While You Were Sleeping

Sorry I’ve been away.

A combination of a short working month, the arrival of our auditors and the fact that one member of my department left last week meant that last week’s routine was pretty much: get up at six, go to work, have no lunch-break, get home at half-eight, eat dinner, go to bed. Get up at six…

So I haven’t even turned my computer on for nearly a week (sorry, SaS, your comment about my age sat in the pending box all this time). The worst part is more or less over, though, so next week should be less crammed.

I have had occasional thoughts and happenings over the past week, though, and here is a brief summary:

• The above routine was slightly different on Tuesday night, when I went to see Placebo. I love them, and really enjoyed the show, though I did feel that they played too much of their most recent album and not enough of their older stuff (there you go – Tinman’s done his first ever review).
• During the week UK football club Middlesbrough were playing on the telly, and I had two thoughts: (a) is Middlesbrough the capital of Middle-Earth?, and if so (b) what does that say about Middlesex?
• On Thursday morning they were handing out Knorr Quick Lunches outside Tara Street Station. The Knorr Quick Lunch is the upmarket version of the Pot Noodle. I ate mine and now feel that I have had three-quarters of the Pot Noodle experience, in that I have eaten something devoid of taste, goodness and nutrition, but without feeling like a loser while I did so.
• Why isn’t Infantasia called Jo Blogs ?
• We put up our tree on Monday, the day after my birthday, in accordance with the Tinhouse rule that Christmas cannot be mentioned until the November/December birthdays of Tinson1, Tingirl and I are over, but didn’t finish putting all the lights, etc on it till Friday (wow, that’s a lot of lights, Tinman, I hear you say, but that’s not what I mean).  We just couldn’t be arsed. And even as I write this, at one p.m. on a Sunday with all five of us in the house, no-one has bothered turning on the lights yet today. I mentioned how long it took us to finish putting up the tree at work and two other people said the same thing had happened in their homes, that the tree was put up in reluctant stages. Christmas begins earlier every year in the shops. Have they finally killed it?

That’s it from me for today. Normal service will resume next week.

Swine-y Todd, Flying Squad

Our company has a Swine Flu Committee.

We met for the first time yesterday. (Yes, of course I’m on it, that’s the kind of thing that always happens to me, though in this case I’m curious as to why. I spent a lot of the meeting looking at the six people in the group trying to figure out why we were the six specific ones asked to join. In my own case I finally decided that, as the virus is especially dangerous to both the elderly and to those with underlying health problems, they were covering both those angles by having me).

This is us...

I got quite excited when I was asked to join. I pictured us as a pseudo-scientist group called the Anti Coughing, Hawking and Oozing Organisation (ACHOO). We would wear space-suits with our logo (the Flying Snot) on the left breast. Whenever anyone displayed any symptoms we would burst in from all directions like the scientists in ET, and the offender would be dragged away.

Alternatively I imagined we might be more sinister and clandestine. If someone sneezed we would glance at one another, tap our (clean) nose with our (sterlised) finger, and the following morning the employee would be simply gone, his cubicle empty, and with HR having no record of him ever having existed.

The reality, of course, was a bit more mundane, though our name -we’re called the Pandemic Team – is way cooler than my one. We discussed different types of hand-cleaning materials, argued over which posters were too disgusting to put up in the kitchen, and five of the six made the sobering discovery that only one person out of the 110 in the company knows how to do the payroll (by God, whatever drugs are out there, they’re going to make sure I get them).

Then we went out and sent round a company-wide e-Mail about prevention, care and how to recognise the symptoms. One such symptom that we mentioned (and we cut-and-pasted this from an official document) is having a temperature of 28 degrees. It’s a measure of how seriously our e-mail was read that only GoldenEyes (who already has all the handwipes, etc, on her own desk, she’s convinced she’s going to get this) pointed out that this should probably read 38 degrees.

She is, of course, right. If your temperature is 28 degrees you are not a swine-flu sufferer, you’re a frog.

Caught in the Web

Everything was down in the office this morning. We couldn’t get onto the network, couldn’t access the internet, couldn’t use e-mail.

While the  netadmin team scurried frantically about trying to figure out what was wrong (and telling any of us who asked had they tried turning it off and turning it back on again to fuck off), the rest of us tidied our desks, had our mid-morning snacks a bit early, then just basically stared at one another. We all had nothing to do.

Which sounds great, and would be, as long as you could use the downtime looking up stuff on the internet. But when you’ve no Dilbert, no blogging, no looking up other blogs, no reading the news online, no internet at all,  then having nothing to do really is, well,  having nothing to do.

After an hour or so they got everything running again (they had to re-boot something which, no matter what they say, IS actually turning it off and turning it back on again) but I was left amazed at how lost I’d felt while everything was down.

I’ve always regarded myself as the ultimate computer luddite (and in our office I really am, possibly since I’m the only one old enough to remember a time without them), but I was shocked this morning at how much I missed having one.

If I’m not careful I’ll end up finding out what words like Flickr, Twitter and RSS Feed mean.

Like In The Movies

In the kitchen at work this morning the conversation turned to the hiring of scooters and mopeds while on holiday abroad. After I had regaled them all with the hilarious tale of how I had been given a moped with no brakes while on a Greek island back in the 80s, and how I had stopped by the simple method of toppling it sideways, thus losing a fortnight’s carefully accumulated suntan on one leg and one arm, one of the girls said:

“A friend of mine once crashed her moped into a stall in a market in Hong Kong.”

Straight away she was bombarded by questions:

• Had she driven through a line of washing first, and was there a vest/blouse/bra over her face?
• Did she crash through a load of cardboard boxes?
• Did a truck reverse out in front of her, which she had to slide under?
• Was the stall she crashed into selling live chickens?
• Did the stall owner end up with an egg cracked on the top of his head?

As you can see, our knowledge of what goes on at Asian markets is based entirely on Jackie Chan movies.

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.

Lost in the Post

We got a letter from An Post at work today.

It starts “Dear Customer, As part of our ongoing drive for a more efficient and reliable postal service, from 9 February 2009 we will be implementing a number of changes to the way we collect and deliver our mail in the Dublin 2 postal district”.

It then asks “what will these changes mean to you?” and goes on to explain that there may be changes in the time at which we receive our mail, and says we “may experience minor inconsistencies in our mail deliveries while these changes are being implemented”.

These changes, it concludes, “are essential to enable us to deliver a more streamlined and effective network so that we can continue to offer a range of postal services that are among the most competitve in Europe”.

All very interesting. But not very relevant.

Because we aren’t in the Dublin 2 postal district.

The letter is addressed to us with the right building name and street name, but then says Dublin 2 instead of Dublin 1.

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t fill me with confidence.