Public Safety

"Please stand behind the yellow line as the train pulls into the platform" came the announcement this morning on my commute to work. Sure, let me just put my x-ray specs on and look through the snow. Honestly, Southern has the mentality of a chocolate tea spoon! They're the kind of company who would clear the snow off the platform with water to save costs on buying sand! At least it's a Friday.

Mrs Angry Face & Mrs Happy Face

I worked from the London office today. As I'm based in Basingstoke I used the 'drop-in' room to connect my laptop and sat next to a rather scary lady. She looked sweet, lovely and innocent like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and for the first hour she was fine, conducting business (I think she was from our sales department). Then after what seemed a friendly phone call, she said "Goodbye..." *hangs up phone* "you f*cking waste of space". Shocked by this unexpected behaviour, I quickly got up and rushed to the vending machines around the corner to release the laughter from within; and so the day continued in that way, with Mrs Angry Face slagging off each person she spoke to as if she was unaware that she was in a room full of people.

Which reminds me of the lady in Basingstoke who we've nicknamed Mrs Happy Face. One of the phones in our department broke, so rather than call maintenance, we swapped it with a phone on one of the spare desks. We were so proud of ourselves. A few days later another phone broke, so we called the help desk to sort it out. An hour or so later, a woman burst into our department and started yelling at us for messing up "the system"! Nobody must touch her precious telephones! Her children! It was like we were being yelled at by a protective mother who had spotted us encouraging her children to play with fire. To make a long story short, we only touch the phones these days when absolutely necessary ie. to call 999. We reckon she has a sixth sense and will soon be back.

Meet my inner b*stard

This morning I got a phone call from 4imprint.com who supply our branded goods. Our invoices are paid by our lovely finance department in Portsmouth, however an invoice from December hadn't been paid. Unfortunately paying invoices isn't part of my job so I phoned up the invoice department, introduced myself "Hi I'm calling from department 875511 and have Mike from 4imprint on the line, I'd be grateful if you could you explain to him why an invoice from December hasn't been paid" connected Mike to the finance guy and hung up.

In the past I would have looked into it, made various polite phone calls and ensured that the problem is rectified as quickly as possible, however one of my colleagues told me I've been too generous lately and people are going to start abusing this. So the b*stard from within has surfaced. I even got into an argument with a customer last week. Before we can assist anyone we need a reference number for each call (SR number). This is obtained by a customer filling in a simple web form which takes less than 30 seconds. Granted, I could fill it in for the customer, but that used to happen in the past and wasted a lot of time. So, this customer I had on the line, who for argument's sake shall be known as Steve (because that was his name) was arguing that he had never had to use the web form in the past and refused to do it. Good ol stubborn me simply replied "I'm afraid I can't help you without an SR number" over and over again. Ever since he's behaved very well, and I've received a pat on the back here since some of my colleagues have struggled with this customer in the past. So, who's next in line to test my patience?

If you paid me...

What would you do for £50? On Thursday after work I'm going to talk about porn :o) It's for market research group Saros (http://www.sarosresearch.com) who this week are investigating the popularity of adult services on mobile phones. It's only an hour long, anonymous and it's almost a day's wages for babbling so what's the harm?

Final plea

Just passing through Clapham Junction. Please stop. Please *puppy dog eyes*. We don't need electricity, we're riding a friggin tractor. Well, it's a diesel train and is as noisy as a tractor. Oh well, may as well do some shopping while I'm in town.

Ok, no more snow

The English countryside is barely recogniseable in this blizzard, yet this train is more than happy to chugg along at over a hundred miles an hour. I can feel the fabric peeling away from my seat as I nervously grip on. It all looks as if I'm in a foreign land.
I received another mini heart attack this afternoon. There are two express trains to London, one that stops at Woking and London Waterloo, and another that goes through Woking and stops at Clapham Junction and London Waterloo. I always use the latter and these are a few minutes apart of eachother. Unfortunately today I ran out of the office with very little time to spare and jumped on the train that was at my usual platform (platform 3, for stalker purposes) to find out the train was for Woking and Waterloo. Cue panic attack and headrush as I tried to come up with a solution. Turns out there's been a power cut in Clapham which is going to bitch up my journey home :o(
Good news: I'm not going crazy!!! I remembered once seeing planes in a forest just behind Byfleet and New Haw station, but then thought that couldn't make sense since there's no way you could get a plane in there, let alone 3. But I saw them again, although now I no longer feel safe. Perhaps I have spotted a secret government operation and know too much. If you don't hear from me or see me ever again then either I've won a large sum of money and decided to adios my friends in search for decent people to hang out with, or I've been kidnapped, in which case I love all my friends to bits :o) I really do! Take the friendship test: name 6 specific things about your friends such as 'Laura loves pink jelly babies' and get your friends to name 6 of your characteristics. Trust me it works, and it's how my last relationship ended. My list had about 15+ items, and I'd rather not say how feeble the list about me was. I'm not that mysterious am I?

Fire Alarm Tuesday

Every Tuesday, 9:30AM

*ding dong* "We are about to test the building's fire alarm and safety system, if you are unable to hear this message clearly, please contact the help deskon extension *mumble mumble mumble*"

3 deafening blasts follow which garuntee to wake you up *BBEEEP* *BEEEEP* *BEEEP*

*ding dong* "This weeks test is now complete, please respond to all further fire alarms"

How the hell can I respond now that I've been temporarily deafened????

SNOW! The thing is I live in a big city, so it melts, but work in the countryside, where it doesn't melt. So far I'm the only person from my team who has made it in to the office this morning. An hour late but it's the effort that counts. The snow in London is childs play compared to the hardcore snow flakes dropping here in Basingstoke! I reckon out of my friends in London, I had the most scenic commute through fields laced with white glimmering snow. Although if the train delays keep up then screw this, I'm working from home!

I'm rather indecisive, so when shops give you more choice it just confuses me. All I want is to buy some kitchen towels. I have the choice between plain, with cartoon characters on, with floral patterns, cammomile scented, edible, hard, soft, with free gift, with poltergeist, and now they're introducing fat rolls. I give up.

Change of scenery

I had a fantastic time today. I decided to work from home, but then changed my mind and decided to get out of the house and went to Starbucks in Soho. Sure enough, the atmosphere was perfect, warm, cosy, and a wide variety of people passing through; and some who stayed a bit longer. Notable characters include the lovely (art student?) young lady who sat opposite me and was glueing a cardboard frame onto something, the chinese man who fell asleep opposite me, and the Spanish guy in the stripey top who kept catching my eye.

Working from there again will be a definite must. It's nice to meet new people, hear their story and never see them again. You learn something new every day from each person you meet. Also there was coffee on demand!!! I love my company.

I had a moment classic of hidden camera TV on the way home. I popped into WH Smith's to buy Tom (hmmm) a birthday card and there was an old posh gentleman in front of me in the queue. He was making such a fuss over the price of a magazine, and ended up asking me whether I thought it would be a good idea for him to buy the discounted chocolate for him to eat in bed with his wife.

Which brings me on nicely to my next point, my non existant wife/husband/anything. Got a nice text from my mother saying that no matter what happens I'm the most important thing in the world to her. Would be nice if it showed. But I shall let that matter rest for now.

Love and bunnies and sh1t

How could I not mention the beauty that is valentines day tomorrow? I've even arranged to work from home tomorrow so that I can avoid all human contact and get through those lonely 24 hours. In fact, it doesn't bother me that much. I believe that if you love someone you shouldn't love them more for 1 day a year. You should make them feel special all the time! Flowers say 'I love you', and not 'I feel obliged to buy you flowers today'. But then again I would say all this, being single.

Starstruck

So I met Stephen Gately (Boyzone) and Jason Donovan last night :o) Laura came up to London for her birthday with Pink Nicky and we saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We couldn't help but think 'Michael Jackson' when the child catcher came on stage, opened his coat and screamed, "kiddies, come get my lollipop!!". Other memorable lines from the show include "put your lips around it and blow! I won't ask you twice". It was a fantastic night and I would definitely reccommend it to all. The special effects were impressive. Little emerald eyed Laura (19) was so delighted!

Also, a big hello to the interfering yet friendly lady in the lane next to us yesterday morning at the bowling alley who spent an hour trying to convince me to ask out my best friend. Ewwww, it's like trying to set me up with my sister! We only agreed to invite her to the wedding because it's not going to happen! Well, I hope not. Then again...

La Verite

My computer claim's I'm disconnected from the internet.  Well, tell me this, how come I'm able to make this post eh Mr IBM ThinkPad?  LIAR LIAR USB PORT ON FIRE!

Happy New Year!

Chinese New Year to be exact.  Had a wonderful lunch in the canteen but my fortune cookie soon ended my enjoyment.  "You will never be last in line, you will always excel".  Hmmm, funny how I've spent the whole morning using Microsoft Excel.  Is this a sign of what's to come?

7921

£7921 is today's number.  It's how much was wasted replacing something we thought needed replacing, but actually didn't.  The best way to describe it is that we replaced a square window with an upside down square window thinking that they were 2 different things.  Now this has nothing to do with square windows.  It's to do with ThinkPad port replicators.  If you know what they are then you'll know that new ThinkPads don't fit the old ones unless you release the catch and slide the top back.  So we replaced the old ones with new port replicators as the new ThinkPads came in.  By accident one of the old port replicators released, and looked just like the new port replicators (minus one or two cosmetic differences).  Damn.

Pancake Day!!!

Oh yay, how could I forget that it's pancake day.  I strolled into the cantene hoping to get a pie and there before me were pancakes and syrup and lemon and sugar and WOW!  I've now had my pancake fix for 2005 and can get back to work.

The poor must suffer

I managed to connect to MSN Messenger on my laptop on the train home today whoppee!  It was through my mobile phone on Bluetooth and wap so it was horrendously slow.  It's a "poor man's" 3G connection I guess, although the 10 second delay in sending and receiving messages can make things slower.  Don't even think about file transfers!  Broadband is about 576k/s, I'm talking about 9k/s here!  I suppose I could use GPRS which is reasonably fast, only problem being it charged per MB.  So each word would cost about 0.5pence.  This blog would cost almost 50pence.  Ouch!

Eck

Its been quite a while since I last got Window's beautiful blue screen of death.  It's moment like that when you just want to curl up in a ball and die over the amount of unsaved work lost.  Oh well...