Bad Vibes

How often have you felt the need to wave your hands in the air and scream like a man possessed? And then follow that up by throwing yourself through a window with all the grace and panache of a breeze-block?

Never? Okay, just me then!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of travelling to Leeds to one of our customer's regional offices. Because of everything going on around this latest project, I wasn't expecting it to be amongst the best days going ... and it wasn't ...

The first sign that the day wasn't going to be amongst the best was when my neighbours downstairs returned from a night out at 2:15 this morning, turned on some annoying beat-beat-beat-beat-beat-beat-beat-y music, and proceeded to chat and laugh until after I left for Leeds ... at 6:00 in the morning.

Needless to say, I wasn't the most alert person with only a couple of hours sleep under my heavy eyelids!!

Unfortunately, when I set off I realised I was TomTom-less, so spent half-an-hour driving to work only to discover that I had not put the office key in my pocket because I wasn't expecting to go there. Cue cries of desperation!

I couldn't waste another hour bouncing between the office and the flat like an expensive game of ping pong, so decided to travel 20 minutes back home in order to go through a town that I sort of knew how to get across to reach the M1.

Finally, an hour after setting off from home, I was heading to the customer site!!

I am the first to admit that I am not the greatest driver trundling our roadways, so being at a point where I was close to falling asleep at the wheel thanks to my 'holiday mode' neighbours, didn't make for a particularly safe start to the journey. By the time I reached Watford Gap, I was overdue for a strong coffee doused with plenty of sugar ... oh, and a chocolate swirl :-)

I'm sure the mints were nice, too, but they are still on the counter as far as I know...

Actually, whilst I'm talking of coffee, could we PLEASE standardise on the different sizes on offer?! If I ask for medium I get asked if I want regular or large, and if I ask for regular I get asked if I want small or medium!! Am I the only one who thinks medium and regular are the same thing??

I'm getting fed up of those girls that look at you like you're a half-wit because you used a word that wasn't on the menu.

*grumbles*

Anyway, the rest of the journey was largely uneventful, a few accidents here and there (as you expect with the M1), and finally arrived at 10:30am ... thinking I had gotten my times mixed up and that the meeting kicked of at 10am, not 11am. Luckily, 11am was the correct time, so I had done something right at least.

The meeting itself appeared to be going along fine until just before lunch when it suddenly became apparent that things weren't going quite as expected. They had already told me that they were only spending 10 percent of their time on the project as they had other stuff to do, and that all my communications with them over the past few weeks had been ignored because they hadn't had time to deal with them. This should have alarmed me more than it did at the time, but I in my tired haze, it didn't really register.

After the main meeting had concluded, we had a separate catch-up meeting. I won't go into the details here as this is turning into another marathon posting, however, what I will say is that it highlighted there were some major communication and (mis)understanding issues surrounding this project, by all parties concerned.

By the time I left, I felt totally despondent and wondering why on earth I was still working in IT.

By the time my sore backside and I returned home, I had made the conscious decision to quit my OU course so that I could concentrate on work better, and to start registering with the job sites.

The CV is now updated ... and the tutor says no.

To top it all, attempting to set up a network printer connection today resulted in the following message being printed for me instead of a test page:
Unsupported Personality: UNKNOWN

Even the hardware has to have a dig!

Comments

Middle Man said…
You have my sympathy. You can't pick your neighbours unfortunately. You might like the attached post:

http://caughtinthemiddleman.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/neighbours-from-hell/

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