Bernard Black (Google it you lazy sods) is my current favourite quotesmith:

“You can find work and sort your life out anytime. The pub closes in five hours.”

“Well, to be honest…after years of smoking and drinking…you do sometimes look at yourself and think. You know just sometimes inbetween the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that 400th glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think:this is fantastic. I’m in heaven!”

Today I was induced into MegaCorp! A bit like being “made up” in the Mafia I would imagine. Only without being shot in the head.
They run regular induction courses for “new starters” and this was the nearest to my start date, despite being almost 4 weeks after the event. Hey, don’t knock it, it took 6 months for me to get booked on an induction at my…ahem…previous employer.
This induction was held at the Gattaca-style centre in “a recently developed part of the former industrial centre of London’s docklands” – you know. This building is so blatantly corporate and opulent that I always feel slightly uncomfortable milling about inside. The high number of high-visability, highly-strung security people, coupled with the huge number of bewildered visitors really gives the lobby a Gilliamesque surreality that does my fucking head in. The little voice eminating from the back of my cranium starts to remind me that “I DON’T BELONG HERE”…despite owning the necessary MegaCorp ID card required to gain entry. Being the only long-haired jeans-wearing scruff bag in the entire joint simplified my progress, mainly because the security people could instantly deduce that I was here for the induction so I was able to traverse the huge, marble-lined atriums, expensively decorated corridors and tons of superfluous glass, with ease.
What would you imagine the induction to be like for such a vast multinational corporation ? You’re so right. Here are a few of the highlights:

• The Powerpoint-failure ballet was shortened as a result of the auditorium having its own PC installed. It still added an extra 10 minutes to the proceedings, but any regular conference-goer will be with me when I describe this as orgasmically short.
• The expensive video projection system did get bollocksed-up enough for me to nearly embarrass myself. We were treated to the inspirational, introductory music to “The History of MegaCorp” five or six times; sometimes without the visuals, sometimes with some Windows graphics but only finally with the correct footage. Even then, half the voices were silent owing to creative stereo sound editing combined with a broken right channel. The climax of the film consisted of the current CEO, let’s call him “Wayne King”, delivering a terribly inspirational speech only to be halted by a horribly debilitating desease that froze him with some hideous blocky facial deformity. The key conference geezer used this paralysingly long time to faf about and announce that this was the end of the film anyway.
• We learned about the new glorious 5 year^H^H^H^Hpoint plan that will ensure we achieve our mission statement: to become the most powerful organisation in de whole vorld!!!! Muwahahahahahah etc
• We learned about the diversity of the company. In fact this was surprisingly well thought out and interesting, despite a considerably embarrassing excercise where we all had to ask ourselves where the listed scenarios were “acceptable” or “unacceptable”. They were things like:
  

  “A workmate often spends his time on the Internet looking up websites about raping and murdering woman.Occasionally he wears their skins into work and masturbates over the office plants.”.

  On the other hand, considering some of the scum that Megacorp attracts (cough…traders…) this may not be patronising after all…

• We had coffee and tea…and I didn’t speak to anyone. Instead I simply stared into a previously unobserved piece of open space.
• Other things

Despite all of this negativity, now that I have stuff to do I’m enjoying the work. The people I deal with are sound (despite some earnest to the point of being called “Ernie”) and my immediate colleages are not only nice and techincal, they hate Windows too! Cool!

By the end of my second week at MegaCorp the digital bureaucracy had managed to fast-track me some accounts, allowing me to do a day’s work! Woohoo!
It was good too! Tech stuff, but enjoyable. Just enough mental excercise to make the hours pass away. In fact I’m now digging the new job. It’s about as far removed from the last job as you can get, in terms of social-life anyway, but that’s good. Also the UK members of my “team” are not only nice blokes but skilled tech-dudes too. Something of a contradiction I would have thought until now.

The weekend was disgustingly short. I bought a Belkin ADSL modem/router/firewall/wireless-access-point from PC Wank on saturday. It turned out to be a stonker of a good buy: not only does it contain a rather cool OS called ‘ATMOS/ISOS’ that’s very IOSy it can also run Linux 🙂 I’ll leave that bit of hackmongery until I get very bored.

We had our customary Saturday night curry and watched Wedding Crashers (worth a view – available on a torrent site near you). On Sunday I went over for a meal at my mum and dads. Michele had gone off to the parrot rescue place all day and Frances was at a barbecue [ have I blogged about my sister moving back to London after leaving her boyfriend/job/life in Plymouth ? IMHO she’s very brave and has made such a good decision. Obviously she doesn’t see it in those terms at this point but she will I’m sure.] We managed to have a really good laugh about all kinds of stupid stuff that night too.

Until sitting down at this computer I had intended to write all kinds of insightful stuff about the London bombs etc…but frankly I think it would have ended up being a load of old crap….so I didn’t bother.

Tonight the good folks of G*******s arranged for a night out at the nearest pub. We were threatened with ejection owing to the drunken state of my colleagues (not me obviously). For the benefit of my long-term-memory here are a few key points:

• Dave’s pet idea
• Llynos stripping off and getting into the paddling pool
• Lisa’s “new look”
• Jif and Llynos smashing up the chair and getting threatening comments from the guvnor

There are more interesting things…but I don’t remember them 🙁

As it is only my third day at the new job, it’s unfair to judge it too harshly. But I’m going to anyway. From here on in it will be referred to as MegaCorp.

MegaCorp is hugely massive. Saying it’s bigger than I’m used to is a severe understatement. It’s bigger than anyone can conceive. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s too big to be comprehended by anyone, which obviously includes the C*Os. However, despite its ludicrous size, the whole functions like a well-oiled machine; a well oiled machine thats totally fucked in the most fundamental way.

To give you a taste of how it all works, or doesn’t, here are some guidelines for survival at MegaCorp.:

• You need to GLA, preferably TLAs.
• For every administrative task that needs automating, provide at least two systems that are both incomplete and incompatible
• Calculate how long any job will take by multiplying the realistic time by two and adding two more days.
• For every employee in a normal business, employ five. Then split each group of five into two competing groups with disarmingly similar acronyms. Then, each group can blame the other for failing to do any work:
  “Nothing to do with us, pass it to NOBHED.”
  “Those bastards are always doing that – tell FUKFAYS they have to initialise the process before we can touch it.”
• Ignore 2/3 of all email. You’ll be too busy otherwise. And if someone can’t be bothered to mail you three times it can’t be that urgent.

Ah well. Once I get access to all of the things I need access to I’m genuinely looking forward to getting my teeth into some good technical stuff. Luckily the guys […and I mean ‘Guys’ – AFAICT there are only two women in the entire building…] I’m working with are technical and there are plenty of opportunities to get deep into some juicy code.

Apparently I’ve had a week off. I know because of the calendar. It feels like I just left work this afternoon and now I have to start a new job tomorrow. Owing to the fact that all personnel HR departments, in all sectors, appear to suffer from the same level of bollocksness, I have no idea where or what time to start work tomorrow. So I’m going to turn up at 9am and just hope it all works. To be honest I’m cool with such lax arrangements at a place of work. And what’s the worst that can happen – a sacking ? Hmm.

Last night was great despite being quiet. On second thoughts, perhaps it was great because it was quiet. Quality time with Michele, Humph and a top curry is just what I needed. Even the TV looked promising; The Royal Tannenbaums was scheduled and I’ve always wanted to see it. The IMDb reviews are quite peculiar because they are either full-on raves or bile-filled rants with no-one sitting on the fence. I’m delighted to announce that I’m firmly in the hate camp. Not loathing, that’s reserved for Peter Greenaway films, but “anti” nonetheless. As my dad observed, ” I kept waiting for it to start”.
None of the things we were promised were present, for example “humour”, “darkness”, “insight” or “being interesting”. We gave up after about forty-five minutes because we were diverted by watching Michele’s nail polish dry.
Later, out of desperation rather than insight, I put C4 to watch Birthday Girl. Despite being obvious Hollywood crap (I mean it’s got Nicole kidman in it FFS), might provoke some interest. What I got ,after some investment in time, was a well acted, clever little comedy drama that kept me glued (give it half an hour before you turn it off). And Nicole Kidman turns out to be a really great actress too. Well bugger me.

Afterwards, as I was wallowing in post-movie thought, there was an urgent knock at the front window which nearly caused my heart and rectum to panic. I looked out to see an old, old friend that clearly wasn’t there because he lives on the other side of the country. As my legs started to crumble beneath me, I looked again, and he was waving! Oh Jesus, is this it ?

Naahh….Steve Harper was really there, together with Pete and Bill from down the road. He’d come up for the weekend and was kipping there the night. So, the least I could do was invite them in for a chat and that’s what I did. The most I could have done was to offer them some tea/wine/etc but, being crap and still stunned I didn’t. Sorry Guys.

And so, to bed (via an episode of The Sweeney I taped earlier).

Pics from last Friday at Goldsmiths now up

The inevitable anti-muslim backlash has begun following the recent bombings. The usual meaningless tripe about “groups linked to Al-Quaeda” has been spouted almost non-stop by the press since the morning of the blasts. But whichever bunch of nutters is responsible, all they have done is moved the fascist fader in the brains of the Great British public, up a few notches. An odd, but utterly predictible outcome for such an act.
As someone on the radio, possibly Charles Clarke, commented, the plot “went under the radar of the intelligence services”. This I find genuinely odd and can only imagine that MI5/GTAC were looking in the wrong place. In other words, perhaps we should hold off before we decide who’s to blame.
The last time a terrorist “went under the radar” in London it was the right-wing psycho nazi nailbomber, David Copeland. Copeland was trying to start a race war and got away with three nail bombs before being caught. The spooks couldn’t have done it without the help of moles within the far-right. In the grand old tradition of MI5, they missed this plot from the fascists.
Copeland was mentored by extreme nazi lunatic David Myatt who, after his lifetime of nazi theorising, now claims to be a muslim. He is also a supporter of suicide attacks. Cynics might suggest his conversion to Islam was simply a method of spreading tensions beween religions and races.

Either way, he, Copeland and all of the other neo nazis are presumably delighted by the bombings and the racial tension they will assist in heating.

Since the last blog lots of things have happened. Obvious really but I thought I should mention it because I don’t plan to try and remember them in any detail.As humph preens my hair, here they are in a nutshell:

• My last week at Goldsmiths has been and gone. More about this later.
• I Still haven’t written to anyone 🙁
• For health reasons ,I have stopped drinking.
• Michele had a birthday.
• We had our eighth wedding anniversary.
• My sister has moved back to London at last!
• The 120GB Maxor hard-disk I bought to replace the 80 Maxtor drive that packed-up without warning, packed-up without warning. I’m now the proud owner of a 300G Seagate drive and in the process of recompiling my music collection. technology…tchoh…
• 4 bombs went off in London during the rush-hour and,without wanting to belittle the terrible trauma of the families involved, very few people were killed or injured.
• Live 8 and G8 came and went
• All of the Londoners who didn’t even want the sodding olympics still got a warm smug feeling when the announcement was made. But purely because it didn’t go to Paris 🙂
• other stuff too probly

Yesterday was my last day at Goldsmiths. It’s true to say that after 13 years I’ve become a tad institutionalised and so it’s very difficult to believe at the moment. There was a leaving do in the Hobgoblin after work and it was great, if not a little emotional. Not drinking at such an event is surprisingly enjoyable. Apart from remembering it the next day, I didn’t feel ill, didn’t say or do anything regretful and still had as good a time. Weird eh ?

When I resigned, it was made clear that I didn’t want a collection or a ceremony. Mainly because I’d left and returned several years ago; two collections would be a bit embarrassing. They cheated and made a collection but turned it into a kitty to buy everyone drinks which was great. They also bought me a present, wrapped in brown paper to reduce its presentishness. The perfect present in fact: a USB hub and combined coffee cup warmer! Fantastic.
[Humph says: 8ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt tttttttttttttttttttt ]

There were cards full of really lovely comments, an excellent custom-made t-shirt [“veg – out”] that loads of people signed. lots of people I haven’t seen for ages turned up too. Lovely to see you folks!

Plenty of people took pictures so there should be some up soon.

This morning, Suzanne was kind enough to help me move my 13 years of office detritus from work to home. Two huge carboard-boxes full of junk, an old Alpha, and a ZX81. We’ve got too much stuff in our little flat…

When I got home last night, the realisation that I’d left the place kicked in and caused me to panic. Scary things.

Most frequent use of the word “Motherfucker” on international TV before 9pm BST goes to….

Snoop Dogg [sp – thanks alex]!

I’m phoning the BBC to congratulate them!

Tip of the day: “never reheat food in a microwave for less than 4 minutes”. If only I had read this in my blog before I wrote it, perhaps I wouldn’t have spent so much time puking on things today.
After a couple of dignified projectile vomiting sessions before work, I foolishly decided to go in regardless. In fairness, I managed to hold back the stomach flinches for an hour, a long phonecall, and the recovery of a crashed finance server before deciding to bail out and go home. Sadly, that five-minute walk proved two and a half minutes too long and I capitulated to the will of my wretch muscles: all over the shrubs at the front of the college. Hey, it was either that or over the passing pedestrians.
This is most ill I’ve been for a long while, and I’m still feeling rough as a badger’s arse.

Life seems scary at the moment. My dreams have been very, very distressing as a result. Some mornings I wake up feeling like I’ve spent the last eight hours being abused and beaten up by everyone from close friends to Michael Caine.