I've had better weeks...

Part I: A False Sense of Security
Saturday 3/3/02
Birthday party in London for my mate Becks. I met her at LMH and we got on, though we often have conversations wondering why exactly this is, her being an insufferable Tory yuppie, and me being... well... the opposite, I suppose (and profoundly hope). Put it like this: when she was a student, she had a book on 'Power Sleeping'... Still, tinyjo and I went to her party which was about half people from college (including Steph, my ex-girlfriend, now pregnant and married. Which is slightly unnerving.) who were fun to meet up with again, and half people Becks knows from the Naval Reserves, who were more-or-less all oafs. She's one of these people who are cool themselves, but have a lamentably broad taste in friends. I ended up coping by drinking rather too much (though not to a problematic extent), encouraged by the deliciousness of Jose Cuervo's Margarita Mix. Jo and I stayed the night, but so did a number of the navy boys, so it wasn't hard to leave the flat early for the tech shopping we had planned.

Sunday 4/3/02
Wandered round looking at tech in the big, faintly seedy shops on Tottenham Court Road. Having established that my old laptop's CD drive was likely to be hard (read monstrously expensive) to fix, I realised I had two options:
1) Spring 100 or so quid for an external USB CD drive.
2) Spring significantly more for a new laptop with a working CD drive, and preferably the specs to display DVDs, burn mix CDs and play the latest (well, latestish) games.
The solution was obvious. *Sigh*.
Found an ex-display model that seemed to fit the bill (Athlon 1.1GHz, 128 Mb RAM, DVD/CD-RW drive, 10 Gb HDD, AGP graphics card, etc.), did a bit of internet cafe research to ensure that it was a good deal for £999 (how did we survive before net cafes?) and decided to go for it. Jo was kind enough to do the actual paying, allowing me to pay her in installments and I wandered home happy. So far, so good.

Not the best of weeks...

Part II: Nothing I Can't Handle
Spent the week trying to install a decent OS on my laptop, it having been shipped with Windows ME. A warez copy of Win 2K from one of my 1337 haxxor buddies (who shall remain nameless, natch) seemed to be in order. Spent most of the week buggering about with install disks, drivers and partitioning as I tried to set up a clean version of 2K and an additional partition on which I hoped to install some sort of Linux variant. Needless to say, this proved trickier than it should have done, but by Friday I had a working 2K setup which recognised all my hardware and was ready to roll. Naturally, I decided to play games, specifically 'Arcanum' (sword, sorcery 'n' steampunk RPG which I bought a couple of months ago but wouldn't quite run on my old machine.)

Meanwhile, my portable back-up brain (a Psion Revo) had inexplicably wiped itself, meaning I had to restore from a backup which (naturally) I hadn't done for a while. I think all I lost was a few good t-shirt slogan ideas and the details of exactly how much money my housemates owe me in council tax and rent, but both were reconstructible.

Mike and I played another blinder of a set at Panic. We'd actually gotten the hang of the controls this time, so though we'd been drinking since 10, we managed to get up in the booth at 1:00 and put together a pretty slick set, though I (have to) say so myself. We only had one worrying moment when a pissed bloke reached over and grabbed the case of one of the CDs we were about to play (luckily the CD itself was already in the machine) and refused to return it unless we played two tracks from it. Twat. Undaunted, we played the one that we were intending to play anyway, and I tracked him down after the set and retrieved the case without him noticing it had gone. That set in full (I think. Lost the set list):

Sure Shot	Beastie Boys
Twentieth Century Boy	Placebo
Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe	Whale
Self Esteem	Offspring
Rocks	Primal Scream
Hate To Say I Told You So	The Hives
40 Boys In 40 Nights	The Donnas
Fell In Love With A Girl	The White Stripes
Kandy Pop	Bis

Yes, two were tracks we'd played last time too, but a) they were good, and b) we had to tweak the set list at the last minute because the DJ before us played some of the bands we had planned. I have decided that I really like DJing. tinyjo came, in a top and bra combo that gave her eerie ultraviolet breasts from certain angles. She stayed for our set, which was sweet given that she has to get up early. Jeremy cleanskies came too, looking very cool in a hand-customised velcro t-shirt. and also seemed to enjoy herself despite having been ill this week. And while I'm name-checking LJers, liriselie was there too, though this is less noteworthy, his (kir?) distinctive spikey dancing being a welcome regular fixture at Panic.

So overall all seemed to be well, as I contemplated a weekend during which the dutiful, beautiful tinyjo would be at her parents for Mother's Day and her brother's 21st birthday, so I could stay in bed using my laptop as god intended: for games, net-surfing and porn. I look back on how I felt that Friday with wistful nostalgia. It all seemed so simple...

Not the best of weeks...

Part III: Things Fall Apart

Friday 8/3/02
Got to work a quarter of an hour late, wearing my Cheapass Games "Work Sucks" t-shirt. What the hell, it was Friday. Boss Charo came up to me and told me that I had a probationary hearing at three that afternoon. "Fuck", I thought. Not the best of days for it. Decided that under the circumstances, a pub lunch would not be a tactically sound move, so conspicuously ate lunch whilst 'working' at my desk in an attempt to make up for lost brownie points.

As it happened, a colleague and mate of mine, Gareth, was being promoted internally (which I thought sounded like an effect of the pills I get spammed about: 'TAKES INCHES FROM YOUR WAISTLINE AND ADDS THEM DIRECTLY TO YOUR PENIS!!! PROMOTES YOU INTERNALLY!!! PRACTICALLY GUARANTEED!!!') and so had champagne and cakes in his department, starting at 2:30. "What the fuck," I thought, with the ease born of long practice. If, as one of my colleagues said, it was 'high noon at three o'clock', I'd be a fool not to neck back some champagne first, wouldn't I? So, I enjoyed a convivial half-hour chatting to some of the more pleasant of my co-workers. I even joked that if I was going to be fired, this would be a pretty good last memory.

Well, move over Mystic Meg/Madame Cleo/[insert equivalent psychic from your pop culture here]. As I'm sure you have guessed by now, I did indeed get the chop. I guessed when my boss, seeming even jumpier than normal, began leading me down towards the Human Resources department instead of to the meeting room usually used for such one-to-one meetings. The meeting was short and blunt. Once the situation had been explained to me, I was asked if I had anything to say. I was tempted to be bitter and sarcastic, but:
a) despite having braced myself for this, I wasn't feeling at my most Wildean.
b) there wouldn't have been any point really.
c) I didn't want to shoot any further holes into my already swiss-cheese-esque chances of a worth-while reference.
I did laugh a lot, though. It seemed appropriate.

Charo told me afterwards that I took it much better than she had expected. I felt like telling her that this was because it wasn't a job I actually gave a shit about, and that was, after all, why they were getting rid of me. Once again, prudence and apathy prevailed. The rest of the department had been told already, so I had nothing to do but pack my stuff and go. The fuckers wouldn't let me use my computer, which was a pisser, as I had a file of good quotations I'd grabbed from various web-sites and LiveJournals which I would have liked to retrieve. Still, they were correct that I shouldn't have had personal stuff on there anyway. Smart move would have been to spend a bit of time that morning grabbing copies of things I wanted to keep, just in case. Ah well. I'll know next time. Shook hands with a few people. A couple of them asked for my email address, which was sweet, and Katherine had stuck a postit note on my bag (which I still haven't read. Can't be arsed to unpack all the detritus, somehow) and with barely a ripple, I drifted off home...

Strange. As I said to Katherine, it was a shame, but not a tragedy. The job was monkey work, which was comforting, but did mean that I couldn't bring myself to do enough of it to survive. The eerie thing was the 'goodbye' meeting, which all felt so very familiar. After all, I'd had similar meetings with most of my teachers at school, all my college tutors, and my bosses from every permanent job I've had. In fact, I think this was the longest I'd ever kept a job: nine months. They always begin with "You're a very intelligent chap" (aw shucks) "but you don't seem to be really happy here. Is this really what you want to do?" Subtext: If so, why aren't you fucking doing it? I've never come up with adequate answers really. Maybe next time...

Not the best of weeks...

Part IV: Kicked While Down

So I got back home, earlier than expected. eidolonarchie, with whom I live (in a very heterosexual way) was in the kitchen. "Guess what", I said. "You've lost your job", he said. I berated him for always thinking the worst. He apologised. I told him that I'd lost my job. The implications of this began to hit home. I was the one paying the electricity and gas bills, my housemates' rent and council tax when necessary, and stealing toilet rolls from work to feed Lorna's insatiable habit. I was going to have get re-employed fast.

Not, however, so fast that I couldn't begin the weekend that I planned earlier than I'd anticipated, and so I retired to bed with my shiny new laptop and fired up Arcanum. It was fun. So much so that I stayed up until 5:30 in the morning playing it, breaking only for a quick meal of Hot and Sour noodles (28p from the Chinese supermarket, delicious, and they count as a meal!) Then I wrote a mother's day card (luckily I had one lying around that I'd bought for her last year, not sent on time, and then been too embarrassed to send late) and posted it, so it should at least arrive only a day late. Set my alarm for 11:30 and went to sleep.

Woke up feeling OK. Renewed my library book by phone. Ordered Mother's Day flowers for Mum and stepmother Isabel (something I've never gotten around to doing before) and called my sister for a long chat. Nothing too taxing, but at least it was constructive. I felt that I was rising above the minor set-back of unemployment rather well. Ate a lump of cheese for lunch, which reduced the amount of food I had in the house to 2 and a bit jars of Kitchen Magic Coconut and Green Chili Sambol ('Ring-stingingly Good') and a quarter of a bag of oats. Resolved to do some food shopping, but instead went down the pub with housemates Archie and Lorna and our mate, Lorna's boyfriend Duncan, drank a jug a bitter, ate some rather good jacket potatoes, and discussed Lorna's neuroses, all very nice.

At home, watched 'Black Books' (funny, if a little patchy) and 'Reboot Series 1' (a bit shit actually, but it gets much better) with Archie, then went to bed (not with Archie. Obviously.) Fired up the laptop, of course, and got back to Arcanum. And it crashed. Horribly. Blue Screen Of Death saying 'I have crashed horribly. I will now write the contents of memory to the hard-drive' or words to that effect. I left it chugging. Eventually, it came up with a message saying 'If this has happened before, trying booting into safe mode and disabling any dodgy hardware you've got installed. If not, just reboot.' I just rebooted.
Operating System not found.
Shit. Reinstall time. Again. Rebooted from a DOS boot disk with fdisk on it.
Hard drive not found.
Shit. Tried going into the BIOS.
Hard drive: None.
Shit. Tried Windows ME (spit) recovery disk.
No hard disk found. Cannot continue setup.
Shit. Tried Linux boot disk.
No suitable media found for installation.
Shit. Having nothing better to do, I went to sleep.

Woke up. Read book. Slept more. Went for a meal in the Radcliffe Arms with tinyjo. OUSFG came round, including sparkymark who had somehow heard that I had lost my job and brought me the DVDs of the 'Scream' trilogy (none of which I have seen) to watch on my laptop to cheer me up. I thanked him, then laughed a bitter laugh.

So, off to London tomorrow, I guess, to wrestle with warranties and shady shops. iFgnre srcsoes.d..

Current site: None. Sitting here at the Oxford University Computing Service, which I'm almost certain I'm strictly speaking not supposed to be using. Still, they've got net access. Given the epic nature of my news, and my unwillingness to get up before two this afternoon, I'm spending all my time here writing not surfing. Missing my job already.

British dude

You know you're a hard-core LiveJournaler when a thread about you begins on another person's LiveJournal, featuring people you only know via LJ.

You know you're somewhat sad when you're absurdly pleased by this.

Word up, stephenl.