lousy reputation

Some time ago, my good friend Vik signed me up to a dating website. It is such a dating website whereby one recommends friends who are dateless but not necessarily useless, in the hopes that two mutually attractive dateless friends-of will hit it off and go dancing.

This signup occurred before my current non-dateless situation and I did all the requisite profile filling-out and picture-addition. Then I forgot about it because it's not in my nature to seek dancing partners electronically, preferring the tried and tested methods of a) real people, b) friends of real people and c) strangers I find the courage to talk to whilst searching for chemicals on good nights out.

For some reason, in the last few weeks, I've had a fair amount of interest from not-useless young men on said dating website. All such alerts go to my work email address and it's not unusual for people to come over with queries and find me, Vik and Jo giggling at the latest addition to my growing dating inbox.

For the sake of hilarity, then, I'm wondering about photoblogging. Like I used to do with baking but this time with - you know - boys. We go for a drink, I write about how hilariously bad it is OR how great he is OR how great he would be if he didn't have two kids or didn't live with his mother or was able to dance without looking like an epileptic in the bath.

I realise this is nothing new and it won't serve any purpose as I won't be passing my conclusions along, and I'm not going to win any Pulitzer prizes but, seriously, what else am I supposed to do with my evenings? If I'm going to drink anyway, someone else may as well enjoy it too :)

Baby time!

So, an alarming number of my friends are pregnant, engaged or otherwise growing up these days.

My good friend Jen has been heavily, heavily, pregnant for some weeks now and we realised this morning that her husband wasn't online on the work email system which meant he wasn't in the office. We knew what that meant!

Sure enough, Jen had tiny (8lb 5oz) baby Nathan (name correctly identified by yours truly out of ten contenders) very early this morning, a day which auspiciously also happens to be payday.

I love Jen but her baby seems to have cost me more than it will cost her. A 'congrats on getting knocked up' present, an office whipround for the baby, plus a private OTC scavenge-from-contacts-in-other-departments babyshower, and now it seems it is necessary to send her flowers, and a balloon, and some chocolates (we decided against champagne as Jen is the sort to neck it in the delivery suite and then try and breastfeed) to congratulate her on dropping it suceessfully.

Seriously, this is definitely the way forward! I went to the doctor this morning for a repeat prescription of the Pill and nearly told him to forget it. Time off and a shedload of awesome tiny presents? Winner!

we caught the fire (but nobody escaped)

So, early this morning the metal scrapyard next to my warehouse caught fire. It came within 20 metres of said warehouse and you could see the smoke for miiiiiiiiiiles.

The whole place was closed and the site was lousy with security men sending warehouse workers home this morning. It was a shame as I had trailers and trailers of emergency stock coming in to be crossdocked at 10am today. I'd spent a considerable amount of time and charm persuading the supplier, the haulier, the warehouse, the DCs and Site Traffic to allow this crossdock to happen, and then at 8.10am I had to phone the supplier and tell them to tell their driver to turn around and take it back up the motorway to another warehouse where I had secured some precious palletspaces for them - but that they were NOT to try and tip anything apart from my order ON PAIN OF DEATH.

Apart from that, today has been a managable week.

world enough and time

This isn't funny.

All you goddamn hayfever minions, lay off the sales.

Sales go up out of season means my world ends and I get RSI from placing manual store orders, and blind from staring at my screen for six hours solid. I waste away because the thought of being able to leave my desk for the ten minutes it takes to buy and eat a sandwich is ten minutes I could spend amending store forecasts or running any one of fifteen levels of reports to try and work out what the fuck is going on in stores.

I get to work at 7.30am and my boss has already put three reports and a post-it on my desk with things that need looking at URGENTLY. Five minutes after I switch my monitor on she's already over to ask 'how's it looking?' when there's no possible way I could know because I've only just sat down. During the day she comes over periodically to ask leading questions which she already knows the answer to and which waste everyone's time. I open my spreadsheets to find she's already in them; I check store orders to see she's already placed some. Who's in charge here?

I leave work at 6.30pm not having seen a scrap of the sunshine which causes all this misery, knowing that this weekend is forecast to be a bit overcast and that I will probably be the only bastard who comes out of this glorious summer just as pale as I went into it and also batshit crazy to boot.

And they haven't even announced our motherhumping bonus yet, those tight private-ownership mongrels. I'm going to spend all mine on illegal drugs and as much boxed wine as I can fit in my Fiat, you just see if I don't.

war mongrel

Tomorrow I am going to London for work which is just an excuse to dine in fancy cafes, travel first class and feel like a suit-wearing bigshot.

I've spent all week running around with boys and/or finishing my housemate's birthday surprise(s) and I really, really need to sleep but that's not going to happen anytime soon.

This summer is going to be awesome (weather, plans) but also fatal (pressures of work).

I'm so busy I've only just realised I haven't taken any of the medicine the doctor gave me for my rancid gross painful permanent ear infection, so busy in fact that I've only just remembered that I even went to the doctor (and only then because I was describing the perfect parallel park I executed in the surgery!).

I wish this blog was fun like it used to be but it seems I've forgotten how to find humour in situations. I never see Boy Who Is a Tosser anymore and the other funny things that happen to me are only funny if you know that POGs aren't just those cardboard circles we had when we were kids.

I hope all you bastards are livid with hayfever this year x