Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Following the post-christmas slump and return to London with Nikki, I spent two days at work during which there was very little work to do. In fact, most of my superiors weren’t in, which meant that the couple of large problems which occurred went mostly unresolved as members of other departments tried to find people to fix them, and me and the other product matcher who was in did what little we could. I did start doing QA on some categories, which is a new task and allows me to do what I like best - point out other people’s mistakes.

At lunchtime on Thursday I made it all the way to comic showcase and back in my break, though I discovered that this week there aren’t any new comics being shpped, or they were being shipped late, or something. I love the convenience of being able to get to a comic shop in my lunch break, let me tell you. To console myself against a wasted journey, I went and bought a Mint Matchmaker McFlurry in the same leicester square station where Nikki, Graham and I once almost found ourselves in the middle of an Asian gang fight, some time shortly before I began my blog, I believe.

After work, I met up with Nikki and after I showed her as much of where I work as is possible when you can’t get within a 12 storey radius of my desk, we got the tube back to Tottenham Court Road and went looking for a place to eat. We decided there was no reason not to go to the former Wetherspoons (now a Lloyd’s No. 1) which we have visited several times before, and had dinner there together in probably the best seat in the place, as far as i’m concerned. A nice out of the way corner booth. I successfully ordered a “latte” for Nikki despite my general disgust for the whole coffee culture concept (Coffee Republic? Did they overthrow the Coffee Monarchy?) and in a good display of karmic turnaround the fudge cake and ice cream I ordered there was so amazing that I’m planning to return at the next barely convenient juncture. We wandered around Borders for a while, and went to meet Tom at King’s Cross. By the time we got home, I’d been out of the house and in central london for around 14 hours, which in a normal case would’ve been fine, except for my festering illness. I felt like my sinuses were going to explode.

Because, indeed, part of the reason I’ve not updated of late is that since wednesday I’ve had the “flu.” Not the influenza type, nor the type that mows down pensioners like a strangely invasive lawnmower, but the kind that turns grown men into kleenex-guzzling weaklings, leaving you with pulsating sinuses and generally making your voice incomprehensibly deep and scratchy for three or four days. All christmas I’d been saying to people, “It’s amazing I haven’t been ill yet, what with riding the tube every day with all those people.” and yet I apparantly became ill while in Leamington, when I actually saw hardly anyone by comparison. Must’ve been some midlands strain I have no tolerance of anymore.

It’s been good to have Tom around for a while, getting to catch up. It’s easier to talk in a way IRC isn’t. He’s sleeping in Ian’s/the pseudoliving room on the sofa. Ian built the coffee table his father bought him as well, so we tend to congregate in there to watch cartoons and whatever these days. While Tom’s around at least. I got Friday off work and we went up to Tescos, where tom got some cheap (albeit, women’s) jeans for £4 and we loaded up with food for tomorrow’s cooking extravaganza.

The plan for later is probably to head up to Trafalgar Square, or leicester square, or somewhere in london with a square where we can all stand around and wait for the bombs to drop. At least, here’s hoping.

Well, I guess that makes christmas over. Today, with the news that the Zim DVD I’d bought is actually pushed back until April, I went out and laid down the cash for the 3-disc set of Spaced instead. Spaced is a comedy series with Simon Pegg in about a bunch of penniless and unemployable twentysomethings living in London, so you can probably see why I find it funny. That is, for the same reason people who work in offices find “The Office” hilarious and I just kind of stare blankly as jokes fly cleanly over my head with a 3 foot clearance.

I also bought “Dead @ 17″ with the forbidden planet vouchers I got, a graphic novel I’ve been wanting to read for a while. I had planned to buy one of the Zim figures but they only had the less decent ones there. I wanted a Zim or GIR, and instead I had a bunch of Dibs and Tallest Purples to choose from. None of them especially bad figures, but they’re bound to be reduced soon, given how many are left. It’s not my week for Zim merchandise, I guess. Afterwards, I spent a while trying to decide what else I could get but I kept wanting to check if I could get it for cheaper off eBay or bol or something. I decided to go with Dead @ 17 because it’s the one I wanted to read most. It’s slightly more indie than the other things I was considering, and with that in mind it seems like a good investment, since I’m expanding my horizons.

Yesterday I watched Spider-Man 2 again, with the commentary. Toby Maguire’s on it this time, so it’s a much better one that was on the original Spider-Man. In fact, i’m not even sure Sam Raimi was on that one. I also watched the text commentary, which had a load of factoids popping up, and that was fun even if I did know 90% of them. I had dinner at home with mum, terry and rob, and then went up to Nikki’s where we watched “The quiz of the year” or whatever it was called, because it had simon pegg, jimmy carr and jonothan ross on. It wasn’t as funny as it might’ve been had they followed the HIGNFY pre-scripted model; it was mostly improvised, which kind of gave the impression that all these TV funnymen aren’t actually that funny when they’re trying to play a quiz game and don’t have an autocue or scriptwriters helping them out. No more so than any other group of people shoved together in front of a TV camera might be.

Tomorrow, I’m back at work. Nikki’s staying over for a week, which gives me something nice to come home to, and then on Friday former housemate Tom is coming to stay for new year. That’s former to our (Oxford) house rather than, say the Big Brother house.

I had planned to do some kind of christmas-activity related update, but I decided I’m going to watch Spider-Man 2 instead. Now there’s a proper film. Not like whatever crap the rest of you might be enjoying right now. I don’t have much to do for most of tomorrow, so maybe I’ll get around to something more comprehensive then. Or maybe I’ll end up watching through my Matrix DVD box set. Oh yes.

Okay, well, I guess there’s an explanation that needs going here. So let’s bring us all up to date. In extended bullet point form! The most festive of all bullet point forms. They will be numbered, and you have to read them in that order otherwise they’ll make no sense.

1. The cause of this absense, the reason behind my lack of blogging and general disappearance from the internet, can easily be explained by a small large computer fire. My PSU has (had..) been making odd noises for many weeks. Like, months. Some of you may recall seeing me give the case some percussive correction to stop the fan noise. Well, the other day, while Ian and I were watching Buffy, the power went dead and the picture disappeared. At first, I suspected a power failure, but the lights were still on. I got down and looked at the PC, and then I saw smoke coming out of the vents. I consider myself pretty computer savvy, but it takes an entirely different type of knowledge to fix a computer which has become an electrical fire in the waiting. I turned off the power and removed the case, and the room was filled with an unholy stink, which dissipated along with any chance of getting the PC running that day. I filled the remainder of the evening alternately expressing my disbelief that the PSU had actually blown up and wondering what the hell I was going to do without my main source of TV, music, communication, work and general entertainment.

2. So first opportunity at work, I set off in search of a new PSU. It was a lunchtime in the middle of the week, which was not all that far from when I last went into central London, on saturday, but there’s been some serious changes since then. For a start, I was stuck underground waiting for a Northern line train which never came, losing 20 minutes of a journey to that, and then running around the bakerloo and central lines like a hyperactive rodent trying to get to TCR tube stop and find a computer component shop. Once I got to TCR I had to wait for the police and sniffer dogs to finish inspecting people, and then, shock, horror, I actually made it outside. I started up TCR and it occurred to me I had chosen the coldest day of the year at the stupidest point of the year to be running up and down central london. The kind of cold that burns your nostrils, it was, on the kind of day when it makes far more sense just to walk in the road rather than attempt the payments. I found a shop selling PSUs and forked over £30, and started back. By the time I made it back to work, I was half an hour over my lunch break time and sweating like a pig. I learnt that thermal coat and jumper and t-shirt is far too much attire, even on the coldest of days, when you’re underground and running about.

3. With the PSU bought, I installed it, and discovered that my sound card to be the first casualty of my computer explosion. It later came back to life, but for a while it was a really unrewarding experience trying to play a game or listen to music. Not that I had much time, because I had to stay late in order to complete my 7 and a half hours of work after the lunch break debacle. Luckily, it resurrected itself a few days later, but I guess I’ll press ahead with replacing it. It’s one of the oldest components in the PC, because I had it in the P75, which was years ago. Only my ISA network card can boast similar longetivity. When I opened it to check it wasn’t covered in scorch marks, I noticed a sticker from APS, the computer supplier my friends and I used before they went bust (because they were all crooks or something. The boss got caught with a load of RAM stolen from the company stored under his loft insulation.) This pegs the card at about 7 years old, which is pretty damn long for any computer part.

4. By Thursday, I was well and truly back on the way to having a working PC again, but work stood in the way of testing that theory to any extent. Luckily, it turned out to be a day of winding down. I hate to think what it was like on Friday, really, given how it was on Thursday. I did 3.5 hours of work in the morning, then the backoffice went down, so I decided to see if I couldn’t get to a comic shop and back in under an hour for my lunch break. I succeeded quite well, though the northern line was shut down and in my infinite “wisdom” I mixed up leicester square and picadilly circus, meaning I arrived in the centre of the shopping rush again, totally unsure of which direction to head. I chose one because it mentioned Shaftesbury avenue, which I knew was the right direction. I had luckily chose the right direction, and just as I was going to turn back I saw that I’d found Leicester Square station, and thus I was able to go visit the nosebreathers at Comic Showcase and get the new X-Men comics. The way back was much faster, and even though I didn’t take my sweater this time, I was still way too hot and must’ve looked incredibly odd to the other shoppers walking around in the cold carrying my coat and wearing only a t-shirt. When I got back, the backoffice was still down, so I just read the comics for another free hour of break until it came back up. Of course, Lyndon had been running around the PCs all afternoon installing Quake 3 on them ready for the afternoon, so after about another hour’s work, we stopped for the day and I played Quake 3 for the first time since I downloaded the pre-release Alpha. I wasn’t great at it, but I did win the last game.

5. Friday. I tidied up the house, arranged everything to make it look like there was nothing around worth nicking in case we get robbed this christmas again and came home, had dinner and went to Nikki’s, picked my parents up from midnight mass, and then I was wrapping christmas presents at 2am. Like last year. What a week. Soon the festive season will be over, which is lucky because I’m not sure how much more cheer I can take. Being at work has really brought home the hecticness of the christmas season for the first time ever, so please excuse the preceeding typos. I am running on empty. Time for bed.

The called me mad, the peripheral social voices who expel conventional wisdom in a hypothetical sense. “Going christmas shopping the final weekend before christmas,” I considered they might say, “you’re going to get eaten alive.” I even almost believed it. However, once we got outisde of the tube station is was becoming quite obvious that if ever the final saturday before christmas, in central london, was busy, these day’s the public consciousness has convinced itself that it’s so useless going, that no-one actually goes. It wasn’t much busier than any other time I’ve been. We strolled about ith ample space and time and choice of products. I even discovered, thanks to Nikki’s sharp observation skills, Comic Showcase, which IU may begin considering my new local comic shop (replacing Oxford’s comic showcase, amusingly* enough.) Another thing worthy of note is that I finally procured myself a Mint Matchmaker McFlurry (god damn, they’re hard to order when your face is numb..) It was as excellent as I had dreamt. Should they go away I might have to start buying matchmakers and inserting them into McFlurry’s, that’s the level of excellence they had.

It wasn’t until the end of the day, when we decided to go to Hamley’s, that the problems began. We were unable to get into the building at first, a crowd was gathering around the entrance while a guy with a loudspeaker issued orders and instructions to people. (”Stand behind the flaming bins, you will all have a chance to be gouged,” etc) When we were all allowed into the building, we were instructed that the best way to reach any floor was to use the “Harry Potter Staircase” which on closer inspection turned out to be a poorly decorated service staircase/fire exit which presumably, is designed to take some of the heat off the cramped elevators. After around an hour of wandering and getting stood on we decided to bail out and headed home on the increasingly packed streets. What the shopping expedition really taught us was “don’t go christmas shopping after about 4pm on saturdays, in london” and I suspect that rule applies to most places.

Earlier that morning, we’d been to Tescos. They were having some kind of fancy dress day which in addition to providing some hilarious bad and disturbing costumes (I never expected to see and demon slut version of snow white dragging around a cage of potatoes…) also filled me with Christmas Cheer. Mainly, it was the incredibly depressed checkout clerk who looked on the verge of tears, wearing a santa hat, which reminded me what Christmas is all about. Hypocrisy.

* Not actually amusing unless you’re me.

It’s surprising. Since starting my job, I’ve received a Yahoo! branded bag, some mints, and a DVD (as part of Kelkoo’s secret santa.) All that, before I was even paid. Which I was, today. Yes, friends, I have purchase power once again. Mayhap I’ll be getting a bookcase, maybe even before the weekend is out. However, my bank account still has to survive tomorrow, wherein I will be attempting to do all of my christmas shopping, in central london, tomorrow. Not too sure how great an idea that is, really. I expect I’ll discover tomorrow.

However, life contains more things than work. Like the eBay treasure hunt. I don’t know why I bother, really. it’s absurdly difficult, and I don’t really have the time to spend on searching, because I’m at work. All those free iPods are going to go to students and the unemployed. Bastards. Speaking of the unemployed, though, I never got back to you about David Blunkett. Now there’s a crying shame. The man who brought you the concept of the wrongfully imprisoned having to pay back what it cost the state to keep them imprisoned has lost his job for some very ill defined reasons. Frankly, I don’t care what he did wrong, or if he did it wrong, or anything. The only true justice is that the papers ripped him to shreds when they got the chance, and that he’s now (hopefully) rotting in the dole queue.

Which leads me nicely into my next minirant, about public transport. I’ve lived in many places. Of those, the only place with a remotely decent bus service was Oxford. Never have I used buses so actually useful as those. However, they were quite expensive, and Oxford is tiny compared to most cities, so it’s not unreasonable that they’d have an almost useable system in place. London, however, is large. The tube system is impressive and mighty, and incredibly useable. However, I can’t help but feel, when people are being packed into the carriages like cattle, that someone should make some upgrades. The incredibly expensive and modern-looking jubilee line trains/station I use made me realise that it was no coincidence that this was the ne the parliamentry employees were likely to use, so, I propose a new set of rules to give the government initiatives credibility.

I the future I envisage, the members of the government don’t need to be held accountable for their actions, because they will hold themselves accountable. The home secretary must live off benefits in a council houes, the transport ministers have to use public transport to get places, the education ministers have to send their children to state schools, those in charge of health are treated by the NHS, and they’re all forced to watch only the BBC. I reckon that’d probably convince the people doing those jobs to buck up their ideas, and indeed, it’s probably stem the tide of wankers who are attempting to get those jobs. I am increasingly agreeing with the idea that those who want to rule are the people least suited to do it.

I may have more to say later, but I thought it important to check in and say good fucking riddance to David “I am a cunt who deserves to be raped by baboons” Blunkett. I haven’t been this happy about politics in years.

I ended up avoiding headphone purchasement. It was just too warm in bed. I’m currently consoling myself at work by renouncing the radio and embracing the sweet silence of office chatter. At least it’s not infuriating. At 4 I switch on Lauren Laverne’s show, and that takes me through to the end of the day. Unfortunately, I just spent this evening listening to Ben Fold’s album, and it’s going to ruin my day sitting there thinking of all the decent music I’m missing because I have no headphones. Ah well. Soon. Soon I get paid, and by god, I can buy myself the stuff I need. Headphones. A bookcase. Maybe even the long-promised new computer chair. It’s been a difficult few months, but I’m almost sorted. Paid the rent again today, so I’m safe through this time next month. 1/3 of a year down already.

Today in the tube, my ticket was actually inspected while I was en route to the other side of Green Park. Everyone’s, I mean, not just mine. It’s never happened to me before, and it comes just as I was entertaining the idea of saving some money through exploiting a ticket scam (they removed the barriers at Northfields so technically I could get a cheaper return by just not paying to leave zone 1..) Oh well. I’d rather pay full price, anyway. God knows they need the fucking money, given the horrendousness of the service. I mean, it’s a good transport system, but I can’t help but feel it shows that it was constructed like a hundred years ago. Why does it take me almost an hour to go about 10 miles?!

Speaking of work (seems to be a theme with people who have blogs/livejournals and a job…) Here’s the place I work. I’m to be found a couple of metres away from about the fifth or sixth window from the right.

Speaking of Ben Folds’ album, I know I’m probably quite late to the party, but I think you should all go buy it. Or download it. Rockin’ the suburbs, it’s called., and the title track especially is a work of genius, and the start of which sounds surprisingly like that Timberlake guy’s “Rock Your Body” song. I need to buy a “Sham on” t-shirt. Surely, though, it’s too much irony to be contained by a single article of clothing. Many thanks to Paul (whose birthday it is tomorrow) for going to extraordinary lengths to get me a copy, and thereby convincing me to buy tickets for the rescheduled dates next year. I plan to be at the Hammersmith gig.

And now, bedtime…

I’m currently at Nikki’s, considering whether to go and buy some discreet headphones (for work) tomorrow. A large part of what’s driving me insane about the radio is the repetion. The endless repetition. And finally, the repetition. In addition to the repetition. SO much repetition that the repetition because so annoyingly repetitive that when you hear the DJ annunce that they’re going to have some Zutons for you after the break that you want to rip off the headphones and hurtle them through the 12th storey window just so you never have to hear that shit again, but unfortunately you can’t because were you to do so there’d be nothing left that was remotely like a distraction that didn’t directly interfere with your ability to do the job. At least music is a passive activity.

XFM’s adverts are horrendous. I mean, really bad. Maybe as an exercise next week I’ll transcribe a couple and then let you know how many times I’ve had to listen to them. I could probably do their Napoleon Dynamite advert right now, so constantly has it been played. The hilariously tragic thing is, the advrt is literally a bunch of quotes about how great the movie is, but it fails to convey even the tiniest detail about the film. Napoleon Dynamite. PG. Contains a character called Pedro, and apparantly some dancing. That’s all I know about this film. That, and the fact that if I ever come face to face with the hideously annoying human who is asking the questions in the radio clip I would be inclined to crush his fingers to pulp with a hammer.

Hang on, I was talking about headphones. Yes. Discreet inner-ear headphones that I can plug into the soundcard and use to listen to proper music. I could take my giant headphones, but people don’t seem to use them around the office and I’m not trying to turn myself into some kind of headphone renegade. Let’s hope there’s a shop open tomorrow which’ll cater to my needs.

On a lighter note, today Nikki and watched about 85% of Notting Hill. A Richard Curtis/Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant film of the kind I am unwilling to pay for, but that I’m quite happy to watch on an evening in with my girlfriend, when it’s free and there’s nothing else interesting. It had about 3 good jokes, and it was all incredbly predictable, and contained lots of awkward scenes of Julia Roberts standing around. I wouldn’t even say it was a great example of the genre it represented, really. I was far more entertained by hearing the woman who is Alice in the vicar of Dibbley saying “fuck” and looking in the backgrond of shots to see if I could spot everyone’s favouritely named Notting Hill eatery, Sarnie Asylum, which I believe has since been renamed/replaced by the far less hilarious ‘Cafe on the hill.’ Actually, I am reminded that I should go to Notting Hill at some point, since I’ve never been shopping in that area of London, nor had a proper wander around it.

We also went to Cov today. I picked up the final ever issue of Demo ending a year of great comics, and I bought the gifts necessitated by Kelkoo’s “Secret Santa” dealie. There’s a tenner I’ll never see again. Actually, I should, but christ knows in what form… £10 worth of gadget shop junk, if I’m lucky. Still, I’ve tried my best, in that I just got Nikki to chose the stuff, and then she’ll wrap it, and then I can give it in and hope that the person receiving it never finds out it was me who bought them all this rubbish. It’s very hard to buy generic gifts which will suit any age (I had a gender, obviously) and interest. However, if that sounds like a horrendous Christmas tradition for some of you, imagine how much glee I was filled with when December 20th was announced as Yahoo’s “Bring your children to work day.” You all know how I love children. Sliced up in a ed wine sauce. Actually, I think it said “Kids” in the e-mail. I’ll have to check that. I could bring in a pair of goats. The other loophole I was thinking of exploiting was just taking Nikki. “She is carrying my unconceived child.” I would say. Sam sugegsted I just claim she’s my stepdaughter, but I suspect there’d be some odd looks and I’d get “released” from my contract quite fast.

Usually, when I’m on my lunchbreak at work, I read the BBC site and see what issues are prevalent in the news. This is because the websites I normally spend my time reading are quite heavily not work-safe, and I have to go find something slightly less subversive to entertain myself. That’s not to say that I can’t get a great deal of hilarity out of the news items I find though. I’ll skip the obvious comments on how the BBC reports that it’s about the fire 3000 people and go for a marginally less easy target article, Obesity linked to lack of sleep.

Now, this kind of talk worried me at first. I Don’t do a lot of sleeping, to be honest. I mean, once I’m asleep, I’m known to go for hours on end if left uninterrupted, but generally (at least, when I haven’t got a job to get up for) I stay awake as long as is humanly possible, usually reading the websites I can’t at work. While I’m not exactly skin and bones, I keep a watchful eye on not becoming horribly obese, and I was horrendously worried that all my hard work in switching from vegetable oil to sunflower oil and cutting out those pre-bedtime cakes was about to be sent hurtling down the tubes by my predeliction for wiling away the small hours locked in combat with the internet.

I read further, increasingly frantic to learn the truth. Then I got to the second paragraph, and I started to become a bit calmer. By the middle of the article, I was thoroughly convinced. It’s all a load of shit. What the article really says is “Researchers at the university of Bristol have spent a lot of money researching something and come up with no reasonable answer, so they have come up with a half truth and logical fallacy to justify their time.” Apparantly, not sleeping makes you hungry. Being hungry makes you obese. Eating makes you fat. Ergo, they claim, not sleeping is making the public obese. Okay. Still with me? That’s all good, until you notice that really, the first part of that equation is largely irrelevant. How about this one: Small portions at mealtimes makes you fat. Small portions leads to hunger, hunger leads to eating, eating leads to obesity. But wait, it gets stupider! By exactly the same logic, NOT EATING makes you fat! Give it up now, there’s no hope. No wonder obesity rates are spiralling out of control, this message of dieting and exercise is really sending us all down the wrong paths.

Congratulations then, to those Oxbridge dropouts at Bristol Uni, for successfully having turned “Eating makes you fat.” into a news article thinly disguised as research. What they really discovered was “Not sleeping makes you hungry.” which in itself isn’t exactly a fucking revelation.