…in which I narrowly avoid Death by Tic-Tac
I have just accidentally swallowed a tic-tac. That was not the opening sentence I was intending to write, but literally just as I was on the verge of starting typing, I mismanaged putting a tic-tac in my mouth and narrowly avoided choking 
I can now no longer remember what my incredibly witting opening sentence was going to be 
What news do I have? My line manager, who I don’t necessarily dislike but who thinks I am totally incompetent, has just been promoted to the status of Director. Director means he’s not quite a partner yet, but will be as soon as one of the existing partners dies and/or leaves. The upside of this is that he bought cakes to celebrate, and I was lucky enough to get a pink doughnut with sugary sprinkles on it. The downside is that he now has even more power than ever before, and it’s not necessarily advantageous for someone who has a mental black mark against my name to be in a position of increased power. That is to say, I assumed he would still be my line manager, but after talking to a friend of mine she pointed out that directors probably aren’t anybody’s line manager, and thus I might be allocated a new line manager. This is a potentially unfortunate situation; there is one person in the office who, if she became my line manager, would give me no option but to leave.
On the theme of leaving, the afore-mentioned friend of mine put me in touch with some recruitment consultants a couple of weeks okay. After a bit of help from Babel, I finally managed to get my CV to them this week, and have had a couple of calls since. This lunch time I spoke to a guy who was trying to recruit newly qualifieds to move to one of the Big Four accountancy firms. I had ignored his call several times, but eventually felt that politeness demanded I call him back. Essentially, I have no interest in moving to a Big Four firm. One of the things which makes me hate this job is the incessant travelling, and I have absolutely no desire to work for a firm which would demand more travelling and longer hours. Yes, they probably pay £5k more than what I’m on at the moment, but if you divided the salary by the hours I’d have to work, I think it might potentially work out as a lower hourly rate!
His call, then, would not have been particularly interesting, were it not for the fact that I mentioned I had been referred by my friend. He commented that he knew her, and that she was causing him to tear his hair out because after he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging interviews for her, she had got a job at [insert name of Big Four firm] through a personal contact there.
This was news to me, bearing in mind that I had spoken to the said friend only a couple of hours previously. I called her back after lunch, and she was rather horrified that I knew, because she hasn’t handed her notice in yet. Both of us were obviously limited in what we could say, being at work, but in coded language she confirmed that what I’d been told by the recruitment guy was true, and she was indeed moving on.
She’s going to call me later tonight to tell all, but I must say I’m rather sad and will miss her
Anyway, the upshot of all these phone calls is that I have a meeting with a different recruitment consultant tomorrow lunch time. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to say, since I’m not really actively looking for something specific, and Babel and I still haven’t started looking for somewhere to live. I genuinely don’t think now is terribly good time to move into industry, because all our clients are making big redundancy cuts, even in their finance teams. But I thought I might as well go along for the hell of it and see what they said; it’s always good to have options 
I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t mind working here and would like to stay for a little longer. I can’t realistically stay for longer than two years, because I’m not good enough to make it to manager, and after three years a lack of promotion would make me a departmental embarrassment. So I do need to think of something else to do, and some days I can’t wait to get out. This morning, for example, I spent four hours checking a 98 page Word document to a 98 page pdf version of the same document, to confirm that there weren’t any discrepancies. There was the odd thing wrong – a missed comma, a heading not in bold, an incorrect page number – but on the whole the two documents were utterly identical, and after four hours of staring at the size eight font, my eyes had gone square Yesterday afternoon, however, I spent some time posting some last minute adjustments through a set of financial statements, and despite the fact that they were in Microsoft Word and I’m not generally very good at debits and credits, they all ended up balancing and I was quite chuffed
So on the whole, my feelings with regard to life, the universe and everything are rather mixed today. The good news is that swallowing the tic-tac doesn’t appear to have killed me But it is perhaps sad that swallowing a tic-tac is the most exciting thing to have happened in my day