Today has been an interesting day. Interesting in that I am only doing a 2.5 day week? Interesting in that I am working on a secret project? Interesting in that it rained a lot? No. Just interesting. Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I learned lots about some of our back end systems. Many of you might baulk at such news. Many of you might in fact cry. But I did not. I lapped it up, like a thirsty horse next to a big puddle.
I am not quite sure how to handle the mass of information I have learned today. I need to go home, put my feet up and instill this learning as knowledge. Then I can become a wise old sage. This weekend I was down at my parents and my Dad gave me a knackered flowerpot. Full of sage. I think it’s a sign.
Anyway, on with the show that is End of Day Mania. Up first is Mand from Comms. Please read this posting very, very slowly as we don’t have many entries today.
Tuesday’s are rubbish. They’re like an extension of Monday, and the weekend is still soooooooo far away.
Anyway, we’ve cracked on and I tried to rid myself of the Tuesday blues, though this is hard to do when surrounded by people full of hatred.
Bob has continued to hate everything. Except……Twitter. He likes it so much he’s written a blog for you all to read about how much he likes it, and how useful it is: Link
In addition to this he’s been looking at some problems with our automated emails. And other stuff I can’t ask him about as he’s already left for the day.
Chris got a shiny new phone which he’s been gazing lovingly at all day. It does look rather lovely to be fair. He’s also been supporting our CSC colleagues, and complaining about Bob’s Twitter action. He’s also working on a multi-part blog…….exciting.
James has been whining (he says he’s full of hatred, but he doesn’t have the venom of Bob, or the volume of Matt, so it invariably sounds like whining
), writing a blog and hanging around the forums.
Matt’s been writing emails, and helping our colleagues in SA. He’s also getting almost as angry and hate-filled as Bob.
I’ve been to lots of meetings, and have spent the afternoon ‘educating’ our CSC friends. They’ve been having lots of lovely Mand-stylee Home Phone and Terms and Conditions training, the lucky lucky devils.
Anyway, Tuesday is almost over (the working day anyway
), so enjoy your evening whatever you’re up to, and we’ll catch you all later.
……oh, and today’s commic-y goodness is waiting for you right here: Link
Enjoy
Next up it’s Mark… I’ll let him do the intro!
Hi there! It’s Mark here from the Web Development team, reporting on the team’s exploits for the day.
Gary has been helping Dan with his internal tools, which means Dan’s complex computer programming finally needs a colour scheme, maybe some shiny buttons. Gary is ace at both. James has been working on improvements to our manual invoicing system. I’ve been dealing with problems, and creating some system emails we’ll send out if your invoice date is changed. Jonny has been doing team leader duties and distributing cup-a-soup rations to anyone foolhardy enough to accept them. (Got my Cup o’ Chicken Noodles to look forward to tomorrow.)
Over on the other desk, Nick has been doing a little more Community Library work and also updating a number of support pages, while Andy has been working on the Home Phone product changes and problem fixing. Finally, Colin has been working on an internal improvement to our ticketing system, doing a small bit of housekeeping to his task list and getting some testing tasks written for QA.
Thanks and bye.
Phew, I hope reading all that has kept you busy. Thanks Mand and Mark! Time for me to log off and catch the train back to Manchester, where I can ponder my learnings and relax.
Finally, I just asked Dan Kirkland, ‘Head of I Don’t Know’ (his words, not mine), tell me something funny. He said “I think you are the most intelligent person I have ever come across.” Isn’t he nice?
Have a good evening!
Ali McGowan
This entry was posted by AliMcGowan on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category EOD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I'm "Head for Heights" Ali! And please tell us all about the back-end system you learnde about!
Hey Mand. Tuesday's what are rubbish?
Actually, Pete, research suggests that Wednesdays are when people feel the most rubbish. The Bangles got it wrong and so did you
Oh Pete - my terrible editing there. I get so annoyed by Grocer's Apostrophe's everywhere. It suck's.
I agree - though don't be too hard on Mand, she is after all the one with the cricket bat (or magic sword, depending on what you read).
I do wonder though if 'parents' in 'this weekend I was down at my parents' should have an apostrophe too. (I should emphasise that I've not gone picking through your post Ali - it's just something that jumped out at me.) To me, what the sentence really means is 'this week I was down at my parents [home]', which means 'parents' is possessive and therefore needs an apostrophe. But I can't find anywhere that details a set-in-stone rule for colloquialisms such as this - after all, as written, the sentence makes no grammatical sense but is nevertheless an accepted way of writing that statement. So hmm. 
Hmm indeed. I'm usually quite pedantic about apostrophe's (sic) so I'd be very upset if parents needed an apostrophe as a stand alone word in my context. Happy to be corrected though. Now, if I'd put 'home' after parents, would it be parent's home - or parents' home, because of there being two of them (parents, not home!)? See, I am pretty thick after all. From Ali McPedant.
Yeah it's an annoying issue... it's times like this that I wish I'd actually been taught the workings of our language rather than just picking things up as I went along. 
As for parent's vs. parents' - I can unequivocally say it's the latter. As you say, you have two parents, so it's a possessive of a plural, thus necessitating the apostrophe after the pluralisation.
Superb!!
Ali, it's bad grammar to use two exclamation marks!
Dan, I am going to set you on fire in a minute.
Pete, my bad, though given that I wrote that in just a few minutes I think one grammatical error can be excused! 
Ali, 'just a small fire' mind 
Down at my parents' is correct; as Be3G so rightly says.
Mand - weren't we going to drill a hole in the floor so that I could poke you when you fall asleep and also you could set Dan on fire from upstairs? Then he wouldn't even know who'd done it!!!! (Unless of course he reads this, in which case it's curtains for us.)
Pondering now, but the saying 'it's curtains for him/her'... do you suppose this came about because of a terribly traumatic experience in Dunelm Mill or somewhere similar?
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