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

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…)

I have just logged into my blog and been instructed that I need to upgrade my WordPress to version 2.7. I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but it feels to me that for the past few weeks, every time I’ve logged into WordPress to make a post, I’ve been asked to upgrade. I’ve literally only just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.5, which as far as I could see had no discernible (or discernable??) advantages over WordPress 2.6. Sometimes I wonder whether I ought to go to the trouble of upgrading at all, but then Babel has installed a nifty little plugin which does most of the work for me, and people who know about computers have given me the impression that these upgrades are more important than I will ever understand. Having had all those issues with 3ix, I don’t want to slack off on upgrades and leave myself open to some other sort of security problems down the line. (more…)

I apologise for the distinct lack of blogging over the course of the past week, and resolve to do better going forward After my rather wonderful birthday, I proceeded to have a rather miserable week in which I succumbed to a slight cold and had to get up at the godforsaken hour of five in the morning to commute to London. I was booked to a small audit in London, of a computer software business my firm had never dealt with before, and so there was some uncertainty over how long the job was going to take. For this reason the manager decided it was going to be too risky for me to book hotel accommodation, which I then might have to cancel at a later date and incur charges for, and thus I merrily agreed to commute. Commuting to London is something which sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on paper, but when it gets to 5am, it’s cold and dark outside and your breathing resembles that of Darth Vader, it’s the sort of thing you wish you hadn’t volunteered for (more…)

A year ago yesterday, Babel presented me with this website I must say that it was one of the biggest surprises of my life, and it’s taken me most of the year to get over it! Yesterday was once again my birthday, and so my website is a year old and I am a rather shocking quarter of a century (more…)

Babel explained this to me on Monday evening, and it was so helpful that I thought I’d paste it here so that I stood more chance of remembering it. I’m already doing woefully badly at remembering the difference between fewer and less, you and me v. you and I, but I am trying… (more…)

This morning I have had to get up at 5.30 to go to Wantage, and so I am depressed Forget the fact that Babel routinely gets up at this time to go to work; he’s not human so he doesn’t count Getting up at this time of the morning makes me feel ill, and going to Wantage makes me feel that life is devoid of all possible hope and purpose. Forget sending people to Coventry, Coventry actually has quite a lot going for it when you compare it objectively to Wantage. Honestly, that place is a godforsaken hole. (more…)

I am almost loathe to write this post, because I suspect everyone who reads it is going to at best disagree with me and at worst be mortally offended. Probably if you’re particularly patriotic or have a relative in the army, you just shouldn’t read this, because I promise my viewpoint is going to be irreconcilably oppposed to the viewpoint of 95% of the population.

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, tomorrow is Armistice Day, and I am currently undergoing my yearly ritual of politely declining to buy poppies. I have nothing against Remembrance Sunday as a day, and I am more than happy to say prayers for soldiers on both sides of the conflict. I am actually very interested in the First World War especially, and go through periods of addiction to the literature of that time. But there is no way on this earth that you are ever going to persuade me to buy a poppy. (more…)

The nights are drawing in, the Christmas decorations have long since been up in Birmingham city centre, and it’s getting to that traumatic time of year when I have to think about buying presents. Babel was inconsiderate enough to be born a fortnight before Christmas, which means that the run-up to December is very fraught indeed as I try to think of not one, but two acceptable presents

I am not very good at buying presents in general, and buying presents for Babel is particularly problematic. You can’t buy him music, because he doesn’t listen to it. You can’t buy him DVDs, because he downloads anything he wants to watch. You can’t buy him books, because unless you agree a specific book with him in advance, the chances are he’ll have bought it, read it and reviewed it before you get to give it to him. You can’t buy him clothes, because he’s not a clothes sort of person and he has an abnormally large neck. You can’t buy him aftershave, because he wouldn’t use it, and you can’t buy him chocolate because it wouldn’t help his figure. So out of all my usual male-present-buying ideas, the only one that remains is socks and since we disagree in any case over what constitutes an appropriate sock, I feel this is territory best avoided (more…)

The most dreadful thing happened last night! :cry:

Babel very kindly came to have dinner with me after work, because we hadn’t had much chance to talk to each other at the weekend. We initially struggled slightly to find somewhere to eat, because everywhere was busy and full of accountants, but ultimately ended up in a branch of O Neils, which certainly isn’t my favourite establishment but was nevertheless better than nothing. I was a bit disappointed on two counts; firstly, that our favourite pub to eat in opposite where I work has just been rebranded as an “eatery” and is now full of yuppies. Secondly, that my second pub to eat in just down the road from where I work is operating a new dress code such that if you can only go in if you dress like an accountant I had quite a nice barbecue chicken melt in O Neils though, and afterwards we went on a walk in a quest for coffee, and it was all very pleasant until we tried to get back to the car. (more…)