Arrived...

I've landed. It's quite good here at the new job - bit chaotic, but it'll suit me down to the ground.
Already, I've had a negotiation with a sales person who thinks all accountants are trolls. Then again, I mainly consider all sales people to be drama queens.

I've also generated a pretty-coloured spreadsheet, already it feels like home.

Unfortunately, I've taken too much on, so have now to prepare for the shared service tomorrow, go to see S, and type up Sanctus1 minutes. Less urgent things are also hovering. But add eating and breathing, and it's all becoming mightily unfeasible.

Perhaps I won't be able to get past the husband's password on the computer at home. That would help me put some things off til tomorrow.

Going, going

It' s my last day ever at TPBS. I even passed the exit interview.
Of course, I don't know what the web access will be like at my new job, or whether I'll have time to blog, so either this is goodbye or the start of me actually telling people where my blog is cos I've decided it's worthwhile having one.

Who knows?.....

It's also the 40th anniversary of John Lennon's famously ill-considered remark that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. So think on.

Pass the parcel

I got a card through the letterbox on Monday. One of those Royal Mail ‘we called but you were out’ things. On the back, it gave the address of the sorting office in Eccles.
Eccles? What’s going on there?
So I ring the number, and tell them I’ve got a card to say they tried to deliver, and can they deliver it to my work address? Is it in Eccles? Well, no.
It seems that someone has a bunch of cards from Eccles, and is using them in the city centre area, despite repeated appeals from put-upon staff at the Eccles office, who have to deal with irate people who’ve gone all the way out there in person, only to find the card is lying to them. The nice lady gives me a number to call for the Oldham Road office.
This gets me through to a rather confused person who does admit to being the Oldham Road sorting office, but tells me after a while that she doesn’t have my parcel because it’s not her department. She gives me another number, almost identical to hers.
I ring this number. It is the sorting office. A woman tells me that they won’t re-deliver to my work address. She asks for my address. I tell her. Then she wants to know the postcode for my work address. Having convinced her that it really is in the city centre, she relents, but before agreeing to re-deliver, she tells me that first she should check whether they’ve got it.
Given the way this is going so far, I am fully prepared to hear that it isn’t there. Fortunately, after what seems like ages, she comes back and agrees that they do have it, and will re-deliver. I then confuse her utterly by working in a building that has a name as well as a street number. I don’t mention that I’m leaving at the end of the week, as I presume they’ll try to deliver the next day.

Fortunately, I am right about this. I now have a parcel on my desk. It is quite large.
Originally, I ordered a skirt and top by mail order, which arrived in a packet small enough to be stuffed in the mailbox. Having returned one item for being elephant-size, the replacement has arrived in a box about four times the size of the original.
Perhaps it isn’t the skirt I wanted. Perhaps they’ve sold out, and it’s the other potential choice. Until I open the box, perhaps the skirt is both the cream a-line AND the flowered fifties-style.

It is: 2.5 working days til I leave. 24 days to Greenbelt. Getting closer!

More culture

We went to the theatre last night. This did involve a fairly long saga about me phoning up for tickets, discovering that the best and also cheapest seats can only be booked on the day, so I splashed over there in the freak rainstorm last night (sandals, no coat, of course) only to find they’d all gone, and I ended buying almost exactly the tickets I would have bought when I phoned up last week anyway. Still, I was then able to get home, shower and cook before going out again, to drink execrable wine at the Royal Exchange, and watch Mirandolino, which promised to be a jolly good romp about one woman triumphing over several men. I quite liked it, but husband was less impressed, as he felt all the characters were unlikeable, and one in particular had a comedy stutter, which was a bit unkind. I on the other hand am quite happy watching a woman win the battle of the sexes, and a couple of really good laughs. The whole thing unravelled a bit in the second half, though.
On the way home, we went to a pub that should theoretically sell fine wines. My Pinot Grigio was a bit pants though.
And so to bed, full of too much bad wine, after spending some time trying to decipher the voice text left on our answerphone. Eventually we worked out that we did know the number, and got a real text message, which made much more sense.

Most bizarre things overheard through the window of a canal-side office:
Hey Patrick! I think we’ve just run over the dog!

It is: 3.5 working days til I leave. 25 days to Greenbelt.