The reason there have been no posts is nothing interesting has happened… well … almost nothing. I received a package at work today from the USA, two first edition signed books from Terry Brooks, which was nice. What else, let me see, oh yes. Tuesday night we had a Help Desk team night out. We’ve had two new starters in the last few weeks so we thought we’d have a meal to informally introduce them to the team.
We started at the Podium, the local pub, and had a few drinks before making our way over to Cheapside and a restaurant called Barcelona, which is a Tapas bar. Everyone (there were 10 of us) ordered a couple of things from the menu and we settled down to wait for the food to arrive. The food was all very good, freshly cooked with flavoursome sauces and nice salad/vegetables. With dinner we had a few bottles of wine on the table as well. That all went down well and before long we were finished and off again. A couple of people went home at this stage and the rest of us went to a pub called ‘The Slug and Lettuce’ (its a chain) near Bank station. While at the pub I bought everyone three rounds of Aftershock, a lovely spirit they have over here. We eventually left as the pub closed around midnight and then it was off home.
Getting home after midnight proved to be a little bit troublesome for me, I fell asleep on the tube (Northern Line) somewhere near Euston Station and didn’t wake up until the tube was at Totteridge and Whetstone station, which is four stops too far for me. I got off and waited for the next train, which was 18 minutes away and was the last train. When the train arrived the driver stopped opposite me and asked where I was going, and for some reason I said High Barnet instead of Highgate (High Barnet is the end of the northbound Northern Line branch I was on), and High Barnet was in the wrong direction. So, the driver told me to go to the other side of the station and wait for the next train there. It wasn’t until I was over the other side that I realised my mistake, and now I was stuck miles from home with no train coming till the morning.
As Keryn keeps pointing out to me I have been to this station before and should have known where to go to find a bus. However, I set off to walk to a bus stop and went in completely the wrong direction, off up a country lane away from home. It was about half an hour of walking before I realised that I probably wasn’t heading in the right direction (I was following Bus Stop signs to Mill Hill, thinking this was the right direction) and stopped to ring Keryn. It was about 1am at this stage, and luckily Keryn answered. She had a fair idea of where I might be, seeing as she drives through this area to work every day, so she set off to find me. It took her an hour in the end, I was lucky it was a still night and not to cold (or at least not to cold for me). So, I was in bed and quickly asleep by 2.30am.
The worst part of the whole thing was that I had agreed with Ollie to swap shifts for the morning, so I was now due to start at 6.45am, In the end I had about 3 hours sleep before getting up and going to work. For most of the day I was zombie like, doing the job on autopilot. Luckily it was a quite day and most of the other Help Desk members were a little worse for wear as well. So, other than that nothing else has happened.
