My last post was supposed to be the final one before I head off to Germany for the IS, but I’ve had such a lovely Christmas, it would be a sin not to blog about it

In our house we actually pretend to be continental, and have a lot of our festivities on Christmas Eve. It all stems from the fact that we’ve spent every single Christmas Day (except one exceptional circumstance when my mother was ill) by ourselves in our own home, and whilst I realise that it’s kind of traditional to open your presents on Christmas Day, it’s also a lot more fun if you can open them in the presence of the people who gave them to you We tend to see most of our relations on Christmas Eve, hence it kind of makes sense to open our presents then too. (more…)

Having said that I wasn’t going to review my year in a serious manner, I have been unable to resist the temptation to look up my new year’s resolutions and find out what they actually were. The result does not make pretty reading (more…)

It was our work Christmas party on Friday night. I’m not a big one for parties, especially work parties, and so I would say that I survived it rather than enjoyed it. We had our departmental Christmas lunch during the day time which was relatively civilised, and I did have a few glasses of wine but stopped as soon as I started feeling them take effect, because I don’t really like drinking when I’m not around Babel. I didn’t stay for long at the actual evening party because it was in a rather dodgy part of town, and the friend I was with wasn’t staying long either. I’m glad, because it sounds like it was total carnage. There are some amusing photos on Facebook this morning of a mutual friend of mine and Babel’s without his shirt on, but the biggest story currently doing the gossip rounds is that one of the guys I am working with onsite this week, pulled an 18 year old PA from the Transaction Support department (more…)

This week I took the slightly random step of creating a Twitter account for myself. I use the word random because I have only ever had a very hazy idea of what Twitter actually is, and don’t have the patience to read the help guide, but as far as I can establish it seems to be a website for people who are obsessive about updating their Facebook status. Now I must confess that I am rather partial to updating my Facebook status myself, but the more ‘friends’ I acquire, the more constrained I feel about what I can actually say. “Clare has had a crap day at work” is not a status which will further my career when I know my boss can read it, nor is “Clare is really happy because Babel just let her suck his cock” a good status when there is a family member in my friends list. Sometimes I get around the problem by setting my status in Esperanto. Sometimes I don’t even want Esperantists to read it, in which case I write it in German because I only have a handful of Facebook friends who will automatically understand that, especially if I choose my slang carefully. Sometimes I set an indiscreet status in a fit of emotion and then delete it when I’ve calmed down. I like setting statuses, it’s an interesting emotional outlet, and it can help to focus the mind when you’re forced to express your mood in such a limited number of characters. (more…)

Sunday morning we got up bright and early because we had decided to head to the beautiful city of Regensburg in Eastern Bavaria. I don’t have any photos of it so you should definitely click on that wiki link to see some, because I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s beautiful. A UNESCO world heritage site, the town is situated on the river Danube and largely escaped bombing during the second world war, so has a virtually intact medieval centre which is well worth a visit. It’s quite a surreal place; almost every building in the town centre would warrant being a museum piece in another location, yet people do actually have to live normal lives here and so you have medieval churches with a discreet sign outside indicating that they now serve a wide range of spaghetti (more…)

Despite the fact that we successfully checked in online for our flight to Munich, we still had to get up at 4am 4am on a Saturday morning in December is not a pleasant sort of time, all the more so because it was literally tipping it down with rain. The world’s most talkative taxi driver refused to drop us right outside the terminal building, so we had to walk quite a distance in it and ended up very wet indeed Feeling rather tired after a week at work I was desperate for a coffee, and as soon as we got through security, the plan was to head to Costas. Security was unfortunately rather a nightmare on account of it being a Saturday, and by the time we made it to the departure lounge there were only twenty minutes until boarding. That ought to have been long enough to get a drink, but sadly the queue in Costa was so long and the staff so inefficient that my sister and I were literally just in the process of paying for our lattes when my mother arrived to tell us the flight had been called As you can imagine, I wasn’t a happy bunny and it’s made me question the whole value of ever checking in online. (more…)

After having spent the whole week moaning and feeling sorry for myself, I have just been reminded that there are some nice people left in the world. A member of client staff, to whom I hasten to add I have never spoken before, has just pulled over at the side of the road and given me a lift to the train station. I was very surprised, and it was an exceptionally kind thing for her to do

The place where I’m working this week is a 15 minute walk from a small suburban train station in East Birmingham. It’s not a good area, and the client is located on an industrial estate which is rather dark and lonely. I don’t mind walking through it in the morning, in fact I quite like a bit of exercise to clear my head, but in the evenings it’s slightly less fun.

One of my colleagues was commenting on it yesterday and saying that at the place where she used to work, I would have been told to take a taxi. In fact she told me to take a taxi and that she was sure the manager would reimburse it. At her old firm, they took the view that they were liable for staff getting mugged whilst walking to and from client premises, and that they would rather repay people the extra few quid for a taxi than have them become a victim of crime. She reckoned this particular manager we were working for would think the same, and possibly she would – I don’t know her so I couldn’t comment. But this girl annoyed me because she went on for half an hour about how dangerous it was for me to me wandering around an area like this in the dark carrying a laptop

Yes, I know it’s hardly ideal. I look about sixteen and it’s blatantly obvious that there’s a computer in my bag. I’m scared of the dark too, and I actually have quite a horror of industrial estates. But how I get to and from work is my business and when I’ve psyched myself up to be able to cope with it, it doesn’t really help if other people make an unnecessarily big deal out of it and harp on about how *they* wouldn’t even walk around here on their own at lunchtime in case they got murdered.

Sometimes people with cars can be so terribly snobby and get the whole concept of walking totally out of proportion. It’s less than a mile, it’s not that big a deal, and no I don’t want to go to all the hassle of getting cash out of cashpoint, finding a local taxi number, waiting around for them to pick me up, wondering if they’re a weirdo who might abduct me, collecting the taxi receipts and begging a manager to reimburse me. Yes, I might get the money back but that manager will remember and perhaps not want to book me on her jobs again because I’ve caused a problem, and next year when it comes to my annual appraisal there’ll be a comment about me causing disruption and not having a proper regard for the budget. I can do without more black marks to my name. The whole problem will be solved during the year when I learn to drive. In the meantime, I intend to continue to take my chances walking through industrial estates the length and breadth of the country But I am very grateful to the random lady who gave me a lift, and it is noticeable that the colleague who objected so much to my walking drove off at half five without so much as a backward glance, never mind offering to take me to the station herself

I feel a little bit less depressed this afternoon than I have for the rest of the week. I’ve been having one of those weeks where you don’t want to get out of bed, not because you’re tired, but just because you feel you can’t face the day. The audit I’m working on is so rubbish – I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing and the client isn’t here/keeps refusing to speak to us, so it’s virtually impossible to get the information I need to do my job, even if I could work out what that was. Obviously I am doing some work, I’m working quite hard in fact, but most of what I’m doing is probably inadequate and that’s kind of depressing. Like I’m doing it as well as I can based on the knowledge and resources available to me, but that’s still probably not well enough, and everybody out here is basically just hoping that the company goes bust and we don’t have to finish the job. With net liabilities of £11million, it is somewhat difficult to argue that the group is still a going concern! (more…)

Apart from the excitement which is Babel’s birthday, I am in general feeling rather low at the moment. Work has been more than usually depressing over the past week or so, and it’s getting to me so much that this morning I was contemplating calling in sick one day this week, just because I feel I need some time out before I snap. Whilst I may moan about work-related matters a lot, the 12 months have been an awful lot better than the preceding two years because of the amount of responsibility I now have. Yes, it can be a right pain being in-charge of the onsite fieldwork, and it means extra hours and extra pressure, but there are also a whole load of benefits. You get treated like an adult by both the manager and the client, you actually feel like you understand the client and their business, you also understand what it is you’re supposed to be doing and what needs to be achieved in which timeframe. Last week, however, I went back to being an assistant on what must be the world’s worst planned audit, and it’s seriously doing my head in (more…)

Today is a very special day indeed. Not only does it happen to be the birthday of my favouritest person Babel, but it marks the day on which he officially ceases to be A Young Person and has instead become a Grown-Up Oh yes, Babel has now reached the ripe old age of (more…)