Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Today marked the big crunch. Kelkoo packed up shop and relocated to Yahoo! Central. Or at least, began the process which will actually take most of the weekend. From now on, I’ll no longer be working at 1, London Bridge (SE1) but at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue (WC2) which, as you can see, has a far more fashionable postcode. Kelkoo towers, as Ian and I nicknamed it, is history.

Setting off toway, I was acutely conscious that this was the final time I’d be making the journey. No longer would I take the Picadilly line from Northfields, speed-walk down a long tunnel at Green Park, and then join the businessmen of the Jubilee line to London Bridge in a journey that totals about an hour, door to door. From Monday, it’s Picadilly line all the way to the far closerLeicester Square, and accounting for the difference in travel time, potentially an extra 45 minutes of free time a day. At the time I didn’t realise, but I’d already done the last iteration of that trip yesterday, for todaya mysterious and vague sounding “loss of traction current” at Canada Water meant running to the District line at Westminister (a sub-journey that invovles going through some kind of four-dimensional escalator room that is worth visiting the station for itself..) taking the tube to bank/monument, and then the northern line to london bridge. Our final day at work in that office, and the public transport system managed to make us 15 minutes late. Most embarassing, since we all got to leave at 2pm anyway, so it might’ve appeared not unlike skiving the morning to reduce time at work. Ah well.

It’s not like there was much work to do, of course. Many of the systems were already packed up, and at any rate the final part of the day was spent packing up our individual terminals, labelling everything, and getting forms signed for our new employee badges. Ian and I also ran around taking photos of the view from the office, because it’s unlikely that we’ll get such a good look at the city for some time, at any job. In fact, it seems that the only downside to moving to Yahoo! is that our panoramic cityscape view is replaced by, er, the side of the odeon cinema. Ah well. I’ll be sharing some of those photos once I can conspire with Ian to choose the best of the ones we took. There is a big list of good reasons about moving to Yahoo! but I figure I should deal with those on the day, not least because then I can at least find out what’s hearsay and what’s truth.

Having finished at work some 3 hours early, we went to Forbidden Planet to buy comics. While the comics I got were adequate, the real star purchase for the day was Volume 1 of the Genshiken manga. It’s been a mere 6 weeks since we finished watching the anime, but it feels like forever sometimes. I read the first two chapters on the Tube going home and it’s bringing back all sorts of memories. Now I have to wait 8 weeks for the next book. One day at a time.