One week down...

Finally, I'm partly legit.

Security came through with my pass - so now I can actually access the office without banging on the door and hoping someone will break the rules and come to let me in.  Still don't have my humungous national database card, or any of the correct permissions/desktop icons to enable me to do my job, but at least I can be in the office and not left out in the corridor.

My contract is being re-drafted to reflect my actual job/hours/conditions, my pre-planned days off have been authorised (COVEN OUTING IS A GO!!!), my badge is being re-made to show my  correct job title - so that's all good. 

Also what's good is, if today is anything to go by, at the end of the contract I should be an Excel wizard.  The project involves the use of some really complicated stuff, involving pivots and massive amounts of formulae, among other things.  I'm determined to make my self-imposed exile count, so I'm soaking up the opportunities as they present themselves.  The person I'm working with is the Gandalf of Excel - and a VERY good teacher.  She's 22 and she doesn't, unlike the Butterball, patronise. She's also not an eater of mug pasta with puke sauce.  This pleases me greatly. 

I really think, all fuckwittery aside, that this was a good move for me - although I AM looking forward to going home tomorrow! 

You shall not pass!

Today's fuckwittery;

The special key passes I need to give me unfettered access to a humungous national data base are still being processed, despite the request being sent yesterday morning - with the correct authorisation. Begs the question - they knew I was starting on 26th, why were the passes only requested yesterday?

I still have no personal log in or passwords, despite the request being sent on Monday, when I was being talked at in the crematorium room. Again, me coming to the office to start work shouldn't have come as any sort of surprise..

The bank staff blokeys who started in the same department yesterday already have EVERYTHING they need. They are receiving the same training as me, but they can do theirs in real time on a live system.

My photo ID badge was taken by security yesterday evening so that they could, overnight, encode me a door entry key for the office. This process should take around 12 hours, and I dropped mine off at 5pm yesterday. Wearing the correct badge is mandatory, as is having the correct entry card for the swipey door entry thing in the corridor, next to the hand sanitiser thing. I have now, only the plastic shell of mine and a lanyard. I have to keep the shell tucked down inside my clothes, with just the lanyard showing. God knows what will happen if I'm challenged. Other staff are not permitted to open the office door for a colleague - we all have to use the key card. The new card was supposed to be coded and issued within about 12 hours - Security have now had it for 24 and counting, and I was told they were too busy overnight to do it, so I might not even get it tomorrow. Not sure at all how busy hospital security people can be, tbh. Obviously too busy to stick a card in to a coding machine and press a button. They could do that while the kettle's boiling for their evening cuppa...or while they're stuffing down a pie.

I STILL haven't signed my contract or been able to speak to the right people about it, so I still haven't sorted out the contract hours discrepancy, nor the discrepancies between my paperwork and my badge/job title/DBS certificate. Apart from that, I did actually do some work today, buoyed up by some jelly sweets and coconut biscuits brought in by someone who'd been on holiday and whose name I've already forgotten. I think she's called Fossi or something.

The child who is teaching me is a little patronising butterball, with a voice like a cheesewire. She seems to live on low-fat toffee yoghurt and Belvita biscuits. In fact, every time I walked past her desk, she was stuffing her face with something. AND for lunch, she had a macaroni cheese mug shot, which smelled of puke. I could still smell it when I left at 5pm. If she told me once that she went to uni, and how much teaching experience she had, she told me fifty times. She's only about 25, if she's that. How much experience can she have had of anything? Still, I'm biting my tongue. i know I don't play well with others, so it's my mission to improve that - at least until the end of the contract. I thanked her prettily for helping me today. I shall probably do it again tomorrow, too.

Officially, I STILL don't ''know'' where the ''facilities'' are. As this fact is something that I am required to ''sign off'' on my training portfolio - presumably after being officially taken there - I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

On the plus side, though, the viburnum is fragrantly blooming out along the roadside, and Mum made faggots, peas and mash for supper for me and dad. I'm cooking tomorrow, in lieu of paying rent.

Learning about E...

E learning.  The art of staring at a computer screen for up to seven hours on two days, whilst trawling through multiple choice exercises, clicking here, adding information there, reading screeds and screeds of information and, finally, after you've successfully completed your seven hours of E learning in front of a screen, being made to book to go on another two mandatory seven hour ''face-to-face'' courses on EXACTLY THE SAME SUBJECTS...that's what they do to you at Fuckwittery Inc..

Yesterday, a morning in a room resembling nothing less than a crematorium chapel, hung with grey, pleated floor-to-ceiling curtains setting off the fake wood walls and ripe with the smell of new carpet and corporate upholstery, we listened, politely,  to talks on governance, spiritual welfare, hand-washing, charity involvement, Trust values, the Client Experience.  A short break for some tea and a pack of biscuits whilst being bombarded on all sides by Union reps, academic librarians, charity chuggers.  In the afternoon, in an airless room in the very bowels of the building, nine modules (each module containing up to five sub-modules) of E learning to complete; fire safety, health and safety, infection control, corporate governance, equal opportunities, data protection, child protection and preventing radicalisation.  We even learnt how to wash our hands.

Lots of information, probably all of it useful to someone in the room, but certainly not me.  I'm not a clinician - most of the modules were skewed that way.  I'm not even going to be having patient contact.

I thought, as I stumbled out into the sunshine at 4pm, that that was it.  Tomorrow (which was today), I would be starting my new job.

Nope. Today, I spent another seven hours learning E.  Different E, but E just the same.  I had a list of modules to complete.  There were seven.  Within those seven, the modules were LEGION. I lost count, but I practically filled a notebook with aide memoires...

Tomorrow, I have an orientation day.   Perhaps, tomorrow, I'll find out who my colleagues are going to be, and where my desk is, and where the canteen might be, and where the loos are, and where I get a lanyard for my ID badge.  Or perhaps not.  Maybe there will just be more Es to learn. How many more Es can there be to learn?  I'm only in post for six months...

The Boomerang Kid...

Well, it's happened.  At the ripe old age of...well, if you know me, you know how old I am...I have officially taken on a title more usually reserved for millennials.  I am, for the next six months at least, that most sneered at of creatures; the ''boomerang kid''.

I'm back in my old bedroom at the family home.

It's a means to an end.  Before anyone thinks I'm suddenly single for some reason, disabuse yourself, please. Mr A is safely still in my life, thank the gods,  but remains in Sussex.   After being shockingly and unceremoniously dumped by an employer last August (no notice, and after 6 years of employment), I've given up working for myself and have taken a rather nice job with Fuckwittery Inc..  It's only a 6 month contract, but none the worse for that.  However, it's full-time and I didn't want to commute, so I've moved back in with my parents for the duration.  I'll go home at weekends.  Mr A is cool with it.  He's already ''owned'' the bed and besides, it's not as though we're joined at the hip or anything.  He's been without me before; I had a year studying at Leith's in London, a period working away in Bermuda, fourteen months in Belgium - and he's often worked away.  It works for us.  We look on the separations as a bit of a re-boot.

I'm not sure how it will pan out.  It's odd being back.  I have to get my head around having lived away from here for more years than I care to remember.  I have to get used to being a (sort of) child again.  I have to get past the idea that I feel I have to ask permission, or let people know why I am (or I'm not) doing things - don't get me wrong,  it's certainly not expected, but it's still someone else's house and not mine.  I have to get past the self-imposed guilt of not wanting to sit and watch television downstairs, keeping company.  Do they care that I don't want to do that every night?  Probably not, but it's an odd feeling.  When I was considering taking the job, we did have a conversation about mutual expectations were I to move in - it was the grown-up thing to do, but I'm the eldest child and I still have that goody-goody sensible chip firmly embedded, despite my best efforts at prying it out of my psyche.  I suppose it all comes down, in the end, to mutual respecting of space, and recognising that we all do things differently. 

My parents are pretty cool. It'll be fine. And the lovely ''children'' next door are allowing me to pirate off their internet, which is an unexpected bonus.  The modern age has not yet caught up with Lord and Lady Oakwood, and this house is normally a technology-free zone - although I do have a cunning plan to change that.  We have lent the Old Folk a tablet -and my mission, which I have chosen to accept, is to get them confidently onto the bloody thing, and off the Cobbled Highway, by the time I return home in September.  So mote it be...

So here I am, resurrecting the blog from my cosy (and rent-free-at-their-insistence) bedsit.  Do please stop by from time to time...

De nobis fabula narratur (Their story is our story)

This past month has been one of celebration and of sorrow: celebration for us, with the advent of new clients, meaning that the barometer of our own lives has finally swung back round to ‘hopeful’ from ‘dismal’,  and sorrow for some whose lives have touched ours over the years.

In the arching span of a human existence, there are those whose lives kiss the pink of yours, gently, delicately, leaving the whisper of memories, those whose lives pot your black and careen yours off at a tangent and others whose dynamic rush and impact atomically fuse yours with theirs in a blaze of glory, never again to be unmelded. Our families, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, dealing with their lives and impacting on ours, however close or distant we are, have been or will become.

Confidence, knocked and battered by grave misfortune; a spate of accusations, groundless in truth but suspicious on the surface, almost destroying the strongest marital foundations I know, sudden and unexpected death, a devastating diagnosis. A debilitating injury; a parting of the ways. Unjust machinations by those put in place to help, but who manipulate facts, twist words and rend brutally asunder. The Boy and I,  we help where we can, practically, financially, or otherwise.  We lend an ear, we offer solace, tissues, a refuge.  We write letters, consoling, offering support, laying out the facts and putting things straight.  Sometimes, we just do nothing, because we can’t do anything. 

Everyone deals differently with the hand that that old bitch Fate sometimes deals us. In the last month,  I’ve read palliative paeans of exquisite prose for a beloved old life cut from existence by cruel disease, heard blistering invective heaped upon the Gods for misfortunes caused and circumstances suffered and seen oceans of tears wept for the loss of what was good, now gone bad.  I wait my turn on the Wheel of Fortune...

In days of Old, when Knights were bold...Almost...

I heard a sound today that propelled me straight back to 1965.  A sound I thought lost in the movement of time.  From out in the street, the regular jangling chime of someone ringing a handbell to alert us indoors to their presence - and there he was: the Rag and Bone man of my childhood. Well, not the EXACT one, of course, because he was a Methusela to my 5 year old self, but a Rag and Bone Man, nevertheless.  I didn't think any still existed, but they obviously do. Upgraded to a slow-moving flatbed, rather than the horse-drawn cart of yesteryear, but out there, ringing the bell and collecting scrap metal. He had a load stowed, the modern-day Totter; I could see a fridge up there and some other bits and bobs of scrap.  Do they still collect bones as well and pay cash in hand for a newspaper-wrapped parcel? Who knows. If mine weren't already spoken for by my fanatical compost-making husband, I'd have been out there with a bagful finding out.

I remember being sent out by my Grandmother to exchange bones or other small items for warm copper pennies from the leather pouch slung across the Rag and Bone Man's shoulder.  His cart seemed so high up in the air, and his horse so big; we'd take carrots and feed them to the horse whilst the Man loaded up, or stopped for a chat if we had nothing to give him.  Grandad (or someone else, if Grandad was slow off the mark) would go out later and pick up the droppings from the roadway - lovely for the garden - and FREE!

Then I got to thinking, there are so many things like this that have disappeared into the past; the Corona Man, who delivered dimpled bottles of  Dandelion and Burdock and Cream Soda to the door in wooden crates, the Wilkins' Man, who brought sticky and mostly forbidden shop-cakes in great big shallow wooden trays; the Coal Man, in his dark green truck and his sooty clothes, cap and head strap, coming to deliver hessian sacks of coal and coke to Nan's house; the Milkie, in his long white coat and smart peaked hat, bringing daily fresh milk in glass bottles; Mr Brander the butcher.  He always wore a fine straw boater and a navy and white striped apron and he had a moustache of such overwhelming magnitude that 'Big John' Brander, his very large and darkly handsome son, paled into weedy insignificance when in the same room.  Then there was weaselly Mr Moolie the Rent Man, with his little pile of brown rent books, his stubby pencil and a satchel for the money; the Pools Man, from whose company you might win a tidy fortune for predicting the results of football matches and the overly-obsequious Man from The Pru, who walked the streets on a weekly basis collecting tiny insurance premiums against the cost of your eventual burial - he had a satchel, too; they all did, the weekly collectors.  Sixpence here, thruppence there, a penny for this one and a shilling for him, all descendants of the tallymen, Uncles and mountebanks of yore and a Godsend for the weekly-paid...

f + c (+ ts/m) + ( π ) + mbr = av/nw (i). Q.E.D

And so it went. On Friday, too pooped to cook and the Boy went out in the rain and trawled for sustenance, coming back home with fish and chips of epic proportions.  It makes a BIG change for us to eat takeaway of any sort, so it was a real treat.  There's something quite decadent for us in sitting down to eat food that I haven't made, but we do have a spectacularly good Chippery in the village, and it doesn't hurt now and again to spend a few quid on something good.  I still haven't found a good local place to actually go OUT to to dine and spend my money in, but the hunt goes on.  As eating out is a very rare occurrence, I need to know that our hard-earned cash isn't going to be wasted on gunge masquerading as fayne dayning.  I'm often disappointed and not a little cross at what passes for acceptable fodder in restaurants these days.  I'm saddened that other people either don't notice how badly food is prepared and served, or that they just don't have any expectation that it could be better. It's really NOT that difficult.  We usually save our dining out experiences for Belgium where, it has to be said, the food (even in tiny out-of-the-way establishments) is always excellent in both quality and price.

In between showers we dropped down into Bugville to shop.  It didn't take long, mercifully.  The quicker we can get in and out the better, quite frankly, especially on a Saturday afternoon when there seem to be more mutants per square inch than at any other time.  It had to be done, though - there was a Sunday curry to be prepared and no coconut milk in the house.  I had a Beef Rendang on my mind...

And also π... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Hjrs6WQ8M)

Now, call me a Philistine if you will, but I couldn't get on with the book.  I don't know what it is about books written with a sub-continent subject matter, but me and they, they just don't mix.  This is the person who will read cereal boxes in desperate moments but apart from one notable exception ('A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry), lent to me by N when I lived in Bruges, the 'Indian sub-Continent novel' has completely passed me by.  Hand on heart, I tried at least 10 times to get into Vikram Seth's 'A Suitable Boy' to no avail.  Other people rave about it, so either they're a) cleverer than me or b) lying.  I suggest the latter.  Emperor's New Clothes, anyone?  So, anyway, I read the overwhelmingly glowing reviews for π, I listened to the radio interviews about π, I purchased π  (both in hard copy AND Kindle version) and STILL couldn't get into it. Indian sub-Continent, see?  And then, I saw that a film was in production. And, in due course, that film was released to great acclaim, and lo, it was to be shown at the Picturedrome cinema (http://www.picturedromebognor.com/) for a mere £3.00 on Sunday.  Bearing in mind that I've recently watched the Emperor stroll past unclad to the soundtrack of The Glums, I was in two minds about going.  An Indian boy, adrift in a lifeboat in the Pacific, accompanied merely by his wits, a gaff-hook, a broken-legged (then dead) zebra and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker?  I was thinking π x arse-squared.  And actually, it was, but only because a female Hagrid and her equally gigantic offspring were sat directly in front of us and me and the Boy spent the entire time leaning heavily one one buttock in order to see round them.  The fillum itself was delightful.  It took all the useful bits, packaged them up into a beautiful whole and sent out the essence of the novel into the popcorn-scented room that is Screen 2. We loved it.  On the way home, I tried to explain to the Boy just why I couldn't get on with the book.  It might have had something to do with all the extraneous stuff: 25% or so Kindle reading and I was still in Pondicherry Zoo having animals described to me in minute detail.  A mere 10 minutes of the film and Ang Lee had condensed the necessary stuff (why Pi was called Pi, the lessons of 'not feeding the tiger', the weaving in of all the 'Gods' and the religious stuff ) into a few lines of dialogue.  Perfection.  Go see it.  It's a beautiful film and the CGI is extraordinary.  If you didn't know it wasn't possible, that tiger in the prow is REAL.  Truly.

And the Beef Rendang supper wasn't too shabby, either.  A big plateful of mixed bhajis, yoghurt, mint and cucumber dip, mango chutney and a carrot and toasted cumin salad with spiced poppadoms, followed by beef rendang, buttered Basmati and Peshwari naan.  A little 'mixed up', curry-wise (the Rendang's Malaysian, not Indian), but who cares? I made it, we ate it, it was good.  And then, when we thought the weekend goodies were all done and dusted, my very clever Boy managed, by virtue of his lightning-fast reflexes, to score us two tickets to see Counting Crows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bSTWIlQ-MA&list=ALBTKoXRg38BD7Q7Jvb077w22BBNBr4Qu8 at the Apollo in London in April - HOW GREAT IS THAT????

We are lucky, lucky monkeys...