The greatest gift that I possess

Yesterday I was in the crowded canteen at work, and as I walked past someone I caught a snatch of their conversation: "...your general happiness, rate it on a scale of 1 to 10..."

And I grinned because I was thinking, "At least 9½."

Driving in my car

As many of you might remember, I split my working week between two different locations and commute by train to one and by car to the other.

A consequence of this is that I get to drive a new hire car for two days and 280 miles every week, which can be really, really nice. It's less nice when, as last week, you get a Fiat which is very obviously designed for Big People - being a small person, I couldn't get the car seat in the right position and after the first fifty miles or so my lower back starting aching rather a lot every time I put my foot on the clutch. The driving experience overall was quite good - and the first time I've driven a car with a six-speed gearbox - but it's the most physical pain a car has ever caused me, so I was less than happy with it.

This week's hire car turned up last night, and I briefly abandoned my IRC conversation to run outside and check what it was - a Vauxhall Astra. Not too bad; could have been better, but could have been a Fiat. I can cope with Astras.

Driving so many hire cars has at least instilled in me the urge to check wing- and rear-view mirrors, controls, and seat positions every time I get into a car. The first time I had a Peugeot 206 estate I spent five minutes searching for the wing-mirror adjusters - silly me; I mean, putting them down behind the handbrake is obvioulsy where you'd think to look.

This morning I climbed into the Astra and had a quick glance over the controls. It was at this point that I discovered that the car had an automatic gearbox, which I don't think I've ever even seen before, let alone driven. This prompted a quick rush inside to drag out my mum, who hasn't driven an automatic since the 1970s, and she gave me a quick crash course in how it works.

Fears slightly allayed, I set off.

I think the worst point was the first T-junction I came to - I was alert enough that I didn't attempt to go for the clutch and the gear lever, but as I braked my mind started panicking that the car was going to stall horribly. I got over this after the first few miles by forcing myself to imagine the car as a go-kart, or a dodgem car or similar, with just a Stop pedal and a Go pedal. I still don't know how to control the revs properly with only a pedal - as I joined a busy A-road this afternoon and accelerated to their speed, the revs just climbed up and up to over 5000rpm before it changed gear for me.

Ah well, tomorrow should go more smoothly. Provided I can stop cursing the car quite so much.

Looking through

Just by the by, a note on the name of my blog. On my about page (which is badly out of date, and in desperate need of a rewrite) it states that "the name 'bent back tulips' comes from a lyric in Glass Onion, by The Beatles."

And this is true. Now. Who knows what a bent back tulip is?

The lyric in question runs: Looking through the bent back tulips to see how the other half lives... and, according to my sources, refers to the Parkes hotel in London bending back the petals of tulips in order to display the stamen. Petals, not stems.

So, as an example, here are some bent back tulips for you. Enjoy.

(As a note: it's the first time I've ever actually seen bent back tulips. They don't look much like tulips, do they?)

Don't you train me

In October I was warned about a week-long management training course that I would have to go on come March or April, courtesy of Year In Industry. (No, I don't do management. I don't intend to do management. I won't have to do management at least until I emerge from the other side of Uni, in four and a half years' time. But it's mandatory, and I don't think there's anything I can do to get out of it.)

About ten days ago, more details were forthcoming. It's to be held at Southampton University, about 65 miles from where I live. The letter noted that "due to the high number of students we have in the Southern Region, we have devided to repeat the training at four different venues on four different weeks. We have allocated each student to a particular course based on his or her geographical location."

Southampton? Closer than, say, London? I live 40 minutes away from central London by train - it would take almost two hours to commute just to Southampton train station, let alone the university itself. Add to this the fact that we are expected to deal financially with accommodation or travelling ourselves (oh, and refreshments aren't provided either), I was not a happy bunny upon reading this.

I couldn't understand why they'd assigned me to Southampton until I realised they were probably basing it on our working locations rather than our home addresses. Aha. Yes, it's probably closer than London to Farnborough, but it's a right pain for me.

So an email was duly sent. Knowing the kind of communication problems I'd had before with regards to YinI and emails, I set it all out very clearly in big distinct bullet points. The preference would be to be transferred to a London course; apart from that I enquired about getting from the train station to the university, whether any travelling costs could be reimbursed (I'm looking at around £80 merely for four days' travelling to and fro), or alternatively whether there might be any available accommodation on-site, since it's during the students' holidays. (Holidays? Holidays? I'm not bitter, honestly...)

A week passed, nothing happened. Aggrieved, I resent the email and received a reply, apologising and saying that "it may have gone to the wrong address".

Now, I sent the email from cyoung@work. I was working in Salisbury at the time, where I normally leave between 3:30pm and 4pm in order to get back to Farnborough around 5pm (at which point I am no longer on company time) - seeing as it was mid-afternoon I set the reply-to for my home address, cathy@cyoung85.port5.com so that hopefully I'd have a response fairly quickly.

So where does she decide to send the reply? Well, to cathy@work, obviously. Yes, she made up an email address by combining the two possible options and then, when I didn't reply, didn't even check whether I'd got it or not.

And what she apparently said, ten days ago, was that both London courses were fully booked and that she was looking into accommodation at the halls of residence for me. Having forwarded me this initial response with no further comment than the brief apology, should I assume that in a full working week there's been absolutely no progress made?

Bah. I'm phoning her tomorrow, which will hopefully be more successful. Apparently some people only speak 'Phone'.

Don't ask me

My god, this week's been hectic. All at once, I've had shedloads of work piling up and barely time to think.

It's not helped by the fact that I've been ignoring sleep a fair bit lately, getting about six hours' sleep a night on average. To quote Iona (since she's said it so beautifully):

Sleep and I are having a long-distance relationship. We write, I think of her often, but we're just not spending the time. I'm starting to feel like we're star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the tracks who aren't permitted to see each other. Rather than the truth, which is that I keep standing her up.

Ooh, yeah. I know that one well. And the thing is, I don't survive well on little sleep. If I'm just left to sleep, I will, no waking up. Even when I had school holidays for weeks on end, and presumably my body had all the sleep it needed, I'd sleep for nine, ten, eleven hours until someone or something woke me up. I can get very run down very easily without sleep, and it's therefore quite dumb of me to stay up so late. It's really, really dumb of me to stay up late watching episodes of Angel - I very recently bought series 2 from Amazon secondhand, on the cheap. And I've only seen that series once, and at least - oh - a year ago? Oh no, actually, almost exactly a year ago (I know this because February half-term last year was when I ploughed through series 4 of Buffy in a week, trying to get it over with so that I could move onto Angel). So it's still quite gripping for me right now.

The days this week have just flashed past at an incredible pace due to them being so hectic. This would be good, but I need to get more things done. I haven't been in this position before, but unfortunately I've just started being given a number of extra projects because, it seems, they like my previous work. (Last week was also apparently National Praise-Cathy Week - I had two glowing compliments on my work via email, and also half a kilogram (about 1lb., you Imperial types) of Galaxy chocolate as a thank-you for sorting a problem. Last week was fun ;-) )

But this week, then, has been go, go, go all the way. There have been two meetings, one of which I was told about on the day at 9am (which explains why I was wearing jeans - I didn't know I had a meeting to go to), and the other of which was arranged about a month ago, and my Outlook reminder went off an hour and ten minutes later than I set it for, ten minutes after the meeting started, and thus I was late.

I had to put off some largeish jobs until the next day, which I don't recall having to do before thus far in my employment. (By the way, last week was my 25th week of working, which means I'm now more than halfway through my contract.) So I was stuck with doing them today, which was basically data entry all day.

Apart from the 60 or so people profiles that I had to copy and paste from Word into about 60 HTML tables, which took a long time, I was also typing out and marking up a list which is, in parts, a nested nested nested list (it's going to be a drop-down - well, pop-out - departmental tree structure menu) and, furthermore, has about 250 list items. I found flipping between screens for copying and pasting to be incredibly distracting, and bad for my eyes, so I quickly decided that the simplest way would in fact be to scribble all of the information down quickly, and then retype. Although my fingers haven't been appreciating it, my tired eyes and brain certainly were.

My exhaustion and the monotony of the work inevitably meant that my mind found the time to drift off a fair bit, and bizarrely - I say "bizarrely" since we're having freezing weather at the moment - I began to have the strange feeling that it was a summer day outside. Due to my trance-like state I started getting tiny slivers of flashbacks to my long-lost childhood (okay, it wasn't that long ago) and the feeling of sitting on the grass outside at school in high summer. It was an incredibly vivid memory for the instant that it lasted - I just had the edge of it before I came to, and it faded again.