Be Excellent To Each Other

Who else is at work?

I love the dead shift. Just three people in the office, and you can actually get some work done.

I assume, anyway. I'm coding Space Cows.

I have arrived back to a mountain of emails. Stupid american clients who don't take time off over christmas.

Had to cancel long-lunch 1 to clear them. Boo-urns.

I'm in. The stupid cunts that make up the management here aren't. I've bypassed all the locked-down internet browsing security and so I'm going to update Peoww a little and then at lunch I'm going to have an hour of shopping with the vouchers I got as prezzies.

I'm honestly not expecting to do any work this week.

In all week. Monday was awful, but Tuesday and today have been okay. Pretty much business as usual, not "dead shifts" at all.

Here in body but not really in spirit. Pootling away at a few bits but not with any intensity.

I'm in. Mostly my work here involves writing up technical documentation to support the various projects being undertaken by the IT department here, but since there's so few people in, there's really not a great deal I can do.

Sadly, my manager, who sits opposite me, is here this week, so expect plenty of posts from me as I attempt to look busy by typing lots. I'm also going to try to do some of the mock assignments I've been given to do for my web design college course, though I'll probably just do the design stuff here and the actual coding at home. I might see if I can get that logmein.com thing working to see if I access my home computer with any degree of efficiency for some basic Dreamweaver and Photoshoppery.

If you want to waste time looking like you're doing something for work then you could always just use notepad and a browser and follow some basic HTML/CSS tutorials. Even if your course is focussed around using Dreamweaver having these basics will come in very handy.

http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss.en.html

The course is totally centred around Dreamweaver, but we are taught the HTML/CSS along the way and I have some prior history with it. The biggest problem is lack of any kind of image manipulation software other than MS Paint and I need to do some basic Photoshoppery as part of the assignment. I came up with some bullshit excuse about a month ago to get GIMP installed on my work computer, but it wouldn't deliver properly via Novell Zenworks, so that was the end of that.

Edit: I can't manually install anything due to being on Windows 7 and not having administration rights on my own machine. The only non-standard thing I have on this computer is the Chrome web browser.

Supposed to be off all this week but popped in to reboot a server. That was at 9:30 and I'm still here now as it looks like the registry is corrupt on it and there are no system restore points I can use to recover the files from. The box wasn't set up by us and the only backup is an Acronis TrueImage file. Hopefully we can get this other company sorted because I don't particularly want to be here today.

I'm in today and tomorrow. Wondering what to do now given that my lunch companion cancelled like a big sucky loser.

I'm not in...but will be walking passed the office on my way to the board game / uber geek shop on the Wicker in Sheffield.

Does that count?

Not in today or Friday, but in tomorrow.

That's entirely theoretical though, since I have a horrible cold and am coughing up all sorts of horrible phlegmy crap, so there's no bloody chance I will actually go to work tomorrow.

That said, so many people are not in tomorrow that I'm not even sure who to call to say I'll not be there!

Bored. bored bored bored bored bored bored bored. bored.

Oh, man, they really let you know about it, don't they!

Clients, not too bad. In reality, their stuff isnt hugely urgent and they know it, and aren't fussed about getting it turned around uber quickly. However, they have a lot more work that we could do for them, and so I want to impress to get that extra stuff. Turning it round when they know it is a holiday period for us will look good.

However, I've remembered that the only way I manage to justify working these three days in the past is by making my evenings fun, so I have booked tickets to see Richard Herring tonight seeing as the wife is unlikely to join me on a pub crawl. Tomorrow will be lunch with Craster.

Speaking of which - I'm preferring Battery for tomorrow, seeing as I'll almost certainly be going to Osatsuma tonight. Curiosity, you should come too.

Word.

Went to the gym instead. I love the gym when it's dead!

Apart from when my trainer overdoes me on the leg session and I puke all my Weetabix up. Then realise I have no cash (only Euros) and left my card at home. The walk back to gaff sucked.

Alas, I'm not feeling very well. In that I'm surely nearly dead from flu or some such.

I've just told (well, at 4.30) the three people who are here they can go home.

Now I'm waiting for a client to try and phone one of them in a panic.

I had to book the time off

Totally and utterly, fucking,

So my mate in Maryland was building his PC on boxing day. Absolutely lovely PC he's bought and I am most envious of the motherboard.

Any way, the following day he gets over a foot of snow (part of the east coast slamming). The next morning he logs on and I say "Yay ! today we can get all your stuff finished up and play online games !". He says no. Apparently his district manager had spent the morning scoping to see who could get into work and then ordered them in. So, off he goes risking his neck to go to the Verizon mobile store and then sit there all day on MSN doing fuck all. Oddly no one decided to risk their car or their ass to buy a mobile on that day. What a 'kin surprise.

But it was the same for me when I worked at Blockbuster. I ended up having to abandon my car (Ford Taurus, kinda like a Granada Scorpio) and my colleague Adam put his Grand Am into a ditch. We both made it after asking friends to pick us up in 4WD jeeps only to spend 8 hours freezing our tits off in a store with broken heating. Again, oddly, no one decided to rent a fucking movie that night.

Fucking greedy capitalist assholes. In the end the whole town was put into a 'state of emergency' and if you were found driving you would be arrested. I guess the cops and fire engines had enough of pulling people's cars from ditches and cleaning up the mess of car crashes.

But aye, long story short, those cunts don't stop work for nothing or no one.

Well, I'm still here. So far today I've done a tiny bit of design for my web design assignment and read a bit more of H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness, as I found a free .rtf version of it that I could open up in Word.

Exciting.

Same here. Most of us have to save three days holiday for this week. Even with that I still had five days left over this year.

Ended up popping back to the office again. An engineer came to take the server away and need to copy a disc image backup that we had that was 4.6gb. However, it wouldn't transfer to his laptop as his drives were FAT32.

When I went to the 24 Hour Tesco to try and buy stuff for lunch and dinner on Tuesday, it was closed, though lots of staff were going in. To avoid looking like a berk I went to the cash machine and got some money out, then drove over to the service station and asked the guy inside (as I bought a prepacked sandwich) what time the store was opening.

10am, apparently. I didn't fancy waiting four and a half hours so I paid for my sandwich and left.

JohnCoffey: It sounds like that twattock of a manager in my place (who expects everyone to come in but makes zero effort to clear the long path on our property from the front gate to the door) is reading the same 'how to make your staff hate you' books as them,

Fuckin A dude. Even at the call center we were 'ordered' in. I clearly remember it.

We have heard from the township that they are going to pre salt all of the roads and we are personally gritting the parking lots so if you don't turn up for work you won't have a job when you next arrive.

Imagine their fucking horror, then, when I came into work only to get out of my car, fall on my arm and rip my jumper spraining my wrist in the process. On the parking lot they swore up and down would be gritted but wasn't due to the fat lazy cunt shift leader stuffing his face full of fucking donuts.. LAWSUIT was the first angered word that shot from my mouth when I walked into work, bloody and bruised. No surprise they shit themselves, paid for a new jumper and alarm remote fob ($120 Clifford jobby) and gave me two paid days off.

I'm working this week, but through choice. I'd rather have my days off when I can enjoy them, and I get to take them any time.