Huh. I'm in a good mood. Have had a few of these recently. How curious. I blame the fact that, er, things are going a bit better these days. Or are they? Maybe it's all smoke and mirrors, but I'm not going to spend too long dissecting that. Instead I'm just going to ramble in a "fuck it, I fancy writing a blog post for the sake of it" way about how shit's going.
I got a job! In a bizarre twist of fate, while explicitly searching for permanent work and using the search term "no agencies" I stumbled upon an agency advert for a contract. But I recognised the language in the job description, feeling sure I knew who the employer was. So rather than go through the agent, I contacted a few friends who confirmed my suspicions. A few emails and a job interview later and hey presto, I am back at Yahoo!, 17 months after leaving -- an event which itself took place around 17 months after I had first attempted to quit.
Anyone who's known me for a while or has randomly decided to read old posts on here will know what happened in 2006. But fuck it, I'm in the mood for a recap.
I had a pretty fucked up summer that year. My job turned to shit, my missus of almost 7 years left me, I went to my first ever international football matches (in fact, they are to date still the only ones I've seen) which just so happened to be at the World Cup, one of them being England getting knocked out by Portugal. BASTARDS. While in Germany I started this blog! And when I came back, I attempted to quit Yahoo! (a job I'd started in September 1999). I say attempted because I actually got talked into staying, in a completely different role. But as I'd already booked a cheer-myself-up epic round the world fat cat business class holiday, we all agreed I could disappear for 2 months and come back fresh.
That holiday started exactly 3 years ago today. I had a one way ticket to Gibraltar, with the RTW ticket waiting for me at the BA desk at the airport. I'm not going to say too much more about what happened then because I wrote fucking loads about it at the time. Go look at the posts for September and October 2006. I think I'll do so myself, actually, because I really enjoy reliving that holiday (and I enjoyed writing about it as much as doing it). But ANYWAY.
Huh. Lost my flow now. Fucks sake. What was I going to say? Oh, that was it, yes, so, I'm back at Yahoo!. In a Groundhog Day style thing. And it has made life better. I really love working here. Most of the people I worked with when I left are still here, sat round the corner, including my ARCH NEMESIS at table tennis. The Diet Coke may have risen in price by an infinite percentage, being 40p instead of free, and I may have to go all the way to the 3rd floor to get it, but that's OK. I guess. There's no canteen, but that just forces me to go out into the west end at lunch, oh no! And the drinking is as hard as ever. It's not a good thing that I now mean hard as in difficult as well as copious, but I'm sure it's just an extended "welcome back" phase we're all going through. It'll calm down, I'm sure, especially as Christmas approaches. Hmm.
I love the working environment too, specifically (for the sake of this paragraph) the fact that I can listen to music all day every day with very few interruptions. This is a consequence of (a) having a boss in France, so all communication is done over instant messenger/email (b) having very little interaction, for the work itself, with anyone else in this office (c) everyone else doing the same and most conversation being done over IM anyway. Such has been the nature of my job for most of my career, but I did go through a lean couple of years where there were loads of interruptions and meetings, or just a different management/co-worker style, which meant it didn't really happen. Ironically enough I felt most unable to listen to music all day while working at a fucking radio station. GRR. But anyway, now I can listen to music it's all awesome.
Before I went to Australia in June/July I started ripping all my CDs, from scratch, into a new bit of kit I'd bought. With my mood ever-so-bastard-slightly different when I returned from that trip, I never got back into the hang of it, but now that I'm listening all day to my own music (streamed from home) I'm back into "wait, I own [such and such] and want to listen to it, and I've not ripped it yet!" mode so it's all kicked off again. I spent over 7 hours ripping stuff on Sunday, lots of Ps Qs and Rs -- it seems that back in the day I vaguely alphabetised my collection! So behold, it's all Pussy Galore and Repulsion and Public Enemy and Pearl Jam this week.
Actually, no it's not, it's all kinds of stuff, but those are some of the things I'm reacquainted with. And I'm going to, er, acquaint other people to them(!) because my DJing is BACK. Or at least it will be, when me and ex-colleague Mark get our shit together and make a podcast or two full of all kinds of eclectic choices and mindless banter. We've had to almost stop talking to each other on IM or down the pub in case we use up all our jokes and anecdotes which would be better off left in the show, hah.
Christ, this is a ramble and a half, huh. I should probably head out to get some lunch soon. Except I've just had a delightful pop-up reminder that there's a meeting in 3 minutes. Bollocks.
So, just quickly: my new xbox is great. I like the Batman: Arkham Asylum and WET demos. Also Wii Sports Resort, House Of The Dead Overkill, and EA Grand Slam Tennis on the Wii are great. And I still rock so hard at Guitar Hero. At the weekend I played Shortest Straw on Guitar Hero: Metallica, difficulty level 'hard', and only missed 20 notes. TWENTY NOTES.
Not everything's great. Some really good mates of mine are individually having really hard times of it at the moment, and I've not been much use to them. I've bottled out of attending a few bashes here and there due to fairly powerful but hard to articulate feelings of not wanting to turn up. There are people I've been promising to catch up with and/or go visit and not doing so. I'm single, and my ex's cats are still living with me. And Gregg's in Surbiton doesn't stay open until 4am like the two branches in Nottingham city centre. But this paragraph is making me miserable, so I'm going to stop.
