13 December 2010 (Monday) - An Afternoon Off

I woke feeling rather rough this morning, and lay watching the clock for a couple of hours before giving up trying to sleep. I went downstairs and watched lame drivel on UK Gold for an hour or so until “proper” getting up time; at which point I could quite happily have gone back to sleep.

Off to work, through the thickest fog I’ve seen in a long time. I stopped off at Tesco for lunch. Their early morning service doesn’t improve. And then to work, which was dull. I checked the leave rota – for everyone to get all their leave used up we need to have (at least) two people on leave every day. But to get the job done we can’t afford to have more than three people off at any one time. Today there was no one on holiday, so I took the afternoon off. Not because I especially wanted to, but so that I wouldn’t lose the leave.

I came home and had some scoff whilst watching a DVD. “Borstal Boy” is a film I’ve been meaning to watch for a while, but in the event I was rather disappointed. In order to portray the gritty realism of a wartime English borstal, there are a lot of characters who are regional stereotypes - complete with regional accents. Quite frankly I couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. I slept through the second half of the film, and woke with no real interest in replaying what I’d missed.

Then the doorbell rang. I’d ordered an Xmas pressie for ‘er indoors ^TM which the delivery company tried to deliver a week or so ago. No one was home when they called, so they left a note asking me to collect from their depot in Maidstone. I rang them and asked them to redeliver it to my place of work. They refused, and told me to contact the seller. So I asked the seller to ask them to redeliver it to my place of work; which he did.

This afternoon I phoned the delivery company to ask what was going on – where was my parcel?. A disinterested bloke said it was being delivered to the hospital this afternoon. A shame I was at home, but I thought that someone there might sign for it. But then (as I mentioned) the doorbell rang. The driver had decided to re-deliver the parcel to my home address. The parcel bore no mention whatsoever of having the hospital address for re-delivery. The parcel also was ripped open. Not slightly open, but completely wide open. I phoned the delivery company to have a gripe, but they all but told me to get knotted. I had the parcel – what was my problem?

If any of my loyal readers intend to post any parcels, I would suggest that they think twice before employing the services of Interlink Express.

I then spent a pleasant hour wrapping up ‘er indoors ^TM ‘s Xmas pressies.  I’d like to think she’ll have a decent haul of tat this year, but after twenty seven Xmasses, there’s not much left to buy.

Eagle-eyed internet-ers might have noticed that another website with which I have a passing acquaintance has been down for a few days. It would seem that I hadn’t paid up. I have now, or to be more precise, Matt has, and I’ll pay him tomorrow, I spent an hour this afternoon revamping the layout of the thing. I’m still not happy with how it looks, but I think it’s better than how it once was.

Over in lego-land the fire has been left unattended, and has got somewhat out of hand. Unfortunately the fire brigade have been called before our friends managed to dispose of all of the evidence.