Thursday, December 20, 2007

Fruit flies

We have baskets of free fruit at work. Which means that (inevitably) we also have fruit flies. There are two things I know about fruit flies:

(i) the annoyance of them is disproportionate to their size
(ii) they spring into existence at the slightest hint of iffy fruit, from no discernable source.

Oh, and you spend lots of time in biology discussing all the mutant ones that geneticists breed.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Not very Christmassy

I'm not doing well at the whole Christmas experience this year. Being away, I've not managed cards, presents, decorations, festive drinkies, the office xmas party (no great loss, I'm sure). So I've decided, unusually for me, to take the whole week off between Christmas and new year.

Imagine my distress when I received the following mass distribution email from the office:

"Please can you answer the following by the end of tomorrow:

1. Is the holiday shown on the spreadsheet correct for you?
2. Is your holiday outside the UK?
3. Confirm your contact number over the Christmas season (mobile preferable) in case we should need to call you back into the office if we are struggling with resourcing any new assignments."

Monday, December 03, 2007

It's not so grim up north

I'm in Derby at the moment. It was recently determined to be to the south of the north-south divide, despite Nottingham (just a few miles away) being to the north of it.

Nobody seems to have told the good people of Derby, mind, who call everyone "duck" and go about being friendly to everyone. And if that's not enough to put you on the north of the divide, I don't know what is.

Apparently, the line was determined on things like property prices, voting habits, life expectancy and education prospects. I suppose the fact that Nottingham seems to have turned into the gun crime capital of the UK must have influenced the decision to put the line between them. Not sure what the Nottinghamites are all fighting about - access to the lace market, perhaps?

Anyway, it's all rather nice up here. The weather has been sunny and I've taken a trip out into the peaks for walking and hearty pursuits. I've got a cute little serviced appartment which I could probably buy outright for the spare change down the back of my sofa (ok, ok, not quite, but you know what I mean), and the job seems to be going quite well. And on that note, I'd better get back to it...