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Return to bedlam

Weeellllll. First week at the new job, which is actually the old job from four years ago.

Two hours into the first day and I had a brief pause in the deluge of catching up and phone calls and old colleagues who have become new colleagues and I just sat there and it happened….

A massive smile, quite unexpectedly, crept up from the bottom of my chin and spread across my face until I my eyes were all crinkly and my teeth were shiny.

I *so* made the right decision.

Things have improved in the time I spent away (the Wilderness Years as we will now refer to them). New employees have popped up, the useless accounts lady had retired and her new replacement is a) a Geordie and thus reminds me of my Geordie relatives b) a very nice lady [no, not that way you filthy rats]. The lunatic sales manager who I used to work with before is still there and still, well, a lunatic but on the whole it’s got a bit better – which is nice.

Day three saw me receive an official complaint from a customer followed on day four by a faxed copy of the complaint and the original “will arrive in post in due course”. The M.D. rushed in with the details of the complaint and said to my assistant “you see this, the customer has no support contract, has not paid us for 90 days and we had to take him to court last year to force him to pay a bill of 100 pounds. That’s why Ian’s the boss’. Nice to have you back Ian”. See, correct perspective. You never get moaned at for implementing company policy and telling freeloading shiisters where to get off. Good karma. I’d like to give every one of the customers something for nothing but, well, you now there are about 50,000 of them and sometimes you do have to draw the line. Plus he was a twat and lied to me.

I’ve spent the second week in three partying with my father and psychotic sister. I had *such* good time. More bonding with my nephew (14) who informed my he wants to be a computer programmer when he leaves school (bless) – we’ve already arranged for him to come and work on work’s experience with me when the time comes. Friday night was spent at a 50th birthday party. This largely consisted of me, lil Sis and father livening up the brithday girl and her husband. There was a worrying amount of Elvis Presley played – something I have a congenital dislike for.

I was due to go back home on Saturday but ended up staying until Sunday morning. This meant we went out on the lash Saturday evening as well. [delicate readers may wish to stop reading at this point] It was to a “working men’s club” and entertainment consisted of a guy with a guitar who could not sing and could only play G, D, Am, C, E and A (can you tell I’m learning to play guitar). I watched for ages – he couldn’t or wouldn’t play bar chords – no F, no Bm which made his playing of most contemporary pop songs a little one dimensional. Hark at me as if I’m some kind of guitar god (I’m not). Incidentally, as I write this, Yusuf Islam a.ka. Cat Stevens is on the telly doing some kind of BBC TV music session. Now there’s a man who knows how to write and play decent guitar music….

Boy, my chest is ripped to shreds today because working men’s clubs seem to attract a higher proportion of smokers than normal. Roll on 1st July.

Oh, and I played bingo. A surreal experience since in the 1980s I used to work as an assistant manager for a bingo club and met my first wife there. I’ve called thousands of bingo games but only played a handful, if that, over the years. No, I didn’t win.

I got paid – twice – on friday. Once by the ex-employer and once by the new employer. This allows me to have a slightly more generous lifestyle than of late as it’s going to be the first month since splitting up with wife number 2 – 3 months ago – where I am a bit more sorted. In fact, it’s shaping up to be a financially good month which is nice. I’m still trying to work out the following – motorbike test and new motorbike or buy a new car?  Answers please via the comments.

There was an excellent farmer’s market here today. My fridge is now stocked with weird things including fresh sorrel, three types of goat cheese, excellent English wine (bottle one open and partially consumed), cured, smoked and dried ostrich (think – parma ham with attitude), venison, game pie, English asparagus (not Spanish or Argentinian – we’re in season baby and it knocks the competition into a cocked hat), freshly laid free range local duck eggs, superb tomato olive and basil bread, chilli garlic preserve and other yummy stuff.

I’m such a lucky man …

Mischief

The Jackson 5 said “don’t blame it on the sunshine, just blame it on the boogie”.  I say, “don’t blame in on the vodka, just blame it on the bogeys”.

To recreate this effect; take a 1 litre bottle of vodka.  Pour at least half of it into a jug.  Add a fruit-based juice.  Cranberry something works well as does Sainsbury’s breakfast juice.  Add ice, but not too much (God did not intend vodka to be watery).

Now drink it.  All.

Stage 2: Pick up a computer keyboard,  internet connection, email program and a working mobile phone.  Light the blue touch paper and participate in the mayhem.

Oh dear, it will all seem so complicated in the morning… 

Freedom!

Well, last day at work all done and dusted. I didn’t get a thing done from 16:30 onwards as loads of my ex-colleagues went on to MSN or email and said their goodbyes – bless ‘em. To continue the theme of staff revealing things about themselves (ahem, protected posts go into a little more detail) two colleagues told me that they intend to hand their notices in on Monday. One is off to Italy, the other is off to Japan. I’m aware of a few other potential escapees so the place will be like the Marie Celeste if something doesn’t change soon.

My new boss phoned at 18:00 the same day. The conversation went like this:

New boss: So, all finished then?

Me: Yes. Gone and not going back.

New boss: Excellent! I just phoned to say YOUR ARSE IS MINE. See you at the managment meeting 9am Monday morning biatch. [laughs loudly and hangs up]

Ah yes, it’s all coming back to me now…

A little movie for my ex-colleagues

Protected posts

As you can see I have now added a protected entry (purely filthy).

I’ve sent the password to those of you with email addresses I know.  These are the email addresses you used for the comment moderating thing so if you don’t use this address any more let me know and I’ll send you the pw again.

I’m not overly fussed who reads the entries within reason.  If you’ve commented on this blog I’ve almost certainly sent you the password.  If you’d like it please comment on this post here and I’ll email it to you.  I know for certain that Amy’s email address did not work so Amy – I did try!  I’ll see if I can send it some other way.

Have fun.

p.s. Last day at work today and they’ve got me working from home…..soooooooo silly thing to do…… 

Protected: Under the cover of darkness

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Jet planes and lunatics

Ahhh you know what that smell is?  It’s the smell of my final week at my current employer.  It smells a bit like freshly baked white chocolate cookies and a latte.

Oh wait, I have *actually* got freshly baked white chocolate cookies and a latte on my desk.  Ok, I’ll eat and drink them and let you know if the final week does have a smell.  I hope it’s not cabbage.  Or asparagus wee smell (if you’ve eaten asparagus and done a wee a bit later then you’ll know what I mean).

Ok, went to Scotland and did some stuff.  I can’t go into details so I’ll send out a password to the nosey sods my blogging friends amongst you and then post some filth and lies in a protected entry [snigger].  Went to Bamburgh beach in Northumberland too.  Very nice.  Got told not to eat the seaweed by my companion, but, to be fair, the dog had been doing it for 30 minutes and not dropped dead so I figured it would be safe.  My companion pointed out the dog licks its own squidgy bits and eats live wasps and therefore “the dog did it so it must be safe” is not necessarily a good policy.  I didn’t die and nothing bad happened.  BTW: It was not the kind of seaweed people eat (like lava and so on) but some really weird looking stuff and the dog *really* seemed to like it so I wondered what it tasted like; answer: like a salty Chinese water chestnut, quite nice actually.

[geek alert: the following paragraphs are likely to induce nausea and nerdiness in normal people]

New boss man brought round a new laptop for me.  A mega wide screen arse-kicking  jobby with Windows Vista Ultimate on it.    Ooooooohhhh so computer guy sexy.  2gb of RAM, dual core processors,  200gb drive……phwoaaaaar.  I’m currently in the process of streaming my old personal laptop into a VM using VMWare’s convertor so I can have all the joys of my old machine, but running at balls-on full speed under Vista.  So far, Vista, which I’ve used before but only on development/testing boxes and not as my main OS, is actually OK.  I’m about to spend four months in the new job recoding a load of stuff to take advantage of Aero and the presentation layer so I guess I’ll know a fair bit more soon – with appropriate swear words attached.

[non geeks, you can start reading again now] 

I feel a bit odd really because I just want the old job to go away quietly and for me to launch into the new one (Head of Research and Development – get me!)  because it’s all new and exciting but I remember that I was quite pleased with myself to get the job I’m just leaving.  Meh, what goes around comes around.

Could be worse, I could have a migraine and itchy nipples…

Vacant

Yeeeeagh. Ok this is the week for which there is no name. It’s the week before I leave my current employer – yee hah – but it’s not as good as next week which is the week where I actually leave my current employer.

The week where I leave my current employer can be called a name; I suggest “me, werk, no chance” week in which the cast of characters with whom I share my travails will suddenly begin to realise that it’s too late for me to finish off that vital bit of code and check it in to the end of week build [ahem; sorry non geeks, that was WAAAAAY too computer programmer geeky]. It will also be the week where my standard answer to most prolonged questions aimed at me in tedious meetings will be answered with a long sucking of teeth and then a forthright….”meh” and a shrug of the shoulders. Despite this, it will not be hypocritical at all for me to continue to expect my salary to go into the bank at the end of the month. It is the natural order of things for employees in their final week of their notice period.  If I attempt to write any sensible code in my final week one of the little angels in heaven will die.  Fact.

I did think I might be put on gardening leave like others who have bravely marched away before me but no, apparently I am “too trustworthy” and “honest” and “we know we can reply on you because you’re a chump diamond”.  To which I say, again; “meh”.

This current week, of course, is the week in which the guilt of leaving my fellow programmers in the lurch is still more than seven days away and as such is not acute enough for me to actually feel remotely motivated to write any form of code that even vaguely functions as expected.  Unless you count “not working at all” as the normal expectation of code written by me – which you might, if you had used any of the programs I have written in the past 20 years which you may have because I’m mildly well known in the real world but under many cunning guises to avoid alimony, stalkers, the taxman and thieving gits after my computers (all of whom are sometimes combined and abbreviated into one Borg collective person called The Inland Revenue).

But I digress from my ranting discussion; to whit; this week is like a puppy that smells of cabbage, puppy dog = good, cabbage smell = not so good.  Want to leave right now (puppy), can’t because I have to work out my notice period writing computer programs (phew, cabbage).

On the plus side; in yesterday’s planning meeting our horrendously expensive, rightly ridiculed and over-wordy management consultant announced to the whole of the development team “I have decided to resign”.  He then started to give his convoluted reasons for going but they were a little drowned out by the sound of the Managing Director spitting his tea out in shock since it would appear that he had not been let in on this cunning plan of our beloved extraordinary expense budget’s impending departure.  It was a spectacular way to hand your notice in made even better by the fact that as he is still within his trial period (foolishly made out to six months) he is able to leave at the end of this week.  What a crapper.  This means he gets to leave before I do thus very slightly stealing my already over-used thunder.

My day down in the London office yesterday was one of added joy as following our planning meeting a few more of my colleagues sidled up to ensure I had their “personal contact details” and emphasised how much they “would like to work with me again in the future” – generally said with the same manner as Michelle from ‘Allo ‘Allo, except  I did not have to listen very carefully because they did indeed say it more than once.

Happy days.   Right, back to You Tube then.

Name the first thing you see in the mirror

Oh dear, oh deary deary me…