Personality Profiling

So... I've spent the last 3 days on the second part of my Leadership course. Lordy, I'm knackered now. It's nbot that we did much physical stuff, but there was lots of stuff to take in, and when you're at it from about 8 in the morning 'til 10 at night it kinda humps yer noggin.

Anyway. The most important thing I got out of it was an assessment of my personality, Myers-Briggs style. I am, you will be profoundly pleased to discover, an ESTP. Apparently this means that I am:

'Good at on the spot problem solving. Like action, enjoy whatever comes along. Tend to like mechanical things and sports, with friends on the side. Adaptable, pragmatic; focussed on getting results. Dislike long explanations. Are best with real things that can be worked, handled, taken apart or put together.'

There are a whole load of other words, but they could mean anything.

Hmm. 'With friends on the side', eh? What? Like a garnish?

And sport sucks.

But other than that, it's not a bad assessment.

Today's Forecast Is Grey

There are some benefits to working on the 14th floor. On a good day, the view is great. You can see for miles. Today, however, it is not. It's nasty and grey and damp. in fact i would go as far as to say 'murky'. I have taken a couple of pictures to share my nasty, grey, damp and murky view with you.

I took them with my phone... so they're a bit fuzzy. Stop complaining.

Er... Skoda

Yes, yes. I know what you're thinking. Why would the most incredibly cool person ever to grace a web page deign to reduce himself to writing about an object as amazingly uncool as a Skoda. Particularly one that comes in as unattractive a blue as the one pictured above.

Well, I'll tell you. As a person who has been blessed with such good looks, charisma, intelligence and so-on, it is my lot to live my life knowing how much better (and yes, cooler) I am than anyone or anything around me.

Being so fantastically great is an arduous responsibility and it can be very wearing at times. Every so often I feel the need to artificially lower myself in the perception of the people around me, so that they can feel more comfortable around me and not wander round, as they normaly do, in an awestricken stupor whilst in my presence. Hence, every now and again, I persuade my barber to give me a crappy haircut, or I allow myself to be seen in public with Stead.

Recently, my singular magnificence has become such a burden that, this weekend, I just had to take action. Drastic action. Amazingly drastic, in fact.

Since Christmas I have been without a car. This is because I am so cool that I have yet to find a car that can contain such coolness. Sadly this car-lessness has become something of an irritation, stopping me as it does from performing such simple tasks such as popping to the supermarket (obviously I have people queuing up to perform favours such as this for me in exchange for being noticed by me - but I don't like to take advantage of the unwashed masses).

So yesterday, I graciously allowed the Stead to drive me, (in his lady-like Nissan Micra) out to a small vehicular boutique near Barclay. It was my intention to purchase something appropriate to my obvious status. However, when I saw Stead's little bottom lip quivering, I took pity and purchased a Skoda instead.

Let me reiterate this and make it as clear as I possibly can. I bought a Skoda to make Stead feel better about his Nissan Micra. This was very gracious of me and he should be eternally grateful.

Excellent. Now I've made that clear, I shall be off to do more exciting things with my time. Like my laundry (yes, I know, I know - an amazing guy like me shouldn't have to do his own laundry, but I had a bad experience with some of my fans stealing my underwear).

Sickeningly Cute

Cats are buggers. One minutes they're destroying your property and creating foul, foul smells. The next they're being sickeningly cute:

More

Ran again last night.

Legs hurt.

I Am So Dead

I'm gonna start this story with the events of yesterday... I think it will be readily apparent early on where the story is going and why the title of this post is what it is.

Fisrt off, I have to come clean. I'm the first person to take the michael out of girls for the amount of time that they spend shopping for shoes. Shoes and handbags. So when I tell you that I spent over an hour buying a pair of running shoes from a specialist sports shop in Southmead, it is with a certain amount of chargrin.

It had taken a couple of weeks for me to convince Stead that it was time to bite the bullet and buy the running shoes. (Apparently running shoes are not trainers and vice-versa.) He finally relented and we were going to do it on Friday evening, but when the time came, Stead 'couldn't be bothered'. So come Monday, I leaned (my considerable weight) on him until he gave in and at quarter to 5 on a dank Monday evening, we found ourselves in a sports store called 'Sweatshop' in Southmead.

Sweatshop. Bodes well, doesn't it?

Anyways. We were served by a very nice and embarrasingly fit man called Matt who explained to us all about support, arches, road surfaces and shin splints and stuff and sucessfully managed not to patronise the two suited gentlemen in front of him who were clearly as unfit as a pair of unfit weasels. Very exciting. He made us run in various pairs of shoes until we were satisfied with the fit and support we were getting.

The upshot of all of this was that he sold us 2 pairs of £70 running shoes. And we discovered that he had amazingly small hands. If you're in Bristol and you need running shoes, consider this a recommendation.

So, Tuesday evening comes around and the time comes for our first run. It is our ultimate aim to get to 5 miles a run, two or three times a week. Well, we didn't manage that, but we were quite happy with the 2ish miles that we did run. Of course there were one or two rests included in that. It killed us. It killed Stead more than it killed me, but dead is dead. We're so unfit. Our first hurdle is to master that 2 mile run with no break. Then we'll extend it to 2 and a half or 3 miles. Hopefully in a couple of months time, we'll be running a reasonable distance and almost look like we know what we're doing.

And that, my friends is why I am so dead.

An Update For The Week

I've been extremely lax this week. I haven't posted once, despite many, many exciting things happeing since my last post. So here's a single post that will bring me up to date:

Thursday: Computer Repair 101

I went over to my Gran's last night. She made me sausage and mash for my tea.

In exchange I had to fix her PC. She had been very vague about the problem. Something about a very small box on the screen and she couldn't read it. This had been a problem since my Aunt had visited and used the PC a couple of months ago.

Upon starting the machine up, I discovered that the screen resolution had been changed from 640x480 to 800x600, rendering all of the icons and windows too small for my Gran to read. So I changed it back for her.

She was very grateful, declared me a computer guru and gave me more sausages.

Tuesday: Another Fire Alarm

We had a power cut at about 10.00 this morning. The power cut caused
a short in the basement building which began to spark and smoke and in
turn tripped the fire alarm. So we all had to leave the building.

Again.

Hooray.

Friday: Rude People

I may be in trouble at work. A Divisional Manager phoned me up yesterday. Divisional Managers are pretty senior and more or less report to the board of directors - this one has about 40,000 people working for him. In an organisation as big as mine, that makes him
God and me a lowly, lowly pleb. Beneath his notice in fact. Let's, for the sake of annonymity, call him Geoff.

So, about 15 minutes into the conversation, Geoff asked me a technical question about one of the procedures that I deal with. I began to explain the concept to him, when he yawned. Very oudly, with no attempt to hide the fact.

"I'm bored now," he said.

"That," I informed the Divisional Manager, "was rather rude wasn't it, Geoff." I then continued to provide the requested information with as much unneccessary detail as I could.

The remainder of the converstaion was rather terse.

Tea

I just made a cup of tea. I thought it was looking a bit weak ... then I realised I hadn't put a teabag in.

Doh.

Fire alarms, heart attacks in buns, Heroism and really annoying people on the bus.

Yesterday was an interesting day...

Three of my four colleagues were away. One's on a 3 day course (yes, that one...) and two are on holiday. Although I wasn't actually alone in the office, my only remaining team mate has an unfortunate obsession with talking about her 3 year old son - a subject that I'm afraid I can only put up with for very very short periods at a time.

Now then. 3 year old sons are not the interesting things about which I write. Unless you find them particularly interesting, in which case I'd suggest that you go and Google for '3 year old sons' and leave me alone.

The day was proceeding in an orderly fashion - work was being... well, paid lip-service to, phonecalls were being made and I even turned up to a short meeting at one point. It was great and I had a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment inside. Then, at 11am on the dot, the Fire Alarm sounded. It was very dramatic. Let me give you a flavour of the drama:

"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"

"Oh bugger. Let me just finish my coffee."

"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"

"Where's my coat... it looks a bit chilly outside. Keys, keys... Gotta lock my desk up."

"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"

"Where exactly is the fire exit, anyway?"

"EEEEEOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO"

See? I can tell that you were on the edge of your seat there! It was just like 'The Towering Inferno'. I should remind you at this point, that I work on the 14th floor of an office block. Many many stairs to be walked down. At one point, the stairs had collpased and we saw Steve McQueen standing on the level below saying "It'll be ok... just dangle off that flimsy bit of metal. I'll catch you, honest. Send your small children first!"

(The Steve McQueen bit was kinda made up by the way)

Anyway... 370 odd steps later, we reached the ground floor and made our way over to the meeting point. Now this always interests me. The meeting point is in a motor bike park on the other side of the road. Whenever we have a fire drill, the occupants of the building tend to swarm across the road with no regard for the many cars that whizz back and forth. Who cares what a ton of speeding metal thinks, eh? No-one died, or got mangled around the bumper of a battered old Peugot 405, so that was nice.

Three quarters of an hour later we were still standing outside. Our resident temp, a member of the TA with the attention span of a chicken giblet started threatening to make announcements using a nearby traffic cone as a megaphone.

After making a few enquiries, I established the reason for our extended wait. (It always amuses me that people in general will wait around without question indefinitely until they are given instructions - no attept to find out what's going on or to change their situation. I guess it's some sort of herd instinct. Maybe I could get a grant to research it...) The fire alarm button was broken. They couldn't switch it off. Sadly, the lifts are connected to the alarm system and while the alarms are going off, they cannot be used.

So I went to the pub.

Well, it was precatically lunch time and it was clear that we wouldn't be going back in for a while, so I simply made effective use of the time afforded by the situation. I've been on a management development course, you know. I can do these things.

I rounded up a few bodies and headed off to Walkabout on Corn Street, where I indulged in what was described as a 'Brekkie Burger'. This, of course was the heart-attack-in-a-bun mentioned in the title of this post. It had a burger, bacon, fried egg and a hash brown in it. And it was dripping with delicious fatty liquid. I could feel the cholesterol building up as I ate...

Well. After an uneventful afternoon, I spent a great evening heroically righting wrongs in Paragon City with attractive young ladies. And Stead. Who is neither attractive or young. Er... or a lady.

So there you go. I acknowledge that the day was, perhaps, not as interesting as advertised. But I'm not refunding you.

Oh... Oh the bus. Forgot the bus. Yeah. That was this morning. Some silly moo got on the bus before me. It's the first stop of the day, so the bus driver was grumpy, I was grumpy and we couldn't be arsed to listen to some baggage dither about whether she wwanted a Day rider or a Return ticket and whether she was going to pay with her ten pound note and have to get a change ticket in return. It was, she informed us, the first time she'd caught a bus for years. She doesn't know how close it came to it being her last...