The world of work

After my first day of working and commuting by train I can tell you that, contrary to expectations of lovely relaxing reading periods, I already despise travelling by train. Or rather, to be more pedantically accurate, what I hate is those periods where you're not travelling by train, but are instead hanging around platforms waiting for trains that are cancelled or just late. On the way home today I got both, one after the other, which had the end result of letting me get home just over two hours after I left the office - conversely, getting to the office this morning took about 50 minutes.

On the bright side, however, I did get a lot of reading done today. I'm going to have to be careful not to bring books that are too engrossing; I'll end up going straight past one or both of the stations where I disembark.

Today was standard introductory stuff: lots of filling in forms, wandering around to meet everyone and to get some idea of the layout of the building (I'm going to get so lost; the building I work in really is a maze of twisty little corridors, all alike), setting up my shiny new laptop and acquainting me with the intranet, for which they use the plodding IE5.0. Five. Point nought. (I don't think I'll get very far recommending Mozilla Firebird.) A good 70-80% of their markup could easily be stripped out or replaced - I was actually wincing when I Viewed Source. It was painful. Really.

And now I'm back to getting up at 6:30am, which means that I'm actually really tired now. Off to bed at 10:30pm? Gah.

Newer tenant

...although, continuing on from the last such announcement, it's actually the same tenant, but an archive instead of a blog.

It's a Lord Of The Rings Real Person Slash (LOTR RPS) fanfiction archive.

I'd like to stress - quite a lot, actually - that in no way apart from the hosting am I connected to this. I'm not involved in LOTR fandom, I don't read fanfic, and especially not slash because, in most cases, urgh. (With, of course, the notable exception of Cassie Claire's Very Secret Diaries.)

But, well, it's there, and goes by the name of Every Single One. Enjoy.

In other news, working amongst a number of people with slightly (or heavily) northern accents has somehow resulted in my thoughts running in a northern accent. It's started coming out in my voice as well, which I find rather disconcerting because it's all happening totally subconsciously, and I'm having to force myself to speak as I would normally - people will think I'm mocking them if I keep wavering between Surrey and northern accents.

Bing! Reminding you

Over the last week when I've been at work, I've discovered a truly depressing fact. I can't function without automatic reminders.

It all started with Microsoft Outlook, which is What We Use at work. And I found that there's a task manager, into which you (surprisingly enough) enter tasks that you need to do. Give the task a Due date, and then set the automatic reminder to go off in your face at a time of your choosing.

In the space of a week - one week, mind you - my memory has disintegrated because I'm relying on these too much. Now anytime I find out about anything at all that I need to do, at any point in the future, it either goes on my Outlook calendar with a reminder set to go off, or on my Outlook tasks with a reminder set to go off. At the appointed time an irritating dialogue box pops up, and I usually spend the next hour or two clicking "Snooze" at five or ten minute intervals.

All well and good, but unfortunately my memory has evolved to meet these conditions. Because I've noted down what needs doing and I know that it won't get past the appointed time without my being reminded, my memory has taken this to mean that it can just obliterate the task from my mind in the meantime. The only thing I remember is the fact that there are things that need doing in the indefinite future, but not a word as to what they might be.

I have become all-dependant on Microsoft Outlook, which is surely not a good thing. One reminder that's in there at the moment (which, by the way, I know about only because I made a note of it) is set to go off next Tuesday morning, and says "Buy bus tickets", next Tuesday morning being when I calculate I'll have run out.

It gets worse than that. There's also a reminder for Monday afternoon telling me to email myself to remind myself to bring enough money with me the next day.

I have a rather peculiar memory. Little details, I can remember. Even things like my 7-digit staff number, which I was only shown once last week. But tasks? Things that need doing? If there are things I should remember, of the sort that could go onto a To Do list, I use the list as external memory. I constantly write notes to myself.

Incidentally, there's a note that I found it necessary to write myself last week that reads: "Work emails... Must. not. use. smileys."

Witness the excitement

The excitement peculiar to a markup geek, slight or otherwise, that is. (I know I don't appear to be a markup geek, but don't judge by my present markup - it was mostly done in Februaryish when I was younger and more stupid than I am today. That's a good point actually; I really, really must - and yes, I say this a lot - redo all my markup to actually make it near-valid and semantically pure. Anyway, back to the story.)

Sean has marked up a chess board with pieces in XHTML and CSS - no graphics. I had no idea that things like chess characters had their own HTML entities, and I am ridiculously excited about this. Minimal markup, three little CSS rules, and that's it. (And yes, I think it is tabular data.)

Sean's wondering whether it'll crash any browsers, although I'd be surprised. Anyway. Go check it out; I think it's fab.

Prang

I would have written and posted this yesterday, but I got very sidetracked by IRC and then didn't have enough time before bed.

Prang. Rather an odd word, when you think about it. And to my knowledge, every time I've heard it used, it's been in the context of "a prang", as in a minor car accident. I looked it up on Dictionary.com yesterday out of interest, and to my bemusement, it insists that prang is a verb only. "To crash, to damage by colliding with (a car, for example)." No matter, I shall continue to use the word as I see fit.

Yesterday morning I was driving to the dentist and then straight onto work instead of taking the train as per usual. I had a prang turning right out of a junction when another car went into the side of my car.

It was rather scary, being not only my first accident, but the first one I've ever witnessed. The problem with that junction is that it's an absolute blind corner at that time of the morning, because of the setup. At the junction you're on the crest of a rise in the main road that you're turning into, and all the way from the corner on your right to the other end of the road is an absolutely solid row of parked cars (due to people parking there in the mornings and then walking 15 minutes to the train station rather than pay the cark park charges). This blocks your view totally of any cars within two or three hundred yards, until the road rises enough for the cars to be visible again.

Anyway, I pulled out - I thought there was enough room behind the car that was turning left into the junction - and suddenly there was another car slammed into my door. We were both rather shocked, and then managed to pull over to the side of the road to swap insurance details and check for damage. No one was hurt, although my right shoulder's been aching quite a lot today, presumably from the seatbelt. However, his headlights ended up all over the road, and my driver's door is deformed to the extent that it can't be opened.

The shock does hit you rather a lot - my handwriting of his details is quite shaky, and ten or fifteen minutes later my heart rate was still at 120. It took three or four hours for me to calm down to the point of normality, and consequently I took the day off work because I was fairly shaken by the whole thing.

And you thought that was going to be a dull entry about dictionary definitions, didn't you?

Fragment - "Trapped"

I realise my blogging's been a little slack of late. Unfortunately, this isn't likely to change without the occurrence of some pretty major time-management on my part, which is going to take effort and willpower, neither of which I have in large amounts.

In fact, I'm having such trouble finding things to blog about, combined with the time available to write about them, that I'm typing up a fragment of creative writing that I did at GCSE. I found it about a month ago when I was clearing out my room, on a scrappy piece of paper. Enjoy.

---

Power failure. The lights went off.

Now that it's dark, the only thing I can see is a small flashing red light to the right of the lift door. All around me people are letting out little gasps of breath as panic creeps into their minds. I can smell people's perspiration, the mark of fear, and from below our heads comes the first faint sounds of a little girl's whimpering.

The lift walls are hemming us in as if they were closing in slowly, surely, squeezing all the air out and choking us all. Unseen, but still present, still presenting a barrier, keeping us all against our will.

I admit, I'm panicking now - I'm slightly claustrophobic. I've always felt uncomfortable in enclosed places - I feel as if the whole world is closing in on me, closing in as though the world were being compressed, everything shrinking and I'm the only thing remaining the same size, I am suffocating...

Calm down. I notice that my breathing is unnaturally quick and strained, and so I make an effort to focus, focus, concentrate on the things around me. Details. The walls, with dent that I can feel with my palms behind my back. I imagine I can see the ceiling, that it's not obscured in the inky blackness that has descended.

The flashing red light was a danger signal. But now it flickers, flickers... dies. It is a liar, telling us there is no danger now.

We are still trapped.

Lurking monsters, redux

Remember the giant spiders that our house appears to be slightly invested with?

I was sitting on the floor in my room two nights ago, writing in my big heavy notebook, when I suddenly noticed a very fast-moving shadow out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head just quickly enough to see one of our giant spiders (about three inches in diameter, if you're wondering) sprinting across the floor to duck under my bed, passing about eight inches away from me.

Needless to say, I let out an involuntary squeal and leapt onto my bed in a desperate attempt not to let the thing crawl over me. Further thinking (in fact, some thinking, forget the "further") led to the idea that (a), trying to clobber the spider with something heavy might be the best course of action (seeing as there was no one else awake upon whom I could call for assistance), and (b), I had in my hand a big, heavy notebook. Joy was found in the coalescence of these two ideas, so I crouched down beside my bed and gently hovered my notebook over the spider's head, whereby it speedily retreated further under the bed before I could bring the weight down to squash it.

I quickly brought out a torch so that I could spy the beast, but it had hidden in the shadows and I was worried to find that I couldn't see where it had gone. So I perched on the bed, reading, and trying not to imagine the spider crawling up the wall behind me and onto my bed.

To my relief, about twenty minutes later a three-inch dark blur scurried out from under my bed. Wasting no time, I grabbed my big heavy notebook and swiftly battered the spider senseless, squashing it against my bedside table amid cries of "Die, puny spider!" I left it in its squished state, not wanting to do anything further with it, and in the morning was relieved to see that it hadn't moved. Even so, I was reluctant to step out of bed; scared that if I put my foot on the floor it would suddenly spring back to life again. Luckily it didn't. Still, I maintain that it wasn't unreasonable for me to be so cautious.

Yes, I get rather nervous around large spiders. Why do you ask?

Wha... how did that happen?

Ulp. And eek.

Eavesdropping

Well, not eavesdropping as such - I was doing my best not to listen to the conversation, but it was a little difficult given that the woman was talking rather loudly in quiet surroundings. The stationery section of WHSmith, to be precise.

So. Thusly ran one side of the strangest phone conversation I've ever overheard:

"So, did you get that stuff I sent you about the abortion clinic? . . . Yeah, it's appalling, isn't it - well, I think so, at least. [Mildly interesting so far, but not exactly out of the ordinary. However, her serious image was quickly dispelled by:] Ooh, what colour folder do you think I should get? [Some brief discussion about the relative merits of solid blue folders versus patterned pink ones.] Ooh, ooh, Hannah, did I tell you? I saw my first dead body the other day! [All other heads in the immediate vicinity turned towards her, although she was oblivious to the fact.] The face was all covered over, but you could still see it, and it was all stiff...

That being the point where I politely walked off so that she was out of earshot.