DIARY ENTRY 6

from B. J. S.
to maketodayhistory@gmail.com,
date Tue, May 6, 2008 at 11:38 PM
subject May 6th, 2008

hide details 11:38 PM (7 hours ago)


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6.00am
Woke to the dreaded alarm, dreaming that I was an airline mechanic warning a pilot that his jumbo jet had serious maintenance issues and was likely to crash, but he decided that he had to stick to his schedule and took off anyway, and then about Britain being held to ransom because the Queen had been hijacked inside Parliament – pretty normal stuff.

6.10am
Switched off alarm and attempted to get back into the dream, which was far too interesting to leave

6.30am
2nd Alarm clock rang. Checked blogs, e-mails, downloads, Facebook, group updates etc.

7.10am
Drove to work and planned out the day and what I needed the team to get done

7.30am
One of the guys turned up for work with four un-weaned kittens! He had found them yesterday, completely abandoned under one of our containers, in a cardboard box and decided to take them home for his family. Unfortunately, after a night of unsuccessfully being able to nurse them, his father had instructed him to return them to work, or they would go “into the pot”, (I blame food prices)
An hour of bedlam ensued, with angry kittens disrupting my workflow and mensa candidates coming up with ideas about feeding them every two hours from various contraptions ranging from rubber gloves, syringes to condoms and intravenous drips, someone finally had the sense to call the RSPCA. Relieved that they could take them, I instructed the kitten guy to drive them down to Spring Garden before they starved to death.

8.30am
Had to lend my pickup to someone for most of the day, so being office bound I decided to use the time to plan and organize the next two weeks – installations and boring stuff like that, oh and did I forget to mention book my vacation!

9.30am
Nicha and I then had a fight with the office printer, because, (like one of those bad dreams), it kept spewing hundreds of duplicates of the previous days stuff out and the only way we could get it to stop was to unplug it. As soon as it was plugged in again it would come to life and start spewing again, resurrecting old completed print jobs!
Dave, the computer man came round and reconfigured the network and erased conflicting versions (or something like that), solving the issue.
Spent the rest of the morning doing routine admin stuff, made some calls, & dealt with enquiries.

13.30pm
Realised in horror that I had been abandoned without vehicle, and that there was no way to get any lunch! Using every last survival instinct I checked the GPS tracker to see if there were any spare fleet vehicles in the vicinity. Spotting a large truck that was not being used for the afternoon, I plotted my escape.
I phoned up the local gas station (which makes a rather yummy chicken wrap in “Tiger” Sauce), and thought I would introduce them to the concept of pre-ordering. To my amazement, it worked and upon my arrival I was treated to a smile, a girl asking if I phoned for a wrap, and very promptly, my food! I was stunned! This is the way to go!! To hell with queuing for flabby old junk food again!

14.00pm
My happy time-savings were sadly negated this afternoon. The frustration came from the USA, (or perhaps, a call centre in New Delhi). I had to order some memory for a Dell computer … My boss specifically wanted me to get the parts from Dell, for reasons I won’t go into. WELL – if you have never experienced the Dell hotline, you have a treat awaiting you …. NOT!

Ist call – after a series of computer voice questions, I was put on hold for at least 20 minutes without so much as a prompt to ask me if I wished to continue holding – I thought I had been cut off , but then tried to restore my faith in American service. OK that’s it – too long.
2nd attempt – went through the same endless list of questions about which department I really wanted from computer-animated voices – “if your call is concerning your service plan, press 1, if you wish to purchase printer peripherals press 2, if you wish to purchase a monitor, a diode, a fuse or a lead press 3, your call is important to us…”, and so on, so I waited the statutory 15 minutes and hung up
3rd call – got through within minutes (I had chosen the option to say I wanted to buy a new computer) …Relief! … only to find out that they no longer supported our 2001 computer with spare parts and that was that!
4th call – phoned one of those unheard of dotcom companies from Google and successfully placed my order in minutes for the part that I needed. Happiness!

15.30pm
Decided to destroy some expired product – We had to have photographic evidence in order to claim back. The boy inside came up with the scheme of driving over 80 odd cases of juice with a large truck!!

16.00pm
Lined the juices up, behind the back wheels of the vehicle. Well it was quite fun and the truck got stuck amongst the cases for a while, while I directed and filmed the scene with my video camera.

Spent the next hour and a half picking up 500 flattened half-full juice cartons, and became covered in a mixture of Grapefruit and Orange juice (fruit punch)? Was soaked up to my knees in sticky concentrate. Realized it would have been easier to have taken them to the landfill … but much less fun!

18.00pm
Hosed off feet, checked the filming came out OK, and drove home to bathe and launder my clothes!

Enjoyed listening to Mr. Wickham on the radio on the way home, who was discussing meat in China, Vegetarians, how Winston Hall (a more than once prison escapee) went vegetarian for a while and as a result developed special abilities to jump over big walls.

18.40pm
Read reminder about diary and jotted down some of the things that happened today.

19.00pm to 21.30pm
Had very nice Thai Marlin Curry with rice and pappodums, mango chutney and raita, followed by meringues and fresh cream.
Played a couple of rounds of Canasta, won the match and then went back to my apartment to continue with the day’s diary.

21.30pm onwards
Typed out diary entry, made some calls and watched the end of August Rush on the computer.

I'm outta here!