Another year.

This is the one where it happens. This is the year that I pick a direction and run with it.

Well, OK. Maybe I won't run. Maybe I'll just take a few purposeful strides and periodically reassess the situation. Either way, I'm not standing still any longer. I'm bored, I'm lonely, and I swear I'm getting more and more dense as the days go by. By a crude process of elimination, I have surmised that a title and a pay slip will go a long way to remedy that.

Of course, things are never that simple. I'm still waiting in limbo for a key player to yea or nay my course application. Given I submitted said application in October, I'm getting a wee bit impatient. Until I have that letter in my hand I don't know if I'm coming or going and can't really make any progress on the whole 'pick a direction' front.

This does mean that I have some time. I'm hesitant to call it free time, but it is time that I can use on non-essential activities without suffering the overwhelming guilt that causes me not to enjoy the activity at all. It has been wonderful! So far, I've Paxed and Flarked and even done a bit of Billying! Thanks to a back-breaking expedition to the shop that makes my little heart go pitter patter, there is now a place for everything and everything is in it's place (with the possible exception of the black cat, who seems to constantly need reminding of her place). Now it is just a matter of keeping everything in order and getting on with more the important things in life

...like blogging regularly.

Two goldfish were in their tank.

One turns to the other and says, "You man the guns, I'll drive."

:)

The problem with saving drafts on your blog is that it feels like you've blogged when in actual fact, whilst briefly satisfying,  the whole experience is lacking a most integral part of the whole blogging experience. Pressing that publish button is quite important to the group enjoyment of the thing, otherwise it is just some whinging old biddy with too much time on her hands and access to a keyboard.

Oh, and don't be too concerned about the whole holly thing, it won't be staying. There are a few nice new outfits that are being hemmed and pressed and are just waiting for me to get my tailoring backside into gear.

When I was a little girl my mother used to read to me every night. Sometimes it was about princesses and dragons, and defeating the forces of evil with naught but a solid conviction and some flimsy amulet. Other times it was about snakes slithering through the jungle devouring disabled children. For quite a while, my favourite was a series of books about a family of bears.

Papa Bear was always getting himself into trouble and using himself as an example of what not to do. He poked a beehive, he rode his bicycle through a puddle without knowing how deep it was, and at one point I think he was even swept out to sea. And at the end of every misadventure he'd tell his son, Small Bear, that he'd done it intentionally to show him the wrong way to go about things.

Well, today I interviewed VERY badly. It was so bad in fact, that had I been the poor lady subjected to my medical history and ineloquent blatherings about recovery statistics and generalised physical restrictions, I would have been far quicker in applying the old "don't call us, we'll call you" routine. It was painfully bad, in an out-of-body what-the-hell-are-you-thinking kind of way.

So, given I'm still a wee bit tightly wound over the whole debacle, I'd like to present to you the wrong way to interview. In verse.

Firstly stay up all the night,
Get in a state of stress
Then you should take some sleeping drugs
so you wake up a bleary mess.

Find the pants you want to wear,
but discover they're too loose.
Clamp them with a bulldog clip
in a pleat 'bove your caboose.

Brush your hair and tie it back,
and pick a shirt so spiffy
Then pace and strut and walk about
and get yourself all whiffy.

Get your papers and your keys
and front up to the door.
Work yourself into a tizz
thinking they'll want more.

Feel your heart rate climbing up,
and your legs as they go numb.
Stand, say hello, and smile a bit
and immediately feel dumb.

You don't want to seem too forward,
by sitting on the only stool.
Instead, lean upon the consult bench
and pretend you're looking cool.

Bombard the poor dear with the truth
as raw as you can make it.
Feed her every ugly scrap
to be sure that she can take it.

Let her know that you are free
today, next week, and more.
Say good day and shake her hand
as she shoos you out the door.

Hop in your car and drive away
lest the blessed shock abate
And you're forced to come to terms with
what surely is your fate.

That lady sure won't hire you,
you shot your own damn toe!
You told her all the silly things
she didn't need to know.

So off you trot and go back home
to pour a big stiff drink
curl up with your chocolate bar
and try your hardest not to think.

Armageddon's not here yet,
Its just one interview!
Keep breathing in and breathing out
and trust what you can do.

OK, that was relaxing. Not Shakespeare, but not bad for a twenty minute masterpiece :)

The day wasn't a total bust. When I emailed PSWC to bemoan my now unlikely employment, he gave me a polite kick up the bum and sent me off to a few more places. I am now waiting to hear back from at least 2 other local clinics and have semi-guaranteed volunteer hours at another modern (read: easy to clean) facility pending an acceptance letter and the flexibility of  my study schedule.

!!!

This might just happen after all. :)

Today is Tuesday. It is pretend Tuesday though, the wee hours of the morning that are really just tacked on to the end of what was Monday.

Pretend Tuesday is fine. I'm happy for it to be pretend Tuesday. The thing is, I'm not too sure if I'm ready for real Tuesday just yet, because at the end of real Tuesday I have to take myself into the local vet clinic and explain to the manager why she really wants to hire me, even though no role exists for me to fill and my current knowledge of clinic and surgical routines would make me about as useful as tits on a bull.

So if it is all the same to everyone, I'm just going to stay awake and maybe, if I'm really quiet, I can stay in pretend Tuesday forever while real Tuesday comes and goes without noticing I'm missing.

It was going to be a quiet day. I was going to swan into the office, have a meaningful and productive chat about the direction of the website for the upcoming year, and then I was going to get a cappuccino, raise my hand at key points and say "seconded" a few times before going home.

It was a good plan.

It was a good plan that began to unravel as I sat in my air conditioned car, waiting to collect Dan from the train station. My mobile started to ring. I answered, and was met with the delightfully perky voice of the office manager. I cringed. Now don't get me wrong, I adore the lady, she is superb at her job and generally fun to be around but (there is always a but) she hasn't really ever called me to tell me that all systems are functioning normally and that everything is peachy. This call was not to break that pattern.

Bad thing #1 - The modem was cactus.

I collected my human cargo and we drove to the office, inserted the car neatly into a suitable car parking space, installed our get out of jail free card on the windscreen and trundled our way up to the office. We took a moment to rest, we chatted, we sorted documents, and we inspected the latest information packs. Everything was going swimmingly until it was brought to our attention that faxes were not being received. This started the obligatory musical phones dance, with random handsets being plugged into the suspect sockets and my intermittent dyslexia kicking in mid-dial.

Bad thing #2 - The fax line was deadibones.

By this stage I was glaring critically at the photocopier, daring it to start spitting out A4 like a machine possessed. Nanna always said that bad things come in threes. Ever the practical fixit guy, Dan worked his tech-magic and rigged the fax to work on the somewhat obsolete modem line. Bingo, problem solved! And I think this is the point at which we all breathed out. I went back to shuffling papers, the office manager went back to her phone call, and Dan went to work on the computer.

He turned it on.

It booted up.

He clicked on an icon.

It exploded.

I had swivelled around just in time to see the monitor blank out, Dan look perplexed, and the power supply POP! and flash brilliant white. There was a stunned silence. I don't much like silence, so I asked the obvious question.

"Did that just explode?"

Bad thing #3 - The power supply in the accounting machine went ka-boom

And so what had begun as a quiet, sophisticated little meeting turned into a hardware nightmare. Had it fried the motherboard? Where was the data? Had we accidentally run over a plague of black cats on our way to the building?

The power supplies from the SFF desktop cases were bizarrely pentagonal and refused to fit. The one from the old midi tower had some rather ancient connectors that would have quite literally required me to shove square pegs into round holes. The hard drive fitted into one of the desktop cases, but it refused to boot up. This should have been a clue as to the state of it's little silicone brain. Still, I found myself trotting the 4 blocks down the hill to get a new power supply and a new modem, right when I had intended to be sitting pretty at the conference table casting my little vote.

The problem with downhill is that uphill was then inevitable.

The problem with uphill was that it made me forget where I was supposed to plug in the pretty little wires.

The problem with exploding computers is that sometimes, try as you might, they cannot be resurrected.

I inserted the fried harddrive-cum-brick into my handbag, and mused on the thought that it's storage capacity made it essentially an incredibly weighty and unattractive iPod, and wondered if there was any hope of survival.

Alas, there was not.

[preachervoice]And so here before me now rests dear old Barracuda, fried to death before his time. He served the office well, and will live on in our backups. Learn from him, remember him, for although his untimely demise was most inconvenient for all involved, this death should not be in vain! Tell your children, tell the world! save and store your files before it is too late! For once they are gone, there is no backing up.[/preachervoice]

And so, on the basis of exploding computers and phone line fatalities, this little geek wannabe is going into hiding. Every time I go to the office, some disaster befalls an unsuspecting piece of technology. No more meetings ever ever ever. Nup. Not going and you can't make me! well, except for that one, cause that is important, and that one cause there is like, food involved...