Here We Go Again!....

Adventures Of The Nothing Man –
The Rebel Returns..... Eventually

Friday 21/07/2017 – Well it’s as good a place to start as any…..
Ok so hello everyone again… Those of you who’ve read the Nothing man blog(s), will know that I had grand intentions of turning this into a book…. Well maybe that’ll happen and maybe it won’t (and probably it won't) but I felt when I started the project that I was betraying the style of the original blog, so I’ve stopped writing that. Today for some reason and maybe it was just because it was in my mind, I decided to start writing the “blog” again……I may publish it on line I may not (in which case it’s then a diary and how come you're reading it?!).

By way of an introduction and a quick summary to bring you all up to date; I’m now 48, still married, still got two boys (who are now men), Ryan 24 and Jack 21 oh and Alan the Cat (now known as Marley / Get out of the bloody way / Bubba (Mandy) / The Rebel MC (Me)) / Mobbly Mibs and any other stupid name we can give him as the mood takes us.

Just over a year ago Mandy and I decided to up sticks and move ourselves to Dorset, to a little Grade II listed 2 up 2 down cottage (you can read my vent of bile blog regarding listed buildings and the many pompous arses that inhabit this space just to get on my tits! here ... ) .
This was prompted in the main by Ryan moving out and into a house he shares with his girlfriend Georgie and Jack going off to university. I wasn’t going to tell them where we’d gone but Mandy insisted that I had to tccch.

The cottage needs to be repaired, renovated, rebuilt, demolished, tidied, repainted, plastered etc etc etc etc… (You get the idea!). In that time I’ve had / have two jobs… one with Christisthatthetime IT which was great because it was literally a 10 minute drive from home, which given the one before at Senseless in Brazingstoke was an hour and a half drive away was much much better. It was also better because I actually had stuff to do. Support Tickets…. Tickets….Tickets.
What wasn’t so good was the £7k salary drop I had to take to get it…. But you can’t have everything and money they tell me isn't everything (cough splutter, I think you'll find it bloody well is!).
Anyhow was chewin’ the fat with my friend Roachard from Copper Nitrate Centre and he basically offered me a job with a good pay increase working from home…. Happy days…. I’m two weeks in to this and so far so good.

Lumpate Digression...
09:00 – Ok so rewind a little bit….3 / 4 months ago I’m looking in the mirror (as you do) thinking “do I really need a shave ? A few more days wouldn’t hurt” and I feel a lump in my neck. This immediately sparks a memory albeit a hazy one of the same lump but some time previously…. Anyway I didn’t really think too much of it. Having moved down to a village just outside WombleTown I finally summoned up the interest and registered with a Dentist. When I then went for the required pre-checkup checkup (which is just a checkup isn't it?) he felt the lump and mentioned it to me, in a way that said "you should probably see someone about that". I mentioned it to Mandy and she told me to go to the doctors about it. I did and he was a bit like “welllll could be something might not be, problably isn’t….” (great thanks Doc)…. So he referred me to the hospital (not that he was worried in the slightest but he got me on the “fast track” for an appointment, still nothing to worry about eh?) , which is where you find me this morning….

I managed to find a parking space for the Lotus making sure that I could actually get out of the drivers door was something of an achievement but I’m 30 minutes early and need the loo (TMI?).

I made my way to the “Green Waiting room and checked my face in”. When I say checked myself in I don’t mean on Offyourfacebook, this is the NHS after all OFB (as it’s now known) hasn’t been invented here. In fact I’m amazed they have electricity. I would have used the self-check-in screens had any of them been working (“another NHS IT project gone tits up” I thought to myself !) . Fortunately, I managed to get seen by the consultant in a relatively short time (an hour), who proceed to prod my neck, squeeze the afore mentioned lump from inside and outside my mouth not the most pleasant of experiences I can tell you. I was going to mention the hypocratic oath but I’m not sure he’s taken it, in the country where he comes from.

He then announces that he wants put a camera up my nose ! “Ok” I said (like a fool, I mean what are you supposed to say when a consultant says that to you? “err no fuck off mate, give me a diagnosis without doing that” ??). So he squirts some stuff up my nose which he promises will numb it and then proceeds to slide the camera up my nose and down the back of my throat. The Nurse stroking my shoulders and telling me to “relax” in her eastern European accent ( I mean that’s like when the dentist tells you not to move when they’re taking an xray of your teeth)… all very surreal, but not as unpleasant as I was expecting.

The consultant said to me that he’d like me to go and get an ultrasound done…so I toddle off around the corner and checked in there (again not on OFB)… 20 minutes or so elapsed when a tallish man with grey hair appeared at the door and looking straight at me called my name. I looked around and noticed that I was the only Man in the waiting room, so wondered quite what the need for calling my name was but I suppose he’s practiced that and was bloody well going to do it. He then set off at break neck speed, to the room where the “magic” was going to take place…. To be honest I struggled to keep up with him and I’m not convinced I went into the right room. I was “greeted” by the doctor who advised me to lay on the bed (it was easier for him to do the ultrasound that way apparently). “so we’re going to see if I’m pregnant” I joked. It took about 5 seconds for the joke to register and with a smile now cracked over his face he applied the wet cold splodgy stuff to my neck. Lots of moving around and bleeps then ensued and in about 10 minutes it was all done. “Nothing to worry about” he explained, “it’s just a saliva gland but it looks completely normal to me”, “great” I said “thanks”. “I’ll do the report and get it sent round, it should be there before you get back to the clinic”. “Well” I thought “this is marvellous, the NHS really has got with the program of technology etc”…. how wrong I was….sigh.

12:00 Still waiting apparently for my results to come through, sigh… I offered to go and get them as they were literally a 2 minute walk away, but this just seemed to be laughed off.

12:30 Finally my name was called. The consultant says “all looks fine and nothing to worry about” I mean JESUS!!!!!!!

13:00 Made it back home… despite the daylight robbery that was the parking charge £3.60 I mean bloody hell !

14:00 Not much happening today, so I’ve taken the opportunity too book up the cinema 20:40 showing of War for the planet of the apes in 3D woop woop.

Sunday 23^rd July 2017

23:05 – Yup a late post this one…. We spent the weekend at POD’s godfather’s (not the Mafiosi type I hasten to add). We arrived at about 10:00 on Saturday morning and proceeded with them to the Bristol Festival, which seemed to consist of meandering around the dock area of Bristol looking at steam boats. We then headed back to theirs and out for dinner where upon I ventured to have 3 (yes 3, flipping count ‘em) Vodka and cokes. I know party animal eh ?

Sunday was basically a day of walking around some woods near the Longleat estate and then back to Jim and Gill’s for Sunday lunch. We got home about 5pm to a very grumpy, somewhat constipated cat, oh dear.

I must advise that the film was a bit of a disappointment…. Way too much acting going on and when you consider that most of the film was “acted” by CGI apes who don’t speak, it was about 2 hours too long imho.

Thursday 27^th July 2017
12:45 – Fast approaching pay day which I have in my mind as being tomorrow…which of course it won’t be it’ll be Monday as that’s the 31^st but I live in hope. Shopping last night was the highlight of the day, topped off with the treat that is MacDougals for tea. I say treat… Even though they have those wonderful spangly screens and even though I “Customised” my burger so it didn’t have tomato in it, I got back to the car only to discover two thumping slices of tomato, sigh. Mandy said I should go back in but It was soul destroying enough having to stand there and explain that my order was a take away order (another thing I specified on the screen)…sigh……I don’t think I could bear going back in and for another fucked up order. Luckily again this week our food shopping bill would have been pretty good were it not for the extra £10 we had to spend on birthday cards. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all the savings we would have had, had we not had to spend on things we’d not planned to buy, but by now I’m sure it’s a pretty massive sum !

So to work today, I say work, not really much to do at the moment. Roachard is up in the North somewhere doing something. I’ve come to the end of my testing so I figured I’d register my own domain name and try and get an email server working (why not eh ?).

Monday 31^st July 2017God I’m bored today… really wasn’t very much to do. Roachards idea that I go up to AppleTrees in London (the customer I’m supposed to be looking after for him) seems to be a good one were it not for the fact that he’s gone up there himself today. Oh that and the fact that a. there’s nothing to do and b. because the genius’s at work at Waterloo station have decided they’d close all but 5 stations meaning travelling to Waterloo is a bloody nightmare, not to mention getting home again. I’m thinking I’ll try and stretch it out until after holiday when things should be back to normal.

I made lots of enquiries today all nothing to do with work. We have the dilemma of what to do about Marley, so this evening I took the bull by the horns and went and saw Janet and John next door but one, in the big, but not really big house. I asked Jan if she would mind feeding Marley while we were away which she was more than happy to do but she wasn’t sure if they’d be around or not. If not then he has to go into a cattery and I have to pay to get him vaccinated against diseases he’ll never catch, but still hoops have to be jumped through….

Was a bit bored and disillusioned with the job today. It’s one thing getting paid nearly £800 a month more but I am starting to miss the interaction with people especially when there’s not very much to do. I’ve resorted to restarting the CCNA training videos I never got to the end of when I was at Senseless but even that I’m struggling to stay interested in. The CCNA (networking) and Visual Studio (C Sharp) are the two things that I really want to get done so I may as well devote some time to them while things are quiet.

Wednesday 2^nd August 2017

Well yesterday was very frustrating, you’d have thought there’d be chapter n verse about it but I was that frustrated with life generally I couldn’t bring myself to be bothered to type anything.

I did get an email from a former former former boss (I think that’s right) Nick Twatface from Luxoffit which basically said “we have a service provider for IT, thanks” which was in response to my touting for business email. Sort of sums up the man really… My email was quite nice really asking how the business was going and hoping all was well, there you go. I suppose I did stitch him up like a kipper or rather allow him to be stitched up like a kipper which cost him quite a lot of money in the end so I suppose those wounds run deep !Today I have the joyous task of looking into some mobile device management software (oh lucky me), but I’ve also decided that it’s now time to start the count down timer for my retirement. I’m sure that by the time I get there I will regret not having to get up at stupid o’clock and go do a job I really can’t be bothered to do but right now, right now, I really don’t see it.

Oh well back to Mobile Device Management then… Luckily the selected software (BaraTuesday) was written in Germany, so obviously they’ve used Goggle Translate to translate the manual into English which makes the whole task that much more difficult…still in my effort to maintain English – German relations, I’m battering the hell out of their service desk… you put a support email address out there, I’m gonna bloody well use it!

I should also add that Bleedin’ Terrible have called… their Level 2 team to be precise. The advise that they’ve “detected” a fault on my line, well what a shocker… 29 and counting disconnections of my broadband service since Friday, tbh I think we’re all surprised that there’s actually a problem, who knew? What the same fault you reported to them last week that OpenyourmouthandReach said they’d “fixed”? Well yes that’d be correct. Luckily Azmar (I’m not making that up) told me that he’d now reported it to OpenyourmouthandReach as the fault was outside my property (trust me I’ve been out there and looked, no sign of a problem that I can see) and they would be in touch on Friday (I can’t wait), doubtless to tell me that they’ve also “Fixed” the problem, then he’ll say (as it is normally a he), “oh wait, no there’s still a problem”…. This is the way of things… Good old Dorset, no Mobile phone signal, no motorway, dodgy broadband…ahh this is the life….

Thursday 3^rd August 2017
So, last night was Gym induction day (things really are bad if I'm going to a Gym)….not really feeling it we made our way to the gym where a way to bouncy young lady proceeded to show us all the machines and what they could do. I was mightily impressed at how bouncy she was !

We were then left to it and we spent about 40 minutes getting, hot, sweaty and quite tired…. I’m not convinced this is the best use of my time but the scales tell a different story (not that exercise on it’s own will help me with that as we know).

Never the less we’ll give a whirl and on a payg basis at least we’re not tied into anything.

Today has been another day of not really achieving very much… having had an argument with Bleaagh from CriterioffIT (former colleague) about why my email server wasn’t receiving any email the day descended into chaos. I had my teeth drilled, smoothed and generally sodded about with today so I’m really not in the mood for anyone really….

Roachard has been complaining whilst not complaining (because that would be inpolite) about a lack of progress with the projects he’s asked me to get into but I explained that is because I’m still waiting for him to give me the answers to the questions that I’ve asked him !!

Never mind, I’m sure it’ll work out in the end…. Though I remain to be convinced…

Ryan is being illusive, I’ve been trying to pin him down on our trip to Anfield but as yet It’s proving difficult to get him to respond, pick any dates or give me the voucher code so I can book anything.

Monday 25^th September 2017Right so we’re back from our hols and I’m finally in a mood to contribute more to this…. The house ceiling decided the week before we went away that it would partially fall off… Gravity having taken it’s toll on the 300 year old plaster (if in fact it is 300 years old that is !). So we cleared up and that took 2 ½ hours to sort out and we finally can see our cream rug again….

Bob the neighbour (now builder) is cracking on with his extension and we have almost reached an agreement on what fence we’re going to put up. I’ve also asked him about getting a skip and a man to fill it, with the concrete that’s surrounding our house and making bits of it damp.

So far this week I’ve only fallen out with 3 people on the period property website, which for me and given that it’s a Monday is bloody good going. I post stuff now and don’t bother replying to the morons that frequent the forums… aha! Forum Morons awesome !!

Not much happening today, cracking on with Azure Information Protection which by the time you read this will be called something else (like mind control or something), but you never know.  To say I’ve been badgering the Microsoft support team (well they will provide free support for this) is something of an understatement….

Liverpool with Ryan at the end of the week should be good (if not a long and tiring journey)…

Friday 29^th October 2017

Well the excitement is building… off to pick up the hire car to then drive to Ryan’s and then on to Liverpool for our Anfield Experience stadium tour… really looking forward to it.

Saturday 30^th October 2017 (about 5am)

I’m writing this after the event, so I’ll just explain…. We arrived on Friday about 8pm having had the most horrendous journey up. The motorways for the most part were clear but the A34 up to the M40 was stacked due to some accident. Trusting the sat nav as we all do these days it then zig zagged us back and forth across the A34 through country lanes, all with their own traffic lights, school crossings etc for the next 2 hours. Arriving at the West Derby premier inn, with something of a headache and no tablets at about 8pm I wasn’t really in the mood to “do dinner” but they had a beefeater so we “booked” a table at 8:30pm.

I have to say that It was probably the noisiest restaurant I’ve ever been to, and given the state of my head not great.

Anyhow we ate up and went back to our respective rooms…

5am and I’m in the wideawake club, hot and cold sweats a banging migraine, nausea washing over me like a wave and I’m almost convinced the day is going to be a write off. Luckily the premier inn is right next door to an M&S foodhall and and a Lidl so I’m hoping that when they open at 8am (just the head banging 3 hours away) I can get some pain relief in me.

Luckily I dozed off and woke again just after 8am. I staggered up put some clothes on  made it to the M&S where luckily they had some ibuprofen and some paracetamol so I bought the max strength versions of both and took both at the same time…. I returned to my room, made coffee and waited the 30 minutes I’d agreed with Ryan that we’d leave the premier inn.

I met Ryan at the Costa next door to the premier inn and he’d helpfully got me a white americano which combined with the tablets seemed to take the edge off the migraine.

So off we drove to Anfield for our tour (only a 10 minute drive from the hotel), parking in the disabled car park (coz we were allowed to).

The day consisted of a tour around the ground with some headsets which we quickly dispensed with as to be honest I found myself concentrating more on that than the actual ground. Took some pictures then went to the museum which was great and took some more pictures, then we went to the shop where Ryan bought himself a shirt and I bought a scarf (well who am I trying to kid eh?).

Then it was back to the ground for our 3 course lunch and an audience with John Aldridge and Roy Evans. They were really good and quite funny with Roy mentioning John’s penalty miss against Wimbledon in the FA cup final, which was hilarious.

All to soon the day was over and we headed out of the ground with our souvenirs a bottle of wine from John Aldridge’s vineyard (which Ryan one in the heads and tails raffle) our signed pictures and our memories… a great day.

The drive back though long was pretty straight through and I made it home about 7pm exhausted but happy.

Tuesday 10^th October 2017

So Sunday was a very exciting day for me. My first semi-competitive 11 a side match (on grass) in almost 20 years (probably more if I really thought about it).

10:30am kick off so had to get up early ON A SUNDAY, not the most impressed I’ve ever been.

As is typically the case our team was made up of various ringers of varying ability and fitness.

The guy who was supposedly playing up front with me was good and young and fit which meant he basically played the whole game on his own not passing to me. Sure we won the game and he scored quite a few of our goals, but I’d preferred to have lost the game and been more involved really.

After the game I came home and progressively I became more and more tired. By early evening I could barely put one foot in front of another and my head began pounding again.

I was a complete wreck. Monday morning wasn’t any better and I basically lived on pain killers for most of the day.

Like a fool I decided I’d play 5 / 6 a side on Monday night but to be honest I’m glad I did as it was really good fun and bloody hilarious as 5 of us from Sundays game tried to run and play.

This morning I’m actually not feeling too bad, legs know they’ve done more than they should but other than that not too bad at all.

Steve a man with hands the size of dinner plates is busy digging up the concrete that surrounds our house and filling a skip with it. I could have done it all myself but there comes a time when the cost of paying someone is more attractive than the effort required to do it yourself so money well spent I think.

Conversely we’ve had a quote in from Alan “The Sheriff of Nottingham” Sheriff to replace the 30CM x 45cm piece of glass in our front door with some stained glass. £835.00, £835.00 I mean there’s a reason why I call him the sheriff of Nottingham, though I could also call him Robin Hood, but I’m not rich so that doesn’t quite work!! £835.00 !!!!!! Jesus.

Friday 8^th December 2017

Ok so this is obviously how it’s going to be…. Good old Xmas is nearly upon us again… I’ve managed to extract some ideas from Mandy about what she actually wants. I’ve also as usual come up trumps and booked us all (Me, her, Ryan and Jack) tickets to see the Prince exhibition at the O2 on the 6^th… I’m now paranoid that Jack will go himself as he’s going up to see wonderland with his girlfriend. Ryan knows about it so I’m also paranoid that he’ll mention it to Mandy in passing…

Rewinding a bit Tuesday saw me on a visit to AppleTrees in London, for a visit that was frankly a waste of my time but customers are customers at the end of the day, I suppose.

Having fixed everything (by mainly switching it off and back on again) I left about 4:30pm getting to Waterloo in time for the 5:05pm train to Poole which should only take the 2 ¼ hours to get back to Poole. Being about 20 minutes early for the train I managed to grab a seat with a table, awesome!

I’m in coach 2 of 5 when the announcement comes over the tannoy that the train will split at Southampton central and I need to be in the front 5 coaches at that point. “That’s ok” I thought “I’m in coach 2 of 5”.. then the display changes to coach 8 of 10 sigh…. So figuring that If I move now I might actually get a seat, I make my excuses and apologies to my fellow travellers scoop up everything my coat, phone, headphones, bottle of juice and my bag from the overhead shelf and struggle my way up the coach as it’s pulling out of the station. I stopped by the toilets and bikes and put my coat on (one less thing to travel) and then proceed down the train to coach 3 of 10… No seats! “Arse”… I then suddenly realise I’m short of a few items one of them being my phone (“Oh fuck!”), so I check everything my bag my pockets everything at least twice and I’m now panicking…. I make my way back down the train to where I was sitting and ask the people sat there now, if they’ve come across my phone and headphones? Lots of checking and looking under seats then ensue. They even offer to phone the phone and see if it rings (I’m pretty sure it’s on silent as I can’t stand ring tones)…. Sure enough it’s ringing on the phone I’m ringing from but nothing from the phone itself.

Giving it up as lost I’m really not feeling great either (having come down with a heavy cold on Monday)… I make my way back down the train to coach 3 of 10… I figure I need to get hold of Mandy and I come up with an ingenious plan to use my tablet, the train wifi and facebook to get hold of Jack to get him to get Mandy to try calling my mobile to see if someone has picked it up…. Well the train wifi failed.. I mean what is the point of train wifi when it actually doesn’t work…. I just about managed to get an email to Mandy to say that I’d lost my phone.

I arrived back at Poole in a foul mood, but trying to stay positive, I can buy a cheap phone and put it down to experience…but this cold isn’t improving.

Having got home and gone through the story, we sit down and I figure I should contact Jack on a stable medium and tell him I was ok and explain the story to him.

Running up OFB messenger I noticed a message from someone I didn’t know. Asking me if I had lost my phone !!! This person had found it by the bikes and was looking for the owner. I managed to describe the phone to her and she then put it in the post and returned it to me. The headphones are a disappointment but ultimately replaceable, the mobile phone was the most important thing… I have to say I was surprised that there’s a least one decent person in the world, she didn’t even want to be reimbursed for the postage…what a star !!

Having had two days off with this bloody cold I’m now right back at it. I have 3 laptops to setup one which needs fedexing to the US this afternoon… sigh…from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Tuesday 12^th December 2017

Well then, so having arrange with the British Heart Foundation to come pick up (for free) the large black leather chair I was somewhat disappointed when they turned up and after I made sure they could see the fire labels, say “oh hasn’t It got feet?” “errr no? I said does that matter” I asked, “well the chairs too low otherwise you see”, the young lad said… “well I said you might as well both fuck off then, I’ll just take it up the tip”… I mean the feet are an inch high, so their complaint was that this £600 chair which they were getting for free was 1” too low…. I mean 1” .. I am now resolved to take the bloody thing up the tip take a photo of the chair at the tip and send it to them just to spit in their eyes….. ooh it made me so mad.

Lucky me, I have two more laptops to setup … there has to be something better than this.

Roachford is being his happy self and thinks everythings all a joke, inside I’m slowly dying!

Thursday 14^th December 2017

Not really feeling it today, like so many other days. I get the customary “so whats on your agenda today” from Roachford, so I basically make up a list of things that I’m looking at. Some are real and some are just padding. He’s not really asking me because he wants to know though, he’s of course asking me because he wants me to look at something. RimFace from AppleTree has reopened a ticket just to annoy me to say that the thing I created to make their browsers go to their crappy intranet page isn’t working…. I need to find another way of saying “I don’t care”, but I know that he’s not done what I told him to do to make it work, so I really don’t know why I bother.

Oh well I spend a bit of time re-making this work for them and tell him to test it and let me know. I’m sure he’s going to come back and say it still isn’t working, funny how I can test it on a machine and it works just fine for me then, right, prick!

I am as you might have gathered not really in a good place at the moment. I don’t know 100% why, I think money worries is a part, the job is a bit crap and it’s the run up to Christmas, my least favourite time of year. A time of year when the family feel duty bound to need to come and see us or have us see them. I mean they’ve not been arsed for the whole rest of the year but now because it’s Christmas and they might get a present (which they won’t!) they’re interested. I could do without it really, I’d rather just have a holiday.

So one of the things I wanted to look at was seeing if I could make building these poxy laptops faster, so one of the ways to do this would be with a predefined image since Microsoft have decided to make upgrading Windows to the latest version such an onerous task taking 5 hours the last time I tried to do it and since building these things takes so bloody long with all the config and installations etc I figure imaging one and seeing if that makes it quicker would be a valuable use of my time. Roachford of course thinks differently, in the main because he didn’t think of it but also because he’s discovered a new thing called “Auto-Pilot” well we’ll wait and see how much of a “time saver” that is, I await to be convinced, so he tells me he doesn’t want me to look at imaging (like I was asking him!) but to look at Auto-Pilot instead, sigh… nothing like having your hands tied together.

The problem for me with this job is that I get to decide nothing and I’m made to do whatever he wants me to do. Sure working from home is convenient and means I don’t have to get up early. Sure he’s paying stupid money to do it but I’m actually falling out of love with IT and this job isn’t helping.

I think I’ll be looking again seriously in the new year.

Wednesday 20^th December 2017

Well things are looking a bit brighter on the job front anyway as I’ve now got some stuff to get stuck into. It helps pass the time at least. Having rolled into work at 9:15am (well who’s gonna tell me off right?) I’m getting down to configure Microshaft OutofTune which should automagically do stuff to my test machine (ooh very exciting!).

Mandy announced last night that we might consider not putting the ceiling back up in the living room and dining room. I pointed out that we couldn’t very well have downlighters if we didn’t put a ceiling in, to which she said that perhaps we could put a false floor in, instead to house the downlighters… to which I asked “what like a ceiling you mean?” sigh…..

Rimface from appleTree is calling me on skype I really need to find some other ring tone on that as it’s quite simply pissing me off. In fact I’m not sure if it’s the noise of the call or the fact that Rimface is calling me with yet another “urgent” job that needs doing… I really shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near users let alone customers….

No matter 5 sleeps to go… just 5 and then the madness will all be over with for another year. I’ll be a few pounds heavier after being forced to eat ridiculous amounts of food. We won’t be talking to one / two / all the members of our families (delete as appropriate) as I will have said something whilst true, a bit too close to the truth and I’ll have a credit card bill the size of a small 3^rd world countries debt, but hey it’s Christmas so who cares, right?

Off out to Chimchimeny’s tonight a Mexican no less… sort of my Christmas work do, even though I’m paying for it! Well it’s a night out and I think Mandy and I could do with one, in fact the more nights out we have the better imho !! I’ve ironed my T-shirt and trousers which will mean the following a. I’ve ironed the wrong t-shirt and trousers and in any case I haven’t done them “to standard” so Mandy will have to do them again…but I tried and that’s all that matters!

Mandy’s off to Basingstoke to do “the shop” with her Mum for Christmas, it’s ok as I’ve alerted Asbo’s and they had a bit more stock delivered. She’s then off to pick up Jack from High Wislam so he can be home for Christmas. It’ll be good to see him and it’ll be a chance for him to have a bath which is in everyone’s interests tbh!

In other news, Mandy has successfully conned Bracleys Bank out of some money for mis-sold PPI. This should give us enough to pay for the inglenook to be restored (I mean of course it won’t be enough as they’ll find something else that needs to be fixed but we live in hope), and should have enough left over for the fusebox to be moved. If only my resident sparky would provide a quote for the aforementioned work…sigh…..

Thursday 8th March 2018
Well yes I know, it's been aaaaggggeesess... but here I am.
Quick update, it's a new year, the inglenook is now restored to some sort of oldy woldy original feature type shape, though what original means in this place is frankly anyone's guess. Having watched a programme regarding doing up old houses, I suddenly get  a panic about doing unauthorised work on a listed building. A few weeks go by and that feeling has now gone, thank god.

Work wise things are muddling along. I can't honestly say this is a forever job. I have good days and bad and I do miss the hustle and bustle of working in a place with other people. Going to meetings, deciding things and the whole "going to work" side of things. 

To that end I had applied for a "Virtual IT Director" role which seemed interesting. I got an email saying they wanted a 10 minute telephone pre-interview just to make sure I was the right sort of person for the job. We got on to the subject of salary expectation and even though I refrained from my usual <<Current Salary>> + £5k and just said what I earned currently, they were £10k short of that. The guy said "but there's lots of non-financial benefits...." but he'd lost me already. TBH I can't take a £10k pay cut not even for the best job in the world, so things concluded quite quickly after that.

I am resolved that all the time I don't have to take any old job that I will hold out for the right job at the right level for the right money. Simply because if I don't I won't stay in that job for very long and what's the point of that.

Holidays.... So this year we're hiring a camper van and doing a 2 week tour of Scotland. Mandy wanted to try out a VW Camper because she thinks at some point we'll have the money to buy one. I don't have the heart to tell her we won't ! Then in September we're going back to Zante to stay in the Villa we stayed in about 5 / 6 years ago. The guy basically offered us a free 1 week stay, so we paid him a bit and extended that to 10 days. Jack is going to come with us and he was bringing his girlfriend Gemma with him. Now we're not too sure if she can come as she's got a job as a Tui Holiday Rep and is leaving in May to go and do that. It's a bit of a bugger as I've already paid for her flight, so without leaning on him too much I need to find out if she can still come or if I need to cancel her flight. Since it's already paid for I could do with the money back, or otherwise it's a complete waste.

AppleTree Pharmaceuticals - The customer (or the only one I really have much to do with) have been keeping us a little busy with there new users starting the day after they tell us about them! Roachford is working all the hours god sends to get laptops to them, which I think is daft, who else will they get a laptop from any quicker? Unfortuantely Rubbish the IT Manager for AppleTree is well err Rubbish... His latest gem... "I've found a 16GB dimm in a server box in the US office so I'm going to stick it in the server since" and I quote  “it has 2 processors, so one will have 16gb and one has 32gb”.

Mandy has managed to get herself another new job, this time she’s going to work in Sturminster Newton for a Family law Solictors, so she's busy now worrying about that.

23/07/2018
Well actually, that's not strictly true anymore. Mandy is working in Gillingham (dorset), for the same company, because the person she was going to be working with in Sturminster Newton, decided not to take the position....