The Grindstone

I returned to work today - or rather, I turned through ninety degrees within the junk-room, plugged my work laptop back in, and grimaced while clicking the Outlook and Teams icons.

Only they didn't work.

At some point over Christmas, my digital overlords had decided I was no longer welcome. For a few moments I wondered if I had been summarily ejected from my employer - and that the letter, or phone call had not happened.

In the spirit of all things that pull the rug from beneath you, just after posting an email from my personal email account to the company support department, Outlook and Teams suddenly burst into life.

I will also admit that the prospect of not being able to login - essentially being cut off from the matix - didn't cause me to panic at all. I unexpectedly felt a wave of excitement - that I could go make a coffee and not be in a rush to do anything at all - because there was nothing I could do about it.

The universe obviously recognised that I was having quite the wrong reaction, and fixed itself - rather than let me have any sort of a reprieve from clearing a week's worth of emails and teams conversations.

After those first few minutes, everything unfolded remarkably calmly.

Here's where I admit that I burned the midnight oil over Christmas creating a secondary blog. A professional blog, full of pretend cleverness and wisdom. A blog that could probably be used as a narcolepsy weapon of sorts - to cause entire armies to fall asleep with just the mention of it's name, let alone it's contents.

The reason for the existence of the second "professional" blog is perhaps even more amusing than it's contents. I built it to figure out how to use the tooling to build it - ending up with a blog was a side-effect (a bit like the guy that was trying to make something else when he accidentally created teflon - it's a good story - look it up).

The funny thing? After creating the blog, I thought I better check with higher powers than myself that sharing technical knowledge, wisdom, and experience is actually allowed. Thankfully it is. Huge sigh of relief, given that the blog had been sitting there for several days already.

So. There we are. That's what I've been up to today. Oh - and walking all over town looking for a new bullet journal after Amazon sent the wrong ones through. Tomorrow lunchtime I have to walk back across town to deposit the wrong notebooks at the post office to wing their way back whence they came - which will no doubt coincide with the arrival of the new ones while I'm out.

Let's hope my daughters answer the door.

At least I had the presence of mind this morning to tell my co-workers that I might have to leave in a hurry at some point this week, given the very, very pregnant state of my daughter.

My other half has to travel with work one day next week. I'm laying bets the universe will crack open it's bag of throwing spanners, and line them up, ready to start flinging them.