Although I and a few others at work wear ties most days, the bulk of the men (and of course all of the women) don’t. Ties are a purely decorative item, and sometimes they’re expected, sometimes not. Lately I’ve been pondering if I should buy some new shirts. I don’t know if my neck is ... [More]
Cam of TPN is off to America to make his fortune, and his latest podcast is a “Goodbye Australia” edition. But what I found really interesting about it is him talking about the (metaphorical) journey — how he’s got into this position, and how successful people work: meeting people, making contacts, helping those contacts when ... [More]
My three main Inboxes are getting out of control. While I manage to reply in a reasonable manner to most of the email I get that’s directed to me personally, I tend to get very slack at filing things away or deleting them, perhaps partly because I think at some stage I’ll need to find ... [More]
I’ve mentioned before how I hate the expression “I’ll let you go”. It just tells me in the most thinly-veiled way that the person talking to me is sick of me, and has more important things to do. Last week I overheard a work colleague who had evidently rung someone he didn’t want to talk ... [More]
I didn’t get up early. I’m up late. Pulling an all-nighter for a major system deployment. Which has involved a lot of waiting around. Should get to bed soon. Thank goodness I can do it all from the comfort of my own home. Strangely, I don’t feel particularly tired. I bet I will when I ... [More]
It seems one of the popular things is to complain about these days the curse of the always-on generation. Mobile phones, email, instant messaging mean you’re always contactable. But I like all that stuff for other reasons. It means I can leave the office early (as I do every Tuesday) and stay in touch. I ... [More]
“In the mansion of life, we can’t all be the state bedroom. Someone’s gotta be the outside bog, and that’s you!” — Vince, in Pratt Outta Hell, by Ben Elton I wonder how many people are happy with the job they’re in, and how many are just killing time/earning some bucks while they work towards ... [More]
Unbelievably, just hours after lamenting with Marita about how some of us in the Bowen family are prone to upset tummies, I felt the same myself. The Bowen belly had struck yet again, though not as badly as some other times. This comes after my sister and her toddler were struck down with something last ... [More]
Bizarre thought #574: In the building where I work, there’s a security guard who is sometimes seen wandering about the place. He looks kind of top-heavy, like he’s got a lot of upper-body muscle. For some reason it reminds me of an old video game I once had back on my Commodore 64: Ultima II, ... [More]
Outrage in the office. A note at the scene of the crime, the fridge: Further investigation revealed that in fact two victims had had their yoghurt go missing. It seems there is a serial yoghurt thief among us.
Stupid damn printer/fax machine/copier. I put a document in to fax, and punched in the fax number. 7010 2168 (or something like that). But I hadn’t set it to Fax mode. It decided it was in Copier mode, but will only allow three digits for the number of copies, so it started printing 168 copies ... [More]
Sometimes I find Friday’s casual day a stress. I find normal weekdays easier — any idiot can look half-decent in an expensive suit. (Have I told you about my suit? It’s really nice. It was pricey though. It’s so expensive that it doesn’t have a pocket for small change. The makers must have presumed it ... [More]
At home for the second time this week. On Tuesday I worked from home on purpose, as things in the office were quiet and I needed to do some stuff on a side-project web site. Today however, Isaac woke up with a whopping 39.5 temperature. This managed to coincide with the work computer system being ... [More]
Ah, the joys of working from home. Last night 9pm deployment, then conference call until (yawn) 1am as things on a related system went a little askew. This morning, more of the same. Monitoring systems on one screen, blogging on another, listening to conference call on speakerphone/mute. If things calm down a bit later, maybe ... [More]
The ATO isn’t playing nice anymore. Okay, so I admit I haven’t been sending in their infuriatingly frequent monthly forms on time. (When the government introduced GST, they trumpeted it would be a simpler tax system. What they meant was simpler for them. Not so simple if you’re one of the Cursed who now has ... [More]
Over the years, I’ve grown to like tea immensely. I’ve moved from not liking tea, to liking bog standard teabags, to preferring particular types of teabags such as Irish Breakfast, to being in a state of distress when there’s no leaf tea in the house. The tea at work has generally been a few steps ... [More]