Humph!!!!

Palm powered

Well, It’s taken me three and a half years, but I’ve finally decided to start using my PDA properly. I tend to use it to transfer details of my diary and contacts between bases, and it’s really useful for that sort of thing. But apart from that, it’s just a toy. Anyway, with Outlook and stuff, it’s really easy to jot down notes in the “To do” list rather than just leaving bits of paper with scribbles hanging around. Indeed, the Mind gym advocates writing down all good ideas as soon as you have them; moreover, it says that some great innovations have come about by thinking of what you’ve got and then trying to think of the exact opposite (stuffed crust pizzas are an example). So yes, I’m starting to make notes in my PDA and categorising them according to projects or people and then I can bring up the tasks as and when. If I can be bothered of course.



Stuffed crust pizzas are something that I’ve never particularly fancied in all honesty, I’m more of a thin and crispy to tell you the truth. But I suppose they’re a huge marketing success so that’s what counts.



Carmelita here insists on saying “So you haven’t got access to his electronic?”, meaning “Has such and such given you rights to his Outlook diary?”. I guess there’s nothing wrong with saying “his electronic”, it’s just that when you hear it 40 times each day at very loud volume, it becomes rather tiresome. Also, it’s indicative of how backward some people’s working practices are: I didn’t realise people used anything other than electronic diaries at work these days, especially when lots of people need to know where the head honcho is.



She’s now talking about her latest holiday:she has about 5 foreign holidays each year, it’s amazing. Then again, she washes her clothes by soaking them in the bath and claims lieu time for simply hanging around work till 6pm, so she has the time and resources to do this.



Did I tell you about the swan? There’s a little pond near here and, last spring, it was home to a pair of mating swans, as well as the usual ducks. Some charming individual killed one of the swans and it caused a fair bit of outrage, quite rightly too. However, Carmelita’s suggestion to prevent such an unfortunate event happening again was to “move all the birds to the canal, drain the pond, fill it with concrete and use it for car parking!” Yes, because the people who killed the swan wouldn’t be able to find their way to the canal, would they? Honestly. I won’t go into the episode of litter on the expressway because my arteries can’t take the surge in blood pressure at the moment.



After a ranting e-mail to my line manager, after she’d expressed concerned about the disappearance of my usual friendly, happy-go-lucky persona and the manifestation of very grumpy one, I got a phonecall from her in which she tried to counsel me. I’m not knocking her and I think an awful lot about her, she’s great, but when you’re feeling completely crap about everything, it doesn’t help to be told: “At least you’ve got a job. And it could be much worse; at least you’re not in Thailand”. True, I’m not in Thailand, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? There are no exclusive rights to feeling wretched and in my current frame of mind, given my current situation, I feel bloody wretched.



So that’s me for the moment. I’m off to the gym tonight. I went on Tuesday evening and I didn’t half smell rotten by the time I’d finished; I made myself feel quite poorly so I felt quite sorry for the poor people that were either side of me when I was on the cross trainer – I didn’t do my arms though, so I tried to minimise the pollution as much as possible at least.