The second week without the boss is now over. I’ve managed to do a lot of stuff, under the aupices of an American colleage, but for some reason I’m still looking forward to the return of my UK colleagues. It takes a while to get used to working in a team who are spread over two continents and several states. The fact we only know each other by voice is positive if only because it limits the number of ways we can pre-judge each other. So far, all my American colleagues seem really sound and on the ball. I would say that I’m nervous to meet them all face to face…but I’m not. In fact I’m looking forward to it. There’s one guy in particular who seems to “understand” things.

That all aside, I’ve been hanging out with a lot of “old” workmates this week (still no IP there – BT reckon 5am tomorrow – I think we may well see Christ first). Last night a bunch of us met up for a drink in the Walpole and then some of the old guard continued down to Kaya House for the best meal I’ve had in many months; probably since the last visit there.

When I first heard about the shooting of innocent Brazillian Jean Charles de Menezes, I was more concerned that there were armed officers wandering around London in plain clothes. Let me tell you, if I was followed by a bunch of skinhead coppers in mufty I would run like fuck…just like Charles de Menezes didn’t. In fact he behaved like a proper law-abiding citizen.
The media seems hell bent on starting a public debate on the “new shoot to kill policy”…mainly because the debates take place at 50p a go on premium-rate phone lines and reverse-billed text messages. But everyone is missing the point! The police have always operated a shoot to kill policy! You can’t practically operatate anything else, ask SO19! And I have no problem with it. It means that if firearms are used within the Met, they are used to take out nutters in an almost surgical way. They also shoot to the torso because the torso is big, not because it’s more humane! I hate to tell you this, but all of those war films where they “go for the legs” are simply lies to make you feel better. Let’s not fuck about; guns are designed to kill. if they don’t, then it’s a mistake.
The new “Operation Kratos” was simply a “shoot to the head rather than the torso” policy…which makes sense if you are actually going after genuine suicide bombers! What’s more important is that he wasn’t a terrorist! Which does put a bloody great big question-mark over the concept of arming the police at all.
When tactical firearms start letting off rounds, the people they are shooting at die.
Also, history has shown that SO19 have an astonishingly good record for not killing innicent people – really! Which is why I knew that this shooting could have nothing to do with SO19.

Indeed, the Met claim it was SO13! Now, as much as I admire Jack Regan, this is not the 70s. They no longer dish out Glocks to pissed-up plain clothes officers…do they ? If so, then what the fuck for ? In a nutshell I reckon it comes down to two possibilities:

1. It was SO19 and they were wreckless, which also reflects very badly on senior officers, means they didn’t follow training and broke the rules.
2. It was SO13 and they were wreckless, which also reflects very badly on senior officers and probably panicked judging by the number of shots they fired into the poor sod’s head.
3. It was nothing to do with the force, but was actually the result of MI5’s drunken incompetence, and the police have agreed to take the blame…in return for something…a K perhaps ?

As much as I dislike the whole concept of the police, I think the second option above is, sadly, more likely.
There’s more, but I can’t be arsed, and I’ll bet you can’t either.
Love.

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My last employer is having technical difficulties. As much as I’d like to say “If I’d been there it would have been sorted out by now” I can’t because, sadly, it’s not true. BT are, as usual, to blame. Now, if I were running my previous place of employment I would have sorted it out by now. But that’s a very unlikely thing. “Clearing” week is probably the most critical week for keeping Internet access going. Especially when web servers are hosted locally. There are lots of ways around this, all expensive and all BT should be paying for.
Regardless, laziness meant that my email was still hosted there. This has now been sorted out but still makes me want to jump up down on the face of BT senior executives.

That aside, my new job has been weirding me out, although not in an unpleasnt way. As the only non-American team-mates have been either working from home or on leave I have been working from home a lot. There’s nothing I can do in the office that I can’t do at home….well…apart from feel quite so depressed. I do that much better in a straight, tedious office environment. Open-plan offices are much like being married to a bunch of strangers..only without the love. I didn’t say “sex” there because I’m sure that’s rife. Frankly I can’t image anyone at my new workplace who could be found exiting by anyone else. Unless they were just plain kinky and really went for tedious, straight twats. I miss my work mates…
Working from home obviously has its advantages: keeping parrots company, not having to travel, not paying for lunch etc. But it also has its disadvantages: missing the company of humans; not having an excuse to go out; the ergonomics of the seating arrangements and, of course, daytime television. Consequently I have occasionally been going into the office just to remind myself of how lonely one can feel in a building full of strangers who are all professional miserable motherfuckers on the side. Now a new workmate has enlightened me to the joy of call1899 my home calls to the U.S. are so cheap that I’m having problems justifying the bus fare to Lewisham. Especially now that the fare machines are all either broken or nobbled by junkies, in such desperate need of pound coins that they will go to the trouble of block the sodding things up with chewing gum.
I’m still waiting for some project work. Until then I’m engaged in some interim jobs. Interesting jobs, but they don’t seem to count as much..what am I talking about.
Nighty night.

Things that I’ve been getting heavily (back) into recently, despite some people banging on about them for years before:

• Hawkwind
• screen
• Subversion
• Working From Home

As the proprietor of Britain’s leading e-university, I am often asked which educational establishment I would recommend for prospective undergraduates. Well, I have recently encountered an advertisement for probably the most prestigious university in the country, and have no reservations in recommending them highly to everyone. Of course, I am referring to the London College of Business and Management (Leytonstone High Street); the breeding ground for the next generation of world leaders.
Not only do they offer “DOCTORATE DEGREE’S” [sic] in Computer Science, they also offer “OTHER COURSES’S” [sic] in English Language! Can’t decide between Oxford or Cambridge ? Well why not take the third way: The London College of Business and Management (Leytonstone High St)!

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