They don’t. Trust me.

A number of years ago I remember my friend Damon writing a series of posts in the JEB forum, in which he suggested that BT stands not for British Telecom but for Bloody Terrible. This is a sentiment with which I can now sympathise.

For the past twelve months or so, we have been fortunate enough to have wireless internet in our house. It was a highly exciting development when my mother agreed to have it installed, and it has been even more exciting since Babel bought me my own computer and I can actually use it I got my computer at Christmas, and for the first six weeks or so, everything seemed to be going swimmingly well. But when we hit February, problems started to develop. Quite often I’d be using my computer bt night when suddenly the internet connection would cut out. Initially I assumed this was just some sort of random network problem and the signal was temporarily too weak for me to connect to, but it seemed different to any kind of connectivity issue which I had experienced elsewhere before. My computer was still able to detect the network, was proclaiming it to have an excellent signal in fact, but whenever I tried to connect to it it would say it was unable to, and Windows was unable to diagnose and repair the problem. What’s more, I soon discovered that leaving my computer switched off for twenty four hours and hoping it would cure itself was not successful. The only way to get the internet connection back was seemingly to turn the wireless hub off at the power and switch it back on again. This admittedly worked every time, but doesn’t seem an ideal solution to the problem. (more…)

I’m on audit in Wigan this week which is rather horrible. In fact there are an awful lot of work-related things to be depressed about right now, not least the severe hassle involved in trying to book off a single day as holiday, but nevertheless I am still incredibly happy about getting engaged The news is just about starting to sink in now and I’m getting a bit more used to wearing my ring as well. On Sunday I was absolutely paranoid that I was going to lose it somewhere, but the only time it’s fallen off over the last couple of days was when I was deliberately experimenting with shaking my hand as hard as possible to see at what point it might fall off I have told almost everyone I can think of to tell now, and everybody (who hasn’t met him!) thinks that I have a very romantic boyfriend (more…)

Since it is now February and I am no longer in Wantage, I have been trying to make some progress with my New Year Resolutions. Some of these have been going better than others. Buying a laptop was achieved before the new year even began, because Babel did a rather wondrous thing and bought one for me I love my new present so much that I occasionally just want to stroke it – perhaps the reason that it is now covered in finger prints. My aim this week was to buy a duster to clean it with, but I have failed most spectacularly. Does anyone have any ideas where I could buy a nice sort of duster? I’ve looked in all the homeware departments I can think of, and no one seems to be selling them (more…)

1. I have already answered this meme once on Facebook, but in Esperanto. You never know who might be reading in English, and I thought my answers would be more interesting if I didn’t have to worry about not saying things I didn’t want colleagues/relatives/school friends to hear. I’m answering it now in English because I’m at work and bored, but the answers won’t be as exciting. And I’m not going to tag another 25 people!

2. I am very frequently at work and bored, though you may already know that. I hate my job, with a vengeance. My aim for this year was to find a better job, but the recruitment consultant rang me last week to apologise and say that there are no jobs

3. I spend a lot of my time in hotels. So far this year I’ve spent one week in Oswestry and three weeks in Wantage. Between now and May, I have one week in Wigan, three weeks in Banbury, three weeks in London and two weeks in Swindon. This makes me wonder whether it is even worth me moving in with Babel, because I won’t see him any more frequently than I do now (more…)

Whilst I have been busy not posting, Babel and I have managed to have a couple of very pleasant weekends. Two weeks ago we went into Birmingham city centre, and as retribution for the fact that I had made him watch The Reader some weeks previously, Babel subjected me to a whole two hours of The Wrestler. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it might have been – in fact I’d go so far as to say that I enjoyed it in parts, but there were bits of it which were far, far too brutal and violent for my liking, and I don’t think that I would want to watch it again! (more…)

As part of my flirtation with cpanel yesterday, I created a new folder called 2009 in which to house this year’s photos. Now I’m not entirely sold on all this cpanel business – it seems like rather a pfaff – so when I wanted to upload a photo of myself right now, I decided to be lazy and use the wordpress uploading button instead.

I selected the photo I wanted to use and clicked okay. My computer tried very hard to upload it, it really did, but in the end it failed and spat out an error message at me, saying that the server was unable to write to the parent directory

Initially I found this error message confusing and distressing. And then, suddenly in a flash, it came to me! When I’d created the folder, I’d not thought to change the default permissions from 755 to 777. I don’t know how I can have been so silly…

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…)

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…)

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