fudge it

fri-i-i-i-i-i-i-day

before i begin with today's office story, let me tell you how many people i work with here: 1. we're supposed to have a meeting today. anyway, the people i share a deskpod with? i think i exchange 'mornings' with around two of them. there's this office person who sits opposite the stationery guy on my right. on monday he borrowed stationery guy's network cable, and left a post-it on his desk telling him to just nick it back if he needed it. i had a couple of days off on tuesday and wednesday, and when i came back stationery guy had taken my network cable. i know this, because, i'm the only person on the pod with an orange cable (always gotta be different, me). so i stole it back. this morning i returned to find the orange cable back in the stationery guy's computer, only this time it had a giant note stuck on it saying 'STOP IT!'

cough, splutter and so on. i could tell you about how i hunted the stationery guy down to sort it out, but just know that no-one is going to be touching my network cable again. and the office is still quiet. ah.

but forget all that. when you're walking to the bradford forster square station from the city centre, look up, and you too might catch a glimpse of the abundant life centre. whoa.

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i know, i know, it's like the truman show, at some point i'm going to wake up and realise that my whole life i've just been sitting in the middle of a mad sitcom, right? right?

it finally happened. like, how many weeks after the wedding? lemme check. five and a half weeks ago. right ok. the wedding was five and a half weeks ago. (i'm terrible, honest. a few weeks before the wedding i bumped into a friend on the high st who said 'your wedding is on a saturday isn't it?' i was all zombie like and replied 'is it?')

uh oh, off topic. there's this kid, right. she talks talks talks, right. her aunt says it's autism. she's like really confident and debates the state of the world with the 'elders'. i'm going to call her the Old Kid. there's something last of the summer wine about her. this afternoon, okay, in the kitchen. avec the mother in law and one of her daughters (#2):

mother-in-law: guess what the old kid said this afternoon?
us: what?
her: she said, that birmingham girl, her first child is going to be a boy!
me: i'm going to kill that girl when i see her.
daughter #2: oh, she says that about everyone!
mother-in-law: but it's not like it was a bad thing to say!

no, of course not. five and a half weeks after i got married and i already got the grandchildren hint, dammit!

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i mean to add this to the my inbox section: something about life coaching, or something.

bushra | permalink | |

the new office.

i'm sharing a desk pod for six office people. apart from me, i don't know any of the other peeps on the pod. i was this close to laughing at one guy for spilling coffee all over his desk this morning, but the air conditioning here is so severe it's like there's an office presence to make sure you're on your best behaviour. uh oh. thinking out loud too much. hey podite, did you know the new birmingham office not only has hot desks but 'hot pods'?

any-way. the dude with the 'hroo' has gone and has been replaced with a guy in a linen suit who has cleaned up two coffee spills this morning, he's running around all useful and smiley but i'm waiting for him to actually sit down before i ask him for a couple of in-trays please. the office person sitting opposite me, who works with the office people sitting on either side of her and the office person to my left has arrived back from her lunch break, and is waving a book around:

her: the new terry pratchett is out everyone.
them: ...
her: sorry. too much excitement for a monday.

actually, that's not what she said. i had to make it up. she said something similar but when it came to typing it out i've clean forgotten what it was. this only happened minutes ago too! where's the coffee...

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here's the thing:

Ben's blog features posts about Birmingham, under the title 'Reasons to Be Cheerful'.

can anyone think of a title for random Bradford-related posts?

on a different subject, i'm sure some more thoughts for the day appeared on my old desk in birmingham, so i brought them back with me:

'rehearse your cleverness- if you put as much thought into the communication of your work efforts as you do into their formulation, you will overcome the most common of workplace frustrations: being misunderstood or ignored.'

eh, a pretty low key blog post. i'm not doing too good, k?

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'so i'm going to put these pictures up online right, and i bet you no-one will believe this is bradford!'

J: Hang on, hang on, hang on. This Lister Park. Is it as lovely and serene as it looks, or were there shitloads of drug dealers and junkies and chavs and 'travellers' and prostitutes standing behind you when you took the pictures?
me: None of the above. Drug dealers, junkies or chavs I mean. They only come out at weekends. Did you see my butterfly picture? Did you? How cool was that? Can you believe this park is like, on my fricken doorstep?
J: The butterfly/moth/whatever it is picture is excellent. That place looks really nice. I like the waterfall too.

on a different subject:

J: This week's Quote of the Week is quite depressing, I'm afraid. It would be funny if there wasn't so much of it going around. Anyway. Chav mother on bus. Child on knee. Child has apparently been using the word 'dickhead'. Chav mother says: "I mean, where the f*ckin' 'ell's 'e got that from?"

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brian: So, is this going to make it to the "my inbox" section? Because, you know, that's what I hope for every time I write to you....

it depends. is it a hobby? or a lifestyle? or what? oh here you go...

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here y'are. photos of my new digs. well ok so i'm lying a bit. actually it's a set of pictures of lister park, which is like, two seconds away from where i live.

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names have been changed...

i'm in birmingham today. office person #1 has been looking for office person #2 for the last twenty or so minutes. when #2 finally appears, office person #1 was talking to me about life in bradford, and office person #3 manages to tell office person #2 that #1 has been looking for her.

#2: have you? i've been sitting on the loo, reading my magazine!

oh yes, i'm going to miss working with you guys. really. seriously. no, honest!

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Brian may be having doubts about his latest, er, hobby:

brian: I don't want to get a reputation, innit?
me: Er, it might be a bt late for protecting your rep, mate.
brian: Dammit!
me: Yeah yeah, bet you're lovin it!
brian: You got me. I'm a bad gairl!
me: I knew it! Given her education at a girl's school, Bushra saw right through Brian's apparent reluctance at his new-found bad gairl status. 'I was the quiet counself for many of the popular bad gairls at school', she said. 'Any doubts as a bad gairl would disappear the second they were in the spotlight'.
brian: You can see right through me, Gairl! I'm bad and loving it!
me: Trying to think of some wise words, but at a complete loss. You'd think I'd have something useful to say after two days in glittering outfits with fishtail skirts.
brian: I gotta get me some of those!

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still the new girl.

you know that funny system i had going where i numbered the brothers and sisters? because i thought yeah, it's easier to keep track? it's a good system, isn't it? trouble is, i'm not sure how to apply the system to the people here, because well, there's so many of them. so i figure people who appear frequently will earn a nickname or number as i go along. i just hope y'all can keep up.

so anyway. yesterday i caught the bus home with a couple of cousins, they were on their way home from college. i don't normally take the 'killing ground' route home but yesterday, the cousins told me to take a walk on the wild side, until:

#1: oh my god! look! it's one of the grandmothers!
#2: oh shit, wait til she sees my make-up! she's gonna shout!
me: girls, girls, relax. she isn't even going to notice you two. she's going to be too busy checking out the new daughter-in-law, on her way home from work.

there's like i dunno, i'm taking a guess here, five or six families living on mine and the neighbouring street. each with their own ruling grandmother. this one says hello to me, kisses me on both cheeks and sends me on my way. and no, she didn't notice the cousins.

me: told ya!
#1: that's it. you're in our gang.

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me: hey. you know your military/warfare terminology, right? the back-street of this house- very frequently used – is like a strip of cobbles where you can walk to the nearest shop, only it's a street used by every single relative i can just about name, and given how high the houses are here, i'm visible to any daughter-in-law presently scrubbing the bathroom but looking out the window on occasion to see what's happening. BUSHRA IS WALKING TO THE SUPERMARKET. this is big news. so what i'm looking for is that term or name to describe an area where a person is utterly defenceless, no walls to hide behind, etc. what is that?

J: The type of area which you are describing sounds like what would be known, in ambush parlance, as a 'killing ground'. And without darting from doorway to doorway in the style of Starsky and Hutch, it sounds like a rather unpleasantly exposed walk, particularly if you know people in the area. Observation, gossip, danger of smalltalk, etc. What can you do?

me: i knew it would have some sort of horrible name such as a 'killing ground'. it’s why i demanded a key to the front door.

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Out of Office is currently switched on. Do you want to turn it off?

ooh, do i have to? work things so far:

Access Is Denied: to yahoo and gmail

IT guy from Bradford who set up my PC: so what do you think of bradford so far?
me: everytime someone asks me that i say 'no comment'.

also. should i even bother to mention the stationery guy sitting at the desk next to me, who will mumble 'hroo' every morning? which was funny the first time. i was like 'ha? are you talking to me?' but after two days i think the daily exchange will be as follows:

him: hroo.
me: mm-hm.

yep. settling in just fine.

bushra | permalink | |

so like, the day i left birmingham for good (yikes), ben emailed me about contributing to his Reasons To Be Cheerful feature on Birmingham: 'All I'd need would be a paragraph on a place / night / person etc that I haven't covered already and that you think should be mentioned.'

i was kinda in a hurry and a bit panicky about just how much stuff i was taking with me and what if the in-laws demanded a refund so i just sent a little bit about job #1. go see it, it's up on silent words speak loudest.

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also. i already booked tickets for the clothes show this year. i'm doomed, i tell you.

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forget the house. today i went shopping with sister #2 and dismissed a coat as 'too bradford housewife'.

J: This Bradford thing, though; it must be good not having to listen to Birmingham accents. I like those northern accents you get. The Nottingham accent has quite a northern twang, even though it's in the East Midlands. Something which happens in Nottingham is that people often end sentences with 'me duck'. It's the equivalent of 'mate' or 'love', or how in Birmingham you sometimes hear the ghastly 'bab'. "That's £1.50 then, me duck," sort of thing. The thing is, I had lived in Nottingham for nearly a year before I realized what they were saying. It took having a girlfriend from Nottinghamshire to explain it to me.

me: Yeah the accent is better here, but I don't want it. You're right it's less hostile, but I still can't figure it out sometimes. The mister recently said something that sounded like 'your brother told me how you smashed that window' which led me to tell him that was nothing, I'd smashed a door before that and I can cause much more damage if I get really really angry. Only for him to say 'your brother told me about how HE smashed a window'. Ah.

J: The dawning realization that one has married into a family of window-smashers. Anyway. What's the house like?

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'ey up

before i actually get back into blogging - which i suppose means that spending four weeks (sort of) away from the blog has not put me off blogging altogether and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but whatever - i just wanted to say 'ta very much' to Nicky, Scooterdeb and the Podite for looking after the blog while i've been away. so, er, ta very much!

also, a random link that i want to blog about but may or may not add it to the 'if i had a weblog' feed: is this what you were talking about?

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Bloody Cricket!

I couldn't help but smile when I saw that one of the items on 'Bushra's Blog wish list' is to write about Cricket. I can see why Bushra told us to keep well away from certain topics...music, sport and flower arranging, and that was so that she could talk about these things herself!

Now, no one can blame Bushra for jumping onto the Cricket bandwagon, as it was only a matter of time before she was bitten by the Cricket bug, and I'm sure that Bushra has prepared us all a long blog about the merits of Reverse Swing, or on the contraversial selection of Collingwood ahead of Anderson, but perhaps its best if Cricket blogs are best kept to the experts.


I just hate it when people make up words themsleves, and hate it even more when the word is just plane nonesense:

office person 1:...once he understood it he began to see references to it everywhere.
office person 2:...arrrh that's conceretification of an idea, that is.
me:...?

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Sightings of the jelly

Eleven-year old girl: Did you come with us to the beach that one day?
Fourteen-year old girl: Which one day?
Eleven-year old girl: You know. That one day.
Fourteen-year old girl: I don't know. Was I there?
Eleven-year old girl: It was the day we saw the jellyfish.
Fourteen-year old girl: Yes, I was there. Don't you remember me saying, "Jellyfish comin' your way!" and you saying, "What?" and then screaming, "Aaaaaaahhh!!!"
Eleven-year old girl: ...

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Too much TV

Eight-year old boy: What was the first television show you ever watched?
Brian: Ummm... Grange Hill.
Eight-year old boy: Oh. Mine was Law & Order.
Brian: Law & Order?
Eight-year old boy: Yeah. It's a show about people who kill cops... or sometimes people who kill other people... or sometimes cops kill people... or sometimes cops kill other cops... it's that kind of show.
Brian: ...

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things i am probably going to blog about when i really get back...

i have this list on my phone, y'see, and currently it goes like this:

broken window
doNation
sister #4 phones the dad
bloody cricket
buying pricey stuff (though i can't remember what this one is all about)
brian's reputation

i'm not here, really i'm not.

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