'Snow time for that

Lee has been looking forward to going on holiday to Paris for 5 days for some time. However he wasn’t impressed when it snowed yesterday, his last day before his trip. I asked if he would be coming in to work if the airport was closed tomorrow. He said no.

I-phone Murder

Jason managed to get his hands on a Jailbroke i-phone for very little money. Lee managed to sort out some of the teething troubles with it. Jason had spent the previous week just messing with it getting nowhere, not being able to play video on it. Kelly showed him a site where he could stream TV (something like "TV Catch-up”). Considering he had just had a week and a half off sick, watching television, he spent the afternoon listening to “Murder She Wrote” on it.

Tic-tacs

Nev, my boss, can get really intense at times, but then unwittingly cracks me up when he gets his long words mixed up (or even the smaller ones). He always asks me at the end of any meetings he calls with the team why nobody says anything when they are asked for their opinions. I told him last time that some of them don't want to offend one of the guys by pointing out faults, but afterwards they will tell me stuff in private. I suggested calling the next meeting when this guy was out of the office. He said that would be a good idea if it would get them talking. Adding

"Whatever tic-tacs you want to use."

Belated Christmas Message

Due to the fact that Nev was off from December 18th, we got a very odd Christmas message from the boss yesterday. He’s catching up with his e-mails today, which mostly means he goes round asking if anyone dealt with this or that, from three weeks ago. My memory isn’t that good. It’s also amusing to see his speedy typing going unchecked.
_____________________________________________
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2009 8:47 AM
To: Distribution List
Subject: FW: Christmas Message

Everyone,

I wanted to take the chance to thank you all for your
hard work and efforts during 2009. I know I have only taken up my position at
the very end of the year but already from my conversations amongst the team I
can see that 2009 has been a challenging but very productive year for the
team.

We have successfully moved to a new structure designed to
make it easier for our customers to do business with us. We have also been
growing relationships and generally raising the understanding within the
business on what we do. These moves have been well received across the
business.

In addition to this we have also been successful in
winning work from across the group. Most notable is the project to support XXXX
in organising their many thousand documents.
2010 offers a number of
opportunities for us as a team.

I wish you all a safe
and merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Regards

Secret Santa

I've not had time to blog for some time, but Christmas brings all the jokers out in the office. This years Secret Santa was fairly tame. Tom got a giant inflatable football, which he spent most of the rest of the morning blowing up. Then realising he would have to deflate it to take home, on the bus, he spent most of the afternoon squeezing it to get all the air out again. In the end he got someone to drive him home with it half deflated.

Jason had bumped into Tim in the 24 hour Asda, buying cat-food, in his running kit. Jason was buying his Secret Santa present for Tee, who sits across the way from him. Strangely he opted for a ladies jumper. He came into work early to wrap it and explained that he was going to wait for Tee to wear it, then tell him that he wears women's clothes. Unfortunately for him, as soon as it was un-wrapped, Elaine said "That's a woman's jumper". Tee then went round all the women in the office asking what size jumper they took, with a few funny looks. It was a size 14, but he didn't realise that it was quite large for any of the women in our section. Eventually one of the girls from the 6th floor came down for something, a little larger, who admitted to being a size 12. When she saw the jumper she thought that it was nice and would probably fit her.

With Jason's joke backfiring, he was more miserable to open up his present, which was a ball (meant for exercising with). The trouble with this was that Nev brought him a ball, for playing with in water, last year - which he had moaned about for over a month, since we had decided to do a Secret Santa this year. He was so wound up that he told everyone that he's never going to participate in Secret Santa again.

Course

I was quite shocked by the guy that has been taking the course I have been on for the last couple of days. He's an old Yorkshire-man in his sixties and for some reason during the coffee breaks, probably because the other people on the course were much younger, he kept coming over and talking to me to ask how I thought the course was going. We got quite chatty and he was telling me all sorts of stuff about where he was going to consult for the rest of the week, and being his own boss he could spend the following week just playing golf.
So during one of the coffee breaks, while we were down one end of the tea-room, he told me that he had been biting his tongue quite a bit over the time we had been on the course. Where he came from there were very few people of different race, and he was used to talking about them in quite derogatory terms. I could understand that the area where I work is quite multi-racial, but he actually came out with the word "n1**er", which shocked me partly became there were no actual black people on the course, only an Indian girl and a mixed-race girl.
I didn't know whether I was happy with him confiding such things to me.
He was quite odd in other ways, such as saying "electroplating" instead of "electrocuting" when we were discussing the Health & Safety element of the course.

Jason's trip

Before I went on holiday, Jason was telling me about his cousin who had been invited on a hen week holiday in Spain. Jason was telling him he should go, and get him an invite too.

On my return on Monday, Lee told me that Jason had booked the holiday- at last minute- and had gone at the weekend. He had just split from his on/off girlfriend and was enjoying his freedom now. He thought it would be great, just him and his cousin and about ten young ladies.

Lee had got a text from Jason at the airport though saying that the girls were very noisey, I'm not sure that they will last the week with them.

Short shrift

One of the women in the office has left us in the lurch and gone on maternity leave for four months. So this week we have interviewed five temps to replace her. One of the guys that we saw was tiny and looked like he should still have been at school. He was actually in his twenties and had a previous job before being made redundant. My boss, who was interviewing with me, is quite short anyway, so when I went back up to the office after the interview to ask the others what they thought about the little fella no one could believe he had left school.

I had to add my own thoughts though. That my boss would have had someone who would look up to him.

Jason forgets his clothes

Curiously someone had made Monday dress-down day instead of Friday. Of course about a third of the staff forgot over the weekend and came in their usual clothes. Jason, for one, forgot completely. He’s taken to cycling into work though. He came in late on Monday because he had forgot his trousers, so he had caught a taxi back home and come back with his usual work trousers on. He was a bit unhappy to find two thirds of the staff in jeans. He made us laugh last week though because he had forgot his underpants, so had his cycling shorts on under his trousers. He asked to have a half days holiday for the afternoon because he was so uncomfortable sitting at his desk with them on.