Tales of the unexpected

Well I was all fired up to have a great start to the day and that's what I was aiming to do.

However there was one problem.

I got up out of bed.

First problem of the day. The car was totally iced up. Yes, totally iced up and we're nearly into April!

The next problem of the day was that This delayed me just long enough to miss the earlier bus from the car park which if not annoying enough, the bus driver watied until I had just pulled into the car parking space and was grabbing my bag before he pulled off.

and then the third problem of the day was that although my computer on my new desk had been set up it decided to throw the computer equivilant of a five year olds tantrum and stead fastly refused to let me log in properly. We had to go and fetch IT who then took half a hour to fix the thing.

So just to recep first day in a new team and I had a iced car, missed the bus and couldn't start work for half an hour.

The start to my first day with my new team certainly made an impression on me if no one else.

Still the day improved rather rapidly after that. It was still a little strange being with a new team but it's early days and I'm sure things will change as we get to know one another.

Later folks

New Day, New week, New Desk, New Team

Well it's a start of a new week tomorrow and of course starting in my new team tomorrow meansit will be a more interesting Monday then the usual.

Especially with my first job of the day being the rather important task of setting my new desk up.

Which was actually part of my old bank of desks.

But I won't be sitting in the same place, so I guess it would be sort of new/old desk.....

Wait I've confused myself.

Bit then again I've kinda been feeling confused all day. It's what comes of loosing a hour :-)

anyway,

Later folks

That time of year

Well we've been having a fantastic week weather wise. There's been blue skys, lots of sunshine and rather warm weather.

But now it's Saturday, the day I don't have to go to work and do you wanna take a guess what happened to the weather?

Well it went away rather rapidly leaving us with overcast skies and rather cool temperatures.

Which is rather annoying but I had the feeling irony wasn't going to let us get good weather on the day when we didn't have to work.

Plus we've reached that time of year when the clocks go forward so we're loosing a hour of sleep tonight. Which always tend to screw my sleep patterns up a little bit and of course it's not as enjoyable as when the clocks go back as after all you get a extra hour in bed then.

Yesterday was quite a odd experience a work as we were all packing our desks up ready for the move to our new places on Monday. I figured out that in my almost one and a half years at my current place this will be my sixth desk

Which is quite a lot when you consider at my last place I only went through four desks in nearly seven years!

We all chipped in for a present for our team manager which he really wasn't expecting as half the team are going with him and he was rather touched that we went to the trouble.

I am really going to miss working with the whole team as we all got on really well. But it could be worse I suppose, at least three of the team are coming with me, even if we're not going to be sitting next to each other. Their spreading us round the team we're joining. Which makes sense logically I suppose.

Doesn't stop it being annoying.

anyway,

Later folks

Have you spotted the connection to Iron Man?

A flaw in the plan

Well we had some good news today at work. The bosses have decided to give us a extra dress down day this week, so that means another five minutes in bed this morning as I won't have to get up to iron a shirt.

Awesome :-)

Okay well I suppose five minutes is really neither here or there but it seems like a lot first thing in the morning.

We've been told that we will be moving on Friday and in our new teams on Monday. So we need to move all of our things last thing on Friday to our new desks so our current bank of desks can be moved to their new postion over the weekend to where we can sit on them on Monday morning as our new desks.

Seen the ever so slight flaw in that little plan yet?

We did. Pretty darn quickly. Still at least coming up with a solution will be interesting :-)

Later folks

Pass, pass and sorta pass

Well I had my appraisal today and it went much better then I dared hope. In all areas except one I either got meets required levels or exceeded them which considering I'd only been in that department for just over seven months was pretty darn impressive.

In fact I got more exceeds then I did "meets" which put me in a pretty darn good mood for the rest of the day. Most of you who know me will be unsurprised to hear that I received my best rating for my attention to detail.

Funny that :-)

The one area where I didn't get a "meets" rating was decisiveness. Or to put it another way I check up too much for answers and then answer my own question. Or as the boss put it he knows I know my stuff as I wouldn't have got the ratings I did in the other areas, I just need to know that I know!

Seems that confidence issues are once again proving to be my achilles heel.

It was also a pretty nice day weather wise, plus it seems to have got much warmer all of a sudden. So much warmer in fact I've been able to leave my coat at home for the past couple of days.

Of course my appreciation of the warmer weather will no doubt be fleeting as usual. Give it a few weeks and I'll be moaning that it's too warm.


anyway

Later folks

Busy, busy, busy

I just don't know where the time is going right now. We're almost at the end of March which means three full months of the year have nearly come and gone!

That's a quarter of the year!

And why am I using so many exclamation marks!?

Because it's been a odd kind of day that's why!

Plus it's a Monday which can always be a bit hit and miss. We've also found out that we'll be moving next Monday which will mean we'll be in our new teams as of next week :-(

Which is sad but also exciting. It will also be very weird as I'll still be sitting at exactly the same bank of desks but at the other end of the building.

I've also got my appraisal tomorrow which will be the first "proper" appraisal I've had in a long time as I didn't have a proper one last year because I was still finishing probation. I guess I'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed everythings good.

anyway,

Later folks

Fun and games

With everything that has been in the news this week things have been feeling a little grim.

Because lets face it there's only so much talk you can hear about rebellions, uprising, no fly zones, earthquakes and nuclear disasters before even the most opptomistic of people start to feel a little down.

So it was a nice way to end out the week with Red Nose Day. Which for those of you who don't know is a annual charity day in the UK which ends with a evening of charity tv shows.

Most work places tend to do silly events for charity and my place was no exception.

We had the ever popular cake sale, there was a auction of donated gifts such as days out and so forth donnated by local companies, tombola's, a sponsored bike ride ( which didn't go as far as you'd think as it was on exercise bikes), some other fun and games and last of all and by no means least the trival pursuits game which involved some managers and seniors. You paid a pound a go and you could ask them a trival pursuits question. They get it right they were safe. If they got it wrong, you got to tip a whole can of either beans or custard over them.

It was fun, silly and quite unsurprisingly incredibly popular.

well when else can you chuck food over your bosses and get away with it :-)

anyway,

Later folks

He said, she said

Long term readers will know that I'm a bit of a news fan and I tend to read about what's going on in the world.

A lot.

Partly due to work and partly due to my own interest.

Of particular interest at the moment is the situation in Japan at the Nuclear Power plant. Unsurpisingly there is a lot of concern about whats happening and I found one article which pretty well summed up why people are getting worried.

Radiation is deadly and everyone knows it's a killer. But what scares people is you can't see it. You can't see it coming, you can't dodge it, you can't get above it, you can't jump out of it's way or seek shelter from in up a tree. If no one tells you it's there you'll never know.

The news stories have done nothing to curb fears. Although you can accuse some news outlets of being sensationalist ( and in all likely hood they are) what it boils down to is the mass of contradictory information ( or he said, she said) isn't helping. On one hand you have the Japense government saying the radiation isn't at harmful levels, but then say the helecopters dropping water can't get too close to the reactors due to dangerous radiation. They say that the exclusion zone is perfectly adequate yes the USA government advise a zone almost three times as big.

And if you keep reading as many news stories as I have you'll find that the contradictions just go on and on, and on .

But there is one thing that keeps being missed in the stories of blown reactors, destroyed buildings and nuclear spent fuel pools. Or to be more precise 180 people keep being missed.

They are the technicians who are currently still at the plant battling to avoid disaster. They form in part the one thing that most experts agree on. They are in all likely hood sacrificing their long term health if not their lifes and they fight to regain control. Their all "faceless" right now but you can not deny their supreme courage.

I guess we'll see what will happen in the next few days and if this incredibile courage can overcome disaster.

Live and in glorious detail

With my current job it's important that we stay knowledgable about current events. As lets face it it's entirely possible that anything which could happen anywhere at anytime will affect the very next call you take.

So as you can imagine there's been a lot of focus on Japan right now. Which is well... what can you say. Here you have one of if not the most technically advanced nation in the world going about it's business and Mother Nature suddenly decides to go thwack!

The shots coming out of Japan are almost unbelievable and the death rate even more so. It's a shame that the higher the death rate goes the harder it is to grasp it. Whole towns have been wiped away. Just gone. I was thinking about Geektown and just couldn't imagine what it would be like if one morning it was just gone.

Of course with everything going on in Japan it's easy to forget that things are still kicking off in the Middle East as well.

It certainly is a very unsettled world right now.

Outcasts outcasted

Well despite my best hopes the inevitable has happened and so the day after the series 1 finale aired it's been announced that Outcasts has been cancelled.

Which means it will join the long list of TV series with cliffhangers that will never get resolved.

I'll admit the series had it's flaws, firstly insisted that it was not a sci-fi show and quite frankly it ended with a episode that couldn't get more any more sci-fi based.

But it was improving and to be perfectly honest it was far better then Primeval's last series.

However it was too late and with it probably goes the last chance to see any new sci-fi on prime tv British tv for sometime to come.

It's been a busy few days at work but the first of the moves have started so it won't be long until we'll be moving desks. However in my case it will be literally, as the bank of desks we currently sit at are going to be moved across the building to where we will be sitting as part of our new team.

We actually had our last "official" team meeting today which was a very bittersweet affair as we're such a close knit team we're all going to really miss working together. Still it could be worse as at least we'll still be working with some members from the team.

anyway,

Later folks

The first signs of spring?

Somebody spent way too much time thinking about that

In for a closer look

No it's my Bed!

Owen and Grumpy face off

Sunset on a Sunday afternoon stroll

How to fail more tests with dignity

A sense of Scale

We hired the giant inflatable slide again for a YSA activity. For those of you who know Loughborough Chapel I think this picture gives you a great idea of just how big this thing is!

I Say. Just how many YSA can you fit on a inflatable slide?

This many!

How to fail tests with Dignity

More of the same and more of the old

it's been a strange couple of days at work as we've moved into the sort of "middle phase" of moving teams.

So this means we have less to do front line wise but we're getting a lot more to do backline wise. In fact quite a lot more. It's not exagerating to say we're getting three times as much backline stuff as we were. But we we have enough time to cope with it. Just.

My speedy typing skills are extremely useful right now.

But despite the heavy workload I have to say I have been really, really enjoying the challenge and can't wait for my next round of training next week where things will start to get really interesting.

Elsewhere in slightly depressing news the cost of petrol is now only two pence away from hitting that £6 a gallon which to convert that for my American readers is $9.76 ( and Nemesis thought petrol was exspensive when she was here in the uk!)

Anyway, I'm off to see if I can find some inspiration.

Later folks