on the bench

It's strange how being at home 'on the bench' i.e not having a paid project to work on, feels entirely different to being at home on holiday as I was last week.

I had an entire hour before I got a call asking me to work on an internal project: to create a senior mgmt presentation on how 2 different project methodologies fit with 3 different test methodologies and how we can convince clients we do all of them spectacularly well using 'a few slides'.
In the best tradition, someone else 'owns' this so it won't be my name on it, but at least it's interesting.

Brighton was wonderful on Saturday, fish and chips in the open air, and a stroll along the front after getting knocked out of the regional final. I was 46th of 69 qualifiers, out just before Mark but not first out from our team. Result I guess but I think I could/should have played better. Drinking pints of lager across the afternoon anaethetised me for the livescreenS football in the pub but I was glad to be on the train back, even if the american lass in the carriage was unbelievably LOUD, overconfident and irritating

We drifted over to the pub around Sunday teatime, after Formula 1, and discovered the new Sunday poker league was starting. Dinner was exceptionally late as Mark decided to play properly and win while I played recklessly and was second out of the game. PAH! I realised a long while back that poker is NOT a team sport and ought not to have assigned any weight to playing like idiots and getting out early.

Reminded myself there to pay Boris his tenner as a fine for not leaping out of bed at 6:30am to beat the 7am congestion zone camera.

I've been making some minor moves about job-hunting: things like inflation running at over 3% while my salary is static, emails from on high whinging that people need to observe rules to book holiday (a month's warning for a week, and 2 months for two weeks) regardless of project impact, because it messes up their forecasting and people need to forecast their holidays for the whole of this year ssssssssssssssaake!

The killer was finding that picking the wrong expenses authoriser (from the supplied list) means they delete the claim so now I have sent off the receipts under one claim number, and need to make new claims, with new numbers, and get them validated again, and guess which of twenty names is the right one. The email I sent to ask who CAN authorise them hasn't been answered. It's almost always the little things that get to you, the big things are shrugged off.

The garden has doen well on attention while it's been sunny, I might even plant that grass seed soon but raking stuff about is just as therapeutic as digging and a lot less effort