i've had better days

it didn't seem like it was going to be one of those days. it's been a long week, sure. on tuesday, my team and i hosted a seminar/workshop for an external networking group that made me want to gouge my own eyes out with a toothpick but that is only to be expected. ("how do we measure productivity and how do we relate this back to flexible working initiatives?" see? here - have a toothpick).

and although i have a move this weekend at work - small, but complicated and very political, involving multiple agencies including the police with all of their various networks and bureaucracies, i felt like i was more or less on top of things.

which is why i was very surprised to get in the lift this morning and see one of the team i am moving standing there with a printer in his arms. maybe it was one of those 'sliding doors' moments because before that lift ride everything was fine and after - nothing was fine.

the lift ride was too short to get any sense out of this chap so i dumped my bag at a table and went off to try to figure out what was going on. it is too boring to relate further detail but suffice to say this was the moment when i twigged something was wrong - very wrong with the technical side of this move.

when i got back to my table i had figured out enough to have a low sinking feeling and an intense desire to make about 50 phone calls simultaneously. i dialled with one hand and reached down into my bag for my breakfast smoothy only to encounter - breakfast smoothy. everywhere. i hung up and rushed my bag to the kitchen.

so it turns out it's really quite messy extracting 600 mls of escaped smoothy out of a backpack.

and it went on like that for pretty much the whole day. by late afternoon i was looking carefully when i crossed the road because frankly, it seemed like bike-courier hit-and-run was the next logical step.

i think i resolved the technical issue, which seemed to be one part "oh when you said computer equipment and listed pcs and printers i didn't realise you meant printers - we only do pcs - you need another company and another set of engineers for that" (this, less than 24 hours before the move - after 6 months and multiple meetings and minutes stating things like "blah blah blah engineers to disconnect/reconnect all computer equipment as listed...") and one part "i thought so and so was doing it so i didn't think it was worth mentioning". that second one is guaranteed to send any project manager worth their salt into the stratosphere through pure incandescent rage, followed closely by the first one.

hopefully that's all the misunderstanding and bad luck out of the way and the move tomorrow will be a breeze. we'll see. i had a plan b before today, but i've added a plan c and d now as well.

i'm home now, and dry (it was raining. of course it was raining. i pretty much expected it at that point. i had remembered an umbrella this morning only it was covered in strawberry smoothy...). i have a large glass of wine, and i've more or less recovered my equilibrium.

after all, it could have been much worse. i might have not seen the guy in the lift and i wouldn't have realised anything was wrong for ages. i could have sat in spilled smoothy. and i didn't get hit by a car or a bike or anything else except for a wave of stupidity, and that, at times, is simply unavoidable.