Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Tedious beyond belief. Severe delays going home last night, severe delays coming in to work this morning. Signal failures at Highgate and then at East Finchley. This is the service I pat over £1,300 a year to use.

To add insult to injury, the announcer at Totteridge and Whetstone had an accent: “Ladies and Geddlemen. There are sibber dillies on the Northern Line due to earlier siggal failure at East Fwishley.” It would have been amusing had it not virtually been on loop. As it was, your mild mannered correspondent simply wished to wrench the tannoy off the post and shove it down someone’s throat.

It was clear that whoever recorded the message wasn’t paying any attention to what he was reading, either. After waiting ten minutes (and still no train, crowded or otherwise), the message changed to announce “minor delays” but with the added cryptic remark at the end “…but this is irrelevant for this station closure”.

I woke up all perky and rested. Now I just want to doze off again.

Well the TFL website says there is a good service operating, but my journey in this morning was barely improved on the one home last night. Even Creepy Swedish Guy (yes, I was that late) looked perturbed as he barrelled troll-like along the platform at Euston.

Today promises to be a corker. We have to achieve a number of impossible tasks before lunchtime and everyone but me has been dragged off into meetings to discuss how horrible the situation is, instead of actually doing something about it. According to my watch there are two hours left, but then deadlines seem to mean very little these days.

I am trying to understand the logic of my office computer, which when I logged on this morning, told me that my password would expire in a month and would I like to change it now? A warning is useful, but a full month? I’ll change it then, if that’s OK. It will give me time to think of something that fits our security requirements, is memorable enough for me to remember but obscure enough for no-one to guess. We used to be given randomly generated passwords from a coupon book. No-one could remember them and kept them in their desk drawers making something of a mockery of it all.

I am still unsure as to whether I shall be required to attend the lunchtime meeting with the Monster. I am hoping not and in a little display of rebellion have failed to wear a tie (I never wear a tie these days unless I am meeting members of the great unwashed or someone who thinks they’re important). I used to keep a spare one in my desk drawer, but that seems to have gone AWOL – along with all the old password slips. Maybe I should reinstate the practice.

Well I was late into work today, but by design, for once. I hung around in the vague hope that Furtle’s package would arrive – the one she paid extra for guaranteed delivery Saturday just gone. It didn’t arrive then and as of 9.20 am today it still hadn’t arrived. I am confident that we will have one of those snotty “while you were out” cards waiting for us tonight.

I was very rude in this connection about Parcel Farce. It seems that I was being unfair as this is some other cowboy courier. When Furtle used the tracking number over the weekend, we find that the package was in Glasgow. It will have started off in Basingstoke, so it probably got driven past the Athenaeum Club to get to Scotland in the first place. Either way, it is now officially more travelled than I am on an ounce for ounce basis.

It also seems to have fallen out of the space-time continuum; the despatch date in Glasgow was before its arrival there. I don’t know what the package is; Furtle is being appropriately mysterious about it. I hope some bugger is enjoying it.