CHOCOLATE ORANGE

I just had a Skype chat with Winners. He wasn't describing himself, but he used a phrase that I've not heard in a while:

up the creek without a paddle

I really like this phrase. It paints a picture of being completely helpless, floating along a wild river, having lost all means of controlling your journey. There is no easy way out.

...

So work's going well today. Actually, I jest, but to be fair, someone did leave an out-of-date chocolate orange in the kitchen where the communal cakes normally go. I know it was out-of-date because it was accompanied by a pink post-it note on which someone had scribbled the warning in capital letters with two exclamation marks.

In an engineering kitchen, such warnings mean very little. I still remember those African sweets someone brought back from their holiday once. Shudder.

Also, I've requested permission to work from home from time-to-time. It means I'll get given a crummy laptop to VPN from but it just might help make things a little different.

No climbing yet. It looks like that might be a while, especially while Nell and HR assess the probability of me leaping to my death from the top of the climbing wall with a wild gleam in my eye. Probably next Tuesday. Climbing, not death, I mean.

Meanwhile this afternoon, to celebrate a successful product release, we're all off on a jolly... ten pin bowling in Bracknell. It's organised fun (pipe down, oxymoron detectives) but at least it's something different and it doesn't involve us all staring at numbers on computer screens which display pointless statistics about our ability to do something completely rand... oh.

The chocolate orange has disappeared, devoured by those who care not for shelf-life as much as they care for chocolate. I only hope it's not too out of date, or the whole department could be up the creek without a paddle.