As One Door Closes....

I've always been a fan of the "de-motivators" from the folks at despair.com (my home office has framed copies of some of my favourite posters from the company) and now they've branched out into clothing. If you fancy a chuckle check out their latest t-shirt range here. It's as if they gave me a personal consultation and came up with a whole new customised wardrobe for me to take to Ireland!

Talking of Ireland it's scary to realise it's just three days away and I'm nowhere near ready. The stress of the old job may now be gone, but the panic of the new is starting to set in!

My last week at work was much less fraught than my 'half glass empty' persona had predicted. The overnight deployment on Bank Holiday Monday went fine, helped somewhat by my project manager, who was officially on holiday all week, coming in for the whole eight hour shift to give moral support. The rest of the week - well at least until Friday lunchtime - was relatively quiet with a few 'priority 1' customer issues that turned out to be simple to fix and not actually anything to do with work we'd done. While my body has pretty much spent the entire week trying to work out why it can't sleep when it should, and why it wants to sleep when it can't, this particular morning that probably has more to do with the amount of alcohol consumed at my leaving drinks do last night than with any after-effects of the over-nighter at the start of the week.

The folks at Intelligent Environments gave me a good send-off and did me proud. Although I got drunk (I don't drink very often so it doesn't take much) I'm relieved to say the only real embarrassment came at the end of the evening when everybody else had left.

It is the tradition at these events for the departing employee or contractor to put his credit card behind the bar and invite colleagues to 'have a drink on me'. This invariably leads to 'Have another drink on me. I've set up a tab' and before you know it the whole world and his wife are trouncing your credit card like it's gone out of fashion, such that by the end of the evening you find you have a bill that's going to require a phone call to the bank manager requesting a second mortgage.

So at the end of last night I went to settle up as the last remaining bodies left, pretty much resigned to being given a final bill in treble and quite possibly quadruple figures if one ignores the pennies. I haven't worked out yet whether I screwed up badly by not reminding people enough times to 'put it on tab number one', or whether it's just that I've been working for the last two years with a bunch of people who refuse to take advantage of a situation that's freely offered to them, but I am VERY embarrassed to report that when I staggered to the bar to pay the final bill it came to a pitifully low thirteen quid. I make a lousy and unsociable host, but at least the bank manager will be happy I guess!