My Birthday 2007
April 7th, 2008 James
I’m doing something slightly different for this post; for those readers who are violin players, get yours ready on my cue. Following on from the last post, I moved to London into my Dad’s house for the first week of work. The first week consisted mostly of sitting around doing very little, until I, and a 3 others from the induction were told that our first project would be in Fleet helping a client test all their systems from a move from XP to Vista. I wasn’t entirely impressed after asking several times that projects that I would be assigned to we be exclusively in London and the answer was ‘Yes’. I have got used to people saying ‘yes’ when in fact what they mean is ‘no’ (which is quite hard to tell, yes? No?), I think this was a case of the answer being different before and after being accepted for the job.
I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday shadowing a project in Aldgate, for a major bank who were rolling out a new mortgage checking website. However, on Friday after luinchtime, I was surprised to receive an e-mail from my line manager about a project in Birmingham and that I had to join a conference call in half an hour about it. I rang him up and explained that this was not ideal since Birmingham is in the West Midlands and I had gone to a bit of trouble 6 days earlier to move out of the East Midlands and into London. It didn’t cut it and I was in no position to argue the point really and besides I didn’t really mind, so after I joined this call I was informed that my hotel was being booked and everything. I used this point to ask for a laptop because Internet access was likely to be blocked where I was based at, and I may need to reply to consultancy e-mails, fill in timesheets and the like and I managed to go back to head office and pick one up the same day.
The day after, Saturday, happened to be the titular birthday when I did…pretty much bugger all. It was my first proper weekend living in London and celebrated by going into Croydon with Dad, bought some socks and underwear just because I’m rock and roll and it was my birthday. I even had to pay my dad board, which may have been a little ill-timed of him to ask for, and received no gifts from anyone in return and without being too materialistic, I din’t really expect to be ending my birthday worse off than I was before. -Ok go ahead with those violins- Before you get too sentimental, a few days later I received a Amazon voucher from Tom, which I bought ‘The Movies’ for the PC and ‘Brain Training’ for my DS. I was also lucky to receive a letter from Mr. Foster with some expertly painted artwork on the cover, containing the new Harry Potter audiobook. Ok and granted my friend also bought me tickets to go paintballing (which we only used 2 weeks ago). All of which I am of course very lucky to have received.
Other than that, I really did nothing, other than have a Chinese, watch films and generally veg out. I also received a call from my manager to say that I, in fact was not due in Birmingham on Monday after all and could turn up in head office. Therefore the timeline went something like this: Tuesday – Going to Woking on Monday, Wednesday – Going to Woking on Monday, Thursday – Going to Woking on Monday, Friday – Going to Birmingham on Monday(frantically join a conference call about this within 30 mins), Saturday – Stay in London on Monday. Such is life and the best made plans I guess.
I’ll leave you with this musing that I thought about whilst watching a great series that I’ve recently watched called ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ which followed NASA’s adventures during the space race. In 1969 when NASA put the first man on the moon with the aid of computers probably less powerful than my mp3 player, NASA in Houston were in regular contact with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, whilst they were on the moon. So why the hell in the year 2008 does my mobile phone lose reception every time I jump on the tube?!