A day in the life...
I sat down in my office and turned on the computer and then it happened. Nothing. No e-mail, no worldwide web, nothing. Just a great big blank screen with the words "The Internet has been deleted" sitting in the middle of the screen. Someone looked up from the next office and shouted, "Has your internet been deleted?" which was returned with a chorus of agreement from the offices in the vicinity.
I phoned the help desk to find out what was going on. Apparently someone in the United States was cleaning up some of the old internet protocols and they pressed the delete key by mistake. Of course there is so much stuff on the web that you got the old Windows Message "file too large for deleted items. Delete anyway?" and one mistaken click later, the internet was gone. Puff. I bet that poor guy panicked. If he'd been using a mac he at least could have pressed the escape key and probably most of the web would have survived. The odd porn site and the occasional irrelevant blog might have gone but at least the majority of the web would have survived.
So there we were. No Internet. Someone shouted that Patience was still working which was something but how was I going to update myself with the interesting e-mails that were sent overnight or find out the latest news from the BBC? There was only one thing to do. Have a coffee. Crap coffee maybe but at least it was caffeine and that would give some time to decide what to do next. Unsurprisingly the coffee room was full to bursting. The conversations seemed to split three ways. The younger people seemed to only be worrying about their inability to read or update their facebook pages. The older ones were reminding everyone in raised voices that this was bound to happen in the end and life was much better (winters colder, summers hotter) in the olden days when they used Semaphore and letters to communicate. The third group, visually identifiable by their Birkenstock sandals seemed to just be discussing that if only people had listened to them in the first place and used Linux instead of Windows we wouldn't be all standing here. I have to believe this is what they were saying as it actually came across as a whole series of grunts, beeps and other noises created during engineerspeak.
In the corridor someone shouted "I've got a signal on my Blackberry". I don't know who it was and the body was indistinguishable after the stampede but when the fastest and fittest had grabbed the handheld device it all turned out to be a little joke. A bit like this text.
My wife said on Friday night, "What if the Internet was deleted?", to which I responded "it can't". But what if it were. Would we miss our e-mails most or our facebook communications? I would miss Google, without which I would have had to turn to a book to give me the lyrics to the wonderful Beatles track, A day in the life, the eight lines of which started this irrelevant piece of drivel. Saying that, I still had more fun writing this tosh than a thousand e-mails would ever bring....more to come.
A change is as good as a rest?
God giveth and God taketh away and in this case God giveth good. You see, I am lucky to be a fully paid up member of the ENFP club and as a part of the 5% of the TI’s management population that share this gift/curse, a change is better than a rest. I had this small club described to me as filled with Journalists. A group of people who need to have lots of plates spinning but sometimes lose focus so spectacularly that they don’t notice the piles of broken crockery building up around their feet.
As a child/younger person, I would change the layout of my bedroom at least once a year. The ABBA poster would come down from over the bed and be replaced by a Porsche. My desk would move from under one window to along the side wall. The wiring for the sockets and lights would be changed for different coloured cable. Actually that’s not true. But what is that my feet do get itchy from time to time and now is one of those times.
So what have been the highlights of the last six years?
1) Drinking so much vodka in Moscow that I called my sister on the phone and forgot I had done it the next day.
2) Drinking so much vodka in St.Petrersburg and not knowing how I cut my arm somewhere between the bar and my bedroom.
3) Seeing the pyramids from a speeding Egyptian car and thinking, mm, they’re big.
4) The view over old Prague from the Castle.
5) The drive from Istanbul to Ankara after midnight including a customer meeting with no shoes.
6) Goose Liver in Budapest.
7) Going to Siberia in a heat wave.
8) Finally having some free time in Istanbul and wandering around the Spice Market and Grand Bazaar.
9) Learning that Warsaw and Wroclaw are two different places but Wroclaw and Breslau are the same.
10) The worlds cheapest taxi ride complete with free, loud Gypsy folk music in Bucharest.
11) Dinner with EBV in Wroclaw. Beer, wine, Vodka....
12) Helping to open the EECSC in Prague. A truly great bunch.
13) Never having a bad meal in Turkey.
14) Landing safely in a Tupolov at St Petersburg and joining in the chorus of cheers at our bumpy arrival in one piece.
15) Late night tea in Kiev, a city with no litter.
16) Spending a couple of days in Israel and bobbing up and down in the Dead Sea.
17) Seeing Romania change for the better over four years.
18) Using Euro’s in Slovenia and Slovak Republic.
19) Playing football in Hungary and being a not too bad goalie.
20) Building the best goddamn team in the whole of East Europe!
And the regrets? Well, they are mainly the countries I did not manage to visit. Dubai, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan to name a few but hey, there’s plenty of time for that and maybe in a few years when the ENFP kicks back in, a change will be as good a rest and I will tick off the final few countries with a smile spreading from ear to ear (no mean feat in my case, I can tell you!).
