGirl to readers of this blog) left in the same blaze of energy with which she does everything. The only person on earth to be able to get sound out of a ’silent’ keyboard (she’s had it less than a year, and half the letters are worn away) rushed about, tidying this and forwarding that, all the time keeping up a stream of chatter, asking me to make sure that this person was OK or that person was looked after. The office is a lot quieter today, though that would have been the case even if she were the only one to go.

And my great friend BlondieBird is going as well.

We all expected it, her section was the one most likely to be gutted, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I’ll miss her lovely, and genuine, smile when she’d say hello in the morning. I’ll miss the amazing sandwiches that she’d construct for herself at lunchtime, using tomatoes, cucumber, ham slices, cheese, sometimes rashers or sausages left over from her breakfast, all brought in from home individually wrapped in cling film. I’ll miss her astonishing mutliple sneezes – five, six, maybe ten little explosions with a “chooscuseme” at the end, which was how you knew she was finished & could say “bless you”.

Most of all, though, I’ll just miss her. She became a really close friend of mine, even though she’s twenty-four years younger (I accused her once of fancying me, and she snorted and said “maybe if you were twenty years younger”. “You’d think the ‘twenty years younger’ would be the most hurtful part of that sentence,” I told her in reply, “but actually it’s the ‘maybe’.”). When I was suffering the blackouts she’d make me text her every evening to let her know I’d got home safely.

She and GoldenEyes became really great friends, to the extent that they socialise together outside work as well, and GE was even more devastated than I was.

And today BB’s gone off to sign on the dole. She says she’s planning to turn up there in a hoodie and pyjama bottoms.

One last story about her. As I’ve said before, at Christmas she got her blonde hair dyed a sort of plum colour. Recently I heard her on the phone talking to someone about their website. “It says ‘clink on the link’ to move to the next section, but there’s no link,” she said. Then I heard her say “oh, that link there, I see. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and I heard her sigh and then mutter “I’m still blonde”.

That’s my friend. That’s Jenny.

Waiting

Back when I was self-employed, if things got really bad, if I felt I’d messed something up for a client, or if I was worried about how I was going to make enough money to feed my family, I’d often wake up really early, and throw up.

That hasn’t happened since I came to work where I do now. Until this morning.

Tomorrow is the day when about twenty people here are going to be let go. But in order that this can take place properly their final pay,P45s, etc will have to be ready for them, which means that the person who does all that stuff will have to be given the list this afternoon.

And that person is me.

So for all of this afternoon and the first couple of hours tomorrow morning I’m going to find myself in the kitchen with, in the loo with, or sitting near people who I know are leaving, though they don’t.

As I said, I’ve already thrown up this morning. But I still feel sick.

Gallows Humour

It’s mid-morning on Friday, and an office full of people who may only have one-an-a-half working days left is hushed, filled only with the sounds of typing as these people carry on doing their jobs with a professionalism that would make you well-up with pride, and with affection,  and with sadness.

I’d love  Mark Fielding and the ISME gobshites who called us all malingerers to come in here and see what the employees of this country, of all nationalities,  are really like.

Meanwhile, everyone is putting on as brave a face as possible, and gallows humour is creeping in. We’ve discussed a sit-in, a la Waterford Crystal. There is a group of eight of us who are acting as go-betweens between staff and management, forwarding suggestions & concerns to the bosses & vetting communications that they are sending back, and, although the eight have no actual role in the selection process and are as liable to be made redundant as anyone else in the company we are referred to as the Firing Squad. One area of the office, where everyone in it reckons they’re going, now call their section The Departure Lounge.

And this morning BlondieBird sent me this:

Actual Answers Given by “Family Fortunes” Contestants:

Name something a blind person might use… A sword

Name a song with moon in the title…Blue suede moon

Name a bird with a long neck… Naomi Campbell

Name an occupation where you need a torch…A burglar

Name a famous brother & sister…Bonnie & Clyde

Name a dangerous race…The Arabs

Name an item of clothing worn by the 3 musketeers…A horse

Name something that floats in the bath…Water

Name something you wear on the beach…A deckchair

Name something Red…My cardigan

Name a famous cowboy…Buck Rogers

Name a famous royal…Mail

A number you have to memorize…7

Something you do before going to bed…Sleep

Something you put on walls…Roofs

Something in the garden that’s green…Shed

Something that flies that doesn’t have an engine…A bicycle with wings

Something you might be allergic to…Skiing

Name a famous bridge…The bridge over troubled waters

Something a cat does…Goes to the bathroom

Something you do in the bathroom…Decorate

Name an animal you might see at the zoo…A dog

Something associated with the police…Pigs

A sign of the zodiac…April

Something slippery…A conman

A kind of ache…Fillet ‘O’ Fish

A food that can be brown or white…Potato

A jacket potato topping… Jam

A famous Scotsman…Jock

Another famous Scotsman…Vinnie Jones

Something with a hole in it… Window

A non living object with legs…Plant

A domestic animal…Leopard

A part of the body beginning with ‘N’…Knee

A way of cooking fish…Cod

Something you open other than a door…Your Bowels

It’s the first time I’ve really laughed in a week.

Fear for My Friends

The R word has arrived in our office.

With staggering speed the amount of work we had on hand has plummeted as clients cancelled contracts or asked us could we delay them, and now we’re undergoing cost-cutting.

Some of the staff are going to be made redundant next week. At the moment the bosses are deciding who and how many, and Tuesday next is Judgement Day.

I won’t be one of them, not because I’m brilliant or irreplaceable, but because some of the work I do in the office can’t be done by anyone else on the current staff. This is obviously a relief, but also a source of guilt. I look at the rest of the staff, see the panic in their eyes (one poor girl’s husband lost his job on Christmas Eve), and can’t share their fears.

At least not for myself. Some of the wonderful people I’ve worked with for the last three years are going to lose their jobs. Some of them may be people who’ve appeared in stories here, the warm, fun-loving, generous young people who’ve welcomed the older guy with the health problems into their midst, and who’ve become my really good friends. These people are hard-working and professional in everything they do, and a number of them will be out of work in six days time. I don’t blame our boss for this, though I look at the greyness in his face these days and see that he does. I don’t blame our clients, desperately trying to cut their costs by stopping any expenditure they consider non-crucial. We are now doing the same, which may have an impact on the staff of some company that sells to us. Everyone is doing what they can to keep going in a country where all expenditure has virtually stopped.

The evening news has just ended as I write this. Last September Irish Life & Permanent put €4 billion on deposit in Anglo Irish on the last day of its financial year, just to make it look healthier, & took it back 10 days later. The truly awful Financial Regulator at the time, who was finally forced to resign when people could take his cosy incompetence no longer, is getting a payoff of €630,000 and an annual pension of €142,670, while my friends will be getting €202 per week at the dole office.

Tonight Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan is putting €7 billion of our money into two other banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland. We all know that eventually we’ll have to take over their “toxic debt” as well, to keep them and their staff afloat. These banks lent money to anyone when things were going well and now won’t lend to anyone when they aren’t, thus causing most of our problems and then making them worse. This Minister today admitted that the Irish Life & Permanent deposit was mentioned in a report he was given last October, but he “didn’t read it all”. He is, of course, still Minister for Finance, though he’s doing his job far more badly than any of my workmates have done theirs.

And our big blustering Taoiseach? He’s so useless that the fact that he made an interesting speech last week was regarded as headline news.

These fools have cost my friends their jobs.

I Will in My …

I have always been a person who talks to himself while working.

This habit developed during the many years that I worked on my own, and I have been unable to curb it now that I’m surrounded by others. I am a hard taskmaster on myself, so my comments are seldom encouraging. Rarely will my workmates hear me murmur “oh, well done, Tinman!” after I’ve gotten something complicated to work, but will frequently hear me exclaim “ah, gobshite!” after I haven’t. (On such occasions Blondiebird’s voice will then be heard over the cubicle asking sweetly “did we make a mistake?”).

LoudEnglishGuy, who used to sit beside me before the company moved office, used to say that it was quite worrying when a bloke in Finance would spend all day saying “What?”, “No way“, “Fuck’s sake”, “Ah, that’s bollocks” and my own phrase “Cad an fuck?”. I explained to him that I trained at the Tourette’s School of Business Studies.

The utterances are at their most frequent and virulent during the first week of the month, which is my busiest time, so on Friday evening I muttered one last expletive after one last thing had gone wrong, and BB’s head appeared over the top of the cubicle.

“Tinman, we’ll have to get you a swearbox,” she said.

My first thought was that this might be a good idea. If I’d to put ten cent into a box each time I swore, it might quieten me down.But then GoldenEyes joined in.

“Great idea,” she said, ” a euro every time you swear”.

“A euro? Fuck that,” I said.

If we go ahead with this by the end of the month I’ll have enough to buy a car.

The Tinman Cometh – the Birth of Tinman, Part 7 (and Last)

So. Today is January 22nd, and my pacemaker is one year old.

Compared to all the crap that had gone before, my 8-day stay in Vincents was fairly uneventful. The staff were friendly, hard-working and knowledgable. The nurses were cute and, to my surprise and delight, some of the doctors were even cuter. I had the heart monitor removed, they waited a bit for that wound to heal, and then they put in the pacemaker. During my stay in Cardiac Care I got to be the youngest in a group for once, since most of the others were in their seventies, so I was the ward gofer, trekking off each morning to buy newspapers in the hospital shop. One morning NiceNurseNicola (one of the Russells from Skerries, as she used to describe herself) gave me an explanatory booklet about my pacemaker, and the patient on the front was also in his seventies. I think this was the only time I got down during my whole stay. “Look at him,” I said to NNN, pointing to the cover,  “is that not the age I should be to be going through all this?”

Most of the time I was fine, though. I was visited each day by Mrs Tin and an ever-changing selection of Tinkids, my dad came in a lot, and I was also visited by some of the workmates who regularly appear in these annals, including GoldenEyes, Blondiebird, TallNeuroticGirl and even The Overlord himself. I sent and received almost two hundred texts to and from various others. One guy from my local asked would I get to see the United game on the Saturday, and when I said no he offered to text me whenever there was a goal. That was one of the most dread-filled afternoons of my life (and I’m speaking here as a man who’s had blackouts and heart operations, and who once set fire to his kitchen) as all conversation gradually dried up and the Tinsons and I just stared at the still silent phone as the time ticked nearer and nearer to ten to five. With about eight minutes to go my phone finally beeped, and I fell upon it. “One-nil – Rooney,” read the text. “About fucking time,” I texted back, “do they not know I have a heart condition?” (I later discovered that one of the guys had suggested texting me that they were losing, but the general consensus in the pub had been that this might have killed me).

One evening at the end of visiting time I was walking the family out to the front door. There is a statue of Jesus very like this picture in the front hall, with him pointing to his Sacred Heart as he always seems to be doing. “Look,” I said to the Tinkids, “Jesus had a pacemaker too.” Mrs Tin gave me a look of horror as if she reckoned I was now doomed to hell for all eternity, but I think that even if I am it will be worth it, just to have heard them all laugh during what must have been a really scary time for them.

At half-eight on the morning of the 22nd a guy arrived into the ward with a trolley to collect me. I climbed up onto it while he went off to sign some paperwork. After a couple of minutes I started calling out “I say? Driver?”. The man in the bed opposite said “I’ve been watching you this morning. I’ve been in here lots of times, and I’ve never seen anyone who’s about to go upstairs for an operation looked as relaxed as you.”

“Listen, ” I said, “I’ve been through eight months of not knowing when this will all end. All that time I was hoping for a day like this. I can’t wait to get upstairs.”

Two hours later I was back in bed and I sent out a group text saying “Am now part-man, part-machine”. The people at work were always giving out about how little time I’d taken off during all this (what was the point, I used to blackout at home too, with the difference being that at home I was doing it in front of my children) so HR Fireball texted “I suppose I’ll see you here in work tomorrow.” “Why?” I texted back, “will you not be there this afternoon?” (“Not in the least bit funny” was her reply).

CuteAccountantGirl, who has now left but with whom we still go on the beer sometimes, texted back “Congratulations Tinman!” and so is indirectly responsible for the name I took when I started all this blog stuff three months later.

And the following morning the doctors said I could go home. I texted “FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST! THANK GOD I’M FREE AT LAST! Er, can I have a lift?” to Mrs Tin, said my goodbyes, and headed off to a slightly different life.

And in general this life is fine. I do feel the pacemaker turning on every so often, and occasionally it will irritate muscles around it, so that they keep pinging and spasming for a while after it had stopped. I can’t go through the X-Ray machine at airports (not, as I’d always thought, because the pacemaker would set off the machine, but rather because the machine would turn off the pacemaker). Getting to skip the queue is as not as much fun as it sounds, since it just means that I have to get patted down every time, and that’s not as much fun as it sounds either, since they always call a bloke to do it.

And look at my muscles!

When swimming last summer I decided to wear a Rafael Nadal type t-shirt, since I didn’t want my kids or my nieces (or indeed, any of my in-laws) to see my chest with it’s three scars (monitor in, monitor out, pacemaker in) and the visible lump where the pacemaker is. My last lingering hopes of being a male stripper have vanished.

But at least now I can swim, without fear of blacking out and drowning. I can drive again, though the seven months without it has made me realise that I actually don’t like driving anymore. I can do almost everything that I used to do before, and also have an excuse for not doing things I don’t want to do (there’s a guy at work who arranges paint-balling every year, and he’s so young and sweet that I’ve never had the heart (sorry) to tell him that I didn’t want to go, so I’ve twice gone and had a really miserable and painful time, but this year I just was able to say I’m not allowed).

In other words, I’ve adapted. Very occasionally I feel it’s a bit unfair that a bloke my age should have gone through all this shit, but most of the time I’m amazed and thrilled that it all finally got sorted.

I am Tinman, and very content with that.

******************************************************************************************************************************

That’s it finished, right? You’ll be back to slagging the Government and talking about your kids or the cute girls at work from tomorrow? Promise?

I Promise.

One last thing. If you ever have to get circumcised or anything like that we don’t need a 7-post series about it. Understand?

Understood.

Daddy Long-Legs

In a conversation with QuietScotsGirl and myself, TallNeuroticGirl told us she is planning to buy her dad a suit for Christmas.

QSG said she would not feel confident in selecting a suit for her dad, but then TNG’s dad is a farmer from Longford, so presumably there is just the one type of suit called “farmer’s suit”, with large pinstripes and a row of biros in the breast pocket, and all she’ll have to decide is whether to accessorize it with a cap or a hat.

TNG's dad

And she’ll have to pick the right size. And this is where her problem arises, because her mum insists that her dad has a 39-inch leg. TNG has tried telling her that nobody has a 39-inch leg (and believe me, if TNG doesn’t, then no-one does) but her mum is adamant.

QSG asked does he wear trousers up to his nipples, á la Simon Cowell. I suggested that TNG should buy a pair of 39-inch trousers, if there are any such things, just so she can say “I told you so”, when he waddles around like a diver wearing flippers.

And then, because all this depersonalised crap has dulled my Inappropriateness Sensor ever so slightly, I heard myself say “of course, your mum only thinks your dad has 39-inch legs because he has told her that this (holding my hands about four inches apart) is nine inches”.

Fortunately she laughed. Still, I have to cure this somehow.

A Panther that is Positively Pink

Blondiebird at work is a real girlie girl. She apparently has 40 pairs of shoes (even the other girls slag her about this).  And she loves the colour pink, drinking water out of a pink glass that she brought in herself, and having a pink laptop. She turned up at the water-skiing last summer in pink wellies. She’s twenty-seven.

Yet she is in no way a stereotypical blonde, in that she’s actually quite shy, can drink pints to outdo any of us and is far from being dumb.

But when someone sent me this, I knew she’d love it:

https://www.keyboardforblondes.com/index.cfm

Click on the small keyboard at the bottom to see what’s printed on the keys. Also have a look at the 10 reasons to want one.

Seemingly it functions as a real keyboard. I’d almost love one myself.

Actually, they should do a bloke one. The backspace key could say “ah, shit”. The Home key could say “Pub”. Control, alt and delete could be replaced by just one butoon that says “Kaboom”.

Anyway, for the Christmas Party BB decided to get her hair done. And she is technically no longer Blondiebird, she’s now Brunette-with-just-a-hint of-purplie-bird. She looks amazing, but will always be Blondiebird to me ( if only because BB is easier to type than BWJAHOPB).

And also to TallNeuroticGirl. BB sits in the cubicle infront of mine and TNG sits on her right,  and they bicker all day long like an old married couple. “I’m still going to call you a blonde,” said TNG yesterday, ” and I’ll still eMail you blonde jokes”.

“Yes, but at least she’ll understand them now,” I heard myself saying before I could stop myself.

Next thing one of those little stress balls flew over the wall between BB and I and hit me full in the face.

It just goes to show that that those balls really work. Blondiebird said she felt a lot better after that.

“Lucky” is my middle name

I didn’t post yesterday, because I’m not sure how the word “mmnnuuuhhhhh” is spelt, and it’s the only word my brain was capable of processing.

The party was a big success. We ate, drank, danced, and then at the end of the night we had the raffle.

The raffle is an essential part of our company’s Christmas Party. It’s held at the very end of the night, all the staff members have their names put into a hat (ie spouses and partners are excluded), and if you’re in bed when you’re name is read out, tough.

We have about fifty prizes, ranging from vouchers for hotel stays to Cadburys Selection Boxes. Two of the most popular prizes (though not with the boss) are paid Half-days off work. This was my idea a couple of years ago and it seems harmless, but some of the top developers in the Company are very well paid, so they can end up being the most expensive prizes of all for the company.

Anyway, in three years of parties, I’d never won anything, so I reckoned this year my luck had to change. And it did. I won this.

The worst thing is that I had actually bought it. My ClosestWorkBuddy, GoldenEyes, organises the Christmas Party each year, and buys all the prizes, but this year she was sick in the week leading up to it, so Blondiebird and I went off on Thursday afternoon with sixteen hundred euro to spend in two hours.

I’ve never done Power Shopping like this before, and it was a real experience as we flew from shop to shop buying vouchers, tins of sweets and cosmetics. It was while we were in Boots buying 3-For-2 things that I saw the above box and said “this looks nice”. “Meh,” said Blondiebird, but by then we were knackered, so we took it anyway.

And on Saturday, GE said “next prize is this Perfume Sample Set,” and then laughed herself sick when my name was read out.

Oh well, at least I’ve broken my duck.