Wednesday 22nd November 2017

Each day I work from home, I think about how I am going to describe the tedium of a day at work. I mean, not much changes, just the tiny detail, but the general details: mails, documents, phone calls, breakfast, lunch, cats, weather. Are about the same day in, day out.

As I often say, I'm not working in the chicken factory, standing at the end of the pennine tunnel waiting for the next row of chilled chickens to be dropped then racked up. I did that for a year. The packed the trussed and wrapped chickens. Another year, eighteen months went by. There was a tannoy which played Radio 1, and so the day flew by during the Golden Hour, then crawled by during Our Tune and Woo Gary Davis, but it was the soundtrack of our day, and on the days the tannoy broke, the dullness without pop music, on Medium Wave being piped through a crappy tannoy was better than nothing. Well, except Steve Wright maybe.

The music has changed, now comes in down the copper wire of the interwebs or through the TV aerial, but still music, and the BBC too. Lunch is taken at a leisurely pace at the table, listening to a podcast or something, reading the Brexit chaos on Twitter or something. Coffee breaks are taken when I want, and not when the line stops. Yes, all in all life is better now. I'll put the kettle on!

There is the usual stuff to day as ever, you know; cats, coffee, breakfast, more coffee, start work. At leas with my new laptop, work has returned to humdrum normality, with no need to keep rebooting until Outlook worked. Saying that, this laptop does not like to create PDFs out of Word docs. Might be a 1st world Quality Manager's problem, but it is real. I have to send docs out and let people create their own PDFs. I call it the DIY Office 365. I have no idea why, and to be honest is only a minor issue so I ignore it.

After lunch I have a man come round to see about a path. Steve and Martin have let us down once too many times. I know Steve has been ill, but if you promise to turn up, and fail to do so, twice, then we look for alternatives.

We are not fussy, but want it done cheap as chips, so the guy offers some alternatives to the granite blocks: one pound fifty a pop those. So, he will get back to me at some point. And that really is the exciting part of the day.

My boss calls and we are talking, and a dialogue box appears on the computer screen; something about an update. I ignore it as I am always asked when installing an update is convenient. I log off the call, and the computer switches itself off, and starts again, telling me that it is installing a Windows update, and might switch itself on and off a few times.

I wait, do some editing, do some writing on my blog, make a brew. The laptop is still updating away.

An hour passes.

Another hour passes.

THird hour goes by, surely it is done now? No.

It is done at half five in the afternoon, four hours after starting, anything that was urgent could wait for the next day.

Its bangers and mash and beans for dinner. One of JOols' favourite meals. Especially as I now put some horseradish in the mash.

And for the rest of the evening, I devoured the rest of The Book of Dust until just before ten it was read. And enjoyed. There was football on the radio, but it went unlistened. Who will think of the footballers and commentators? Not I.