Night before, day after
Wednesday, February 5th, 2014 02:59 pmSo all in all a quiet birthday. Left to my own devices, I shouldn’t have come in to the office, but with needing to take Friday off to go and see Mum, and Furtle not being able to get time off, I reckoned it best to just come in and done with.
As is traditional in these parts, I dropped some goodies on the shared space for colleagues to enjoy and that was that.
I took the opportunity to sneak out early and met up with![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fencingsculptor and ellefurtle for a couple of pints in the Windsor Castle (why it was renamed after being the Cardinal for as long as anyone can remember, is anyone’s guess) before catching the Tube and train back to Ilford before the tube strike got underway.
Once we’d got back with time to spare, we went out for a very tasty Indian meal at the Pakwaan, the only local restaurant we really like (ironic, really, as one of the supposed attractions of moving to Ilford was the expectation that the vast ethnic mix would have produced many interesting eateries). That was, as ever, very toothsome and being a Tuesday night, we were spared the live Asian karaoke that gets going and out of hand at the weekend, if you are on the premises much after 8pm.
That was pretty much it. We had a nice evening, but it being a school night, had poured ourselves into bed by midnight and that was that. We must go out more often for meals. I do like going on dates with me Missus.
Today of course, is the first party of the first 48 hour tube strike and my journey in was miserable. For all that some of my friends were barely affected by it, circumstances meant that in addition to the strike, which for the first time in ages seems to have been relatively widely observed, Greater Anglia trains, God rot ‘em, managed to mangle their own barely adequate service, meaning that I was delayed by 15-20 minutes getting into Liverpool Street on a train that was heaving from the outset. At Liverpool Street, the underground station was open, but there were no Circle Line trains, only the Metropolitan Line, which id a fat lot of use to me.
Queues for the buses ran halfway around the station and I confess that I spent 20 minutes wondering whether or not to turn around and go home again. In the end, I latched onto the end of the queue and waited to get on a number 11 to Victoria. As you might imagine, that too was packed and I spent the largest part of 90 minutes stuck on a barely moving bus before decamping at Victoria. I should have walked, but my knee has been giving me gyp recently, so I decided against it. As it was, standing crammed in for all that time, unable to move much gave me a back ache, though I managed to sit down for the last 20 minutes, which did much to ameliorate the problem.
So I got to my desk a full hour and a half late.
I am leaving to make the return journey shortly after three. I don’t care how short a time I will have been in the office. Had the moneygrubbers got their acts together, I should have been able to work from home, but as it is that’s not an option currently. In the meantime, neither my lackey, nor my predecessor are in the office and I am being pressed for information that I need to cull from the jungle of badly labelled and filed worksheets that I’ve inherited, but not yet been able to properly relabel and recatalogue. This means that I can’t find the information they require.
Oh well. There must be brownie points for effort, mustn’t there?
As is traditional in these parts, I dropped some goodies on the shared space for colleagues to enjoy and that was that.
I took the opportunity to sneak out early and met up with
fencingsculptor and ellefurtle for a couple of pints in the Windsor Castle (why it was renamed after being the Cardinal for as long as anyone can remember, is anyone’s guess) before catching the Tube and train back to Ilford before the tube strike got underway. Once we’d got back with time to spare, we went out for a very tasty Indian meal at the Pakwaan, the only local restaurant we really like (ironic, really, as one of the supposed attractions of moving to Ilford was the expectation that the vast ethnic mix would have produced many interesting eateries). That was, as ever, very toothsome and being a Tuesday night, we were spared the live Asian karaoke that gets going and out of hand at the weekend, if you are on the premises much after 8pm.
That was pretty much it. We had a nice evening, but it being a school night, had poured ourselves into bed by midnight and that was that. We must go out more often for meals. I do like going on dates with me Missus.
Today of course, is the first party of the first 48 hour tube strike and my journey in was miserable. For all that some of my friends were barely affected by it, circumstances meant that in addition to the strike, which for the first time in ages seems to have been relatively widely observed, Greater Anglia trains, God rot ‘em, managed to mangle their own barely adequate service, meaning that I was delayed by 15-20 minutes getting into Liverpool Street on a train that was heaving from the outset. At Liverpool Street, the underground station was open, but there were no Circle Line trains, only the Metropolitan Line, which id a fat lot of use to me.
Queues for the buses ran halfway around the station and I confess that I spent 20 minutes wondering whether or not to turn around and go home again. In the end, I latched onto the end of the queue and waited to get on a number 11 to Victoria. As you might imagine, that too was packed and I spent the largest part of 90 minutes stuck on a barely moving bus before decamping at Victoria. I should have walked, but my knee has been giving me gyp recently, so I decided against it. As it was, standing crammed in for all that time, unable to move much gave me a back ache, though I managed to sit down for the last 20 minutes, which did much to ameliorate the problem.
So I got to my desk a full hour and a half late.
I am leaving to make the return journey shortly after three. I don’t care how short a time I will have been in the office. Had the moneygrubbers got their acts together, I should have been able to work from home, but as it is that’s not an option currently. In the meantime, neither my lackey, nor my predecessor are in the office and I am being pressed for information that I need to cull from the jungle of badly labelled and filed worksheets that I’ve inherited, but not yet been able to properly relabel and recatalogue. This means that I can’t find the information they require.
Oh well. There must be brownie points for effort, mustn’t there?