Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade

2002-06-03 - 11:52 p.m.

So, somewhere along the line, someone did declare "I shall make today difficult for H-B." And lo, it was done.

I woke up early this morning to work on my essays, but quickly discovered that the landlord decided to build a small track of road in the corridor outside my flat.

Well, maybe he wasn't doing that. I'm not even sure I want to know what he was doing. All I know is there was loud drilling, then loud vacuuming, then more loud drilling, then more vacuuming, then what sounded like a circular saw cutting through sheets of steel, then more loud vacuuming. And so on.

It would be while I'm trying to watch The Shining, wouldn't it?

What's worse is that my flat is beginning to do its greenhouse impression again, and since I'm still not getting as much sleep as I ought to I kept nodding off while I was trying to read my textbooks.

Grrrings.

By the time the film was over and I had to go to work, the construction work had apparently stopped. It would do, wouldn't it?

I brought a textbook to work but I didn't get much time to read it, and when I did get to read it, I didn't find anything useful for the subject of the essay. Along with that, tnoight at work was just... ARGH.

It wasn't especially busy, a bit busier than normal for a Monday but not madly busy. Nonetheless, there were things that annoyed me.

Our newly-opened Fulham branch was closed today, for some reason. I mean, fair enough, it was the jubilee today, but we should have had some consistency - either keep them all open or close them all. Anyway, when I got there, the manager wasn't there and Rick hadn't shown up yet, desite his shift starting at the same time as mine. And he didn't show up for almost 20 minutes, either. Since no-one was there to tell me the Fulham branch was closed, I happily took an order for Fulham.

This was easily corrected, thankfully. What was rather less easily corrected was car-decoration-turned-telephonist Julie being a muppet. She took a Fulham order because she wasn't paying attention to the little box in the corner that displays which branch the order's going to, she kept messing up orders, asked for help with the simplest little things and eventually buggered off 15 minutes early.

This would have been bad enough without help from Jian, who spent most of his shift with a pair of earphones on. My parents used to tell me that you can tell when the volume's too high on someone's personal stereo because you can hear what they're listening to, in which case Jian's stereo was way too loud. You could also tell that his stereo was too loud because when his phone rang he wouldn't even notice unless he happened to casually glance in the direction of the phone.

Julie's buggering off early - as in, when I was supposed to be leaving - meant that Jian was going to be left alone in the office for 45 minutes. So I spoke to Rick, nice person that I am, and he said "can you stay on for a while?". So I thought, "OK, I'll stay an extra 15 minutes so I can cover Julie's shift and it'll be OK." So, come 9.45 I clocked myself out and began packing up. Then Rick says "can you stay till 10?"

Now, granted, an extra half hour means an extra �2.25 in the pay packet, but appreciate where I'm coming from here.

The only place close to where I work where I can buy a decent selection of meats - chicken, say, or minced beef - is Safeway in Ealing. On weekdays, Safeway closes at 10 pm. It takes me roughly 15 minutes (including waiting time) to get to Ealing Broadway from Acton Town. So if I want to go buy ingredients for anything other than a carbonara, I need to be leaving work by no later than 9.45, and even then I'm pushing it.

As it stands, I finish work on Mondays at 9.30, Tuesdays at 9.45, Fridays at 9.30 and Saturdays at 10.15. Fridays are usually insanely busy so I tend to end up having to stay till 9.45 or 10 anyway. And now they're getting me to stay late on Mondays to cover for Julie buggering off early. All of which adds up to one thing: I've not got much to eat when I get home from work.

I now expect to be up all night watching The Usual Suspects, making notes on the framing and then writing the essay. And then from tomorrow morning it's Round Two, where I go to university, hope the LRC is still open and will let me borrow some books, and then spend all day writing about the cultural significance of different kinds of clothing. Yay ^_^

And I have to phone up the surgery, hope that they're open and if they are, find out when my next depo injection is due. I'm sure it was around now sometime... ^_^;

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