More Dublin, training, lost clothes

Re my last post, I've over it now, and am quietly getting on with the serious business of sucking all 2.whatever million tracks out of the service whilst I still can, as I believe a number of other 'subscribers' are. Hooray for small mercies, I say. Oh, and whilst the mochaccino from the machine on the first floor wasn't that bad, the espresso was lethal. Although there were some mornings when Bruno (bless 'im) got in before me and was thoughtful enough to place a MUG full of it on my desk, which I think had no fewer than four rocket-fuel espressos in it. 30 minutes later and elephant tranquilisers couldn't slow me down. My most productive mornings, I think.

Anyway, back to Dublin this week, fortunately only for a day trip (although these tend to be the most tiring of all, out on Wednesday at 0430 and back around 2000, straight to the pub for the old place's semi-official leaving do, which I'm really looking forward to. This week I'm mostly writing a business case which is turning out to be more detailed than it has any right to be, and hoping fervently that all my adding up's correct. I noticed a small error the other day where I'd forgotten to divide by 1,000. Aaaanyway....

Then, on Thursday and Friday I'm in some hotel out near Reading somewhere (ooh the glamour; Kathryn gets to go to all sorts of shiny places; I'm somewhere off the M4...) on a Consultancy Skills course. I've no idea what'll be involved, but with any luck I'll be all skilled up after that and won't have to pretend at being a Consultant as I've been doing with varying degrees of success for some months now. It's been a bit like a real-life 'Faking It'; I wonder if anyone's cottoned on yet....

... and then, on Friday night, the Kiwi and I are off to Prague with some other kiwis for the weekend, hooray. I'm told it's back to its former loveliness after the recent influx of stag dos (who've all gone to Tallinn now) so I'm rather looking forward to it.

And on a final note, I've just heard a production designer on the Vodaphone Live Music awards describe Motley Crue as 'heavy metal herberts', which has made my evening, pretty much. More when I get back from Prague, unless there's wireless at the hotel on Thursday night. Looks set to be an interesting week.

Oh, and one more thing - lost clothes. I thought that, in the interest of maintaining the underlying theme of this blog (The Adventures of the Kiwi) I thought I should mention the absolutely wonderful episode yesterday where she had to knock on the door of one of the flats in the building next door to retrieve her shorts and a towel which had blown off our balcony whilst drying. We're still one towel, a dressing gown and a pair of knickers short; the people who own the properties they blew onto are away, so the knickers will have to stare forlornly at us through our kitchen window til they get back. What must the neighbours think....

Tales of Mayhem

This week's been one of those which is a bit like crashing whilst snowboarding. You're careering along at a fair pace and all of a sudden, nothing quite goes wrong as such, but for some reason the world's going upside down and round and round and things are hitting you from all sides and everything's white and then it stops. And you think 'Am I still alive?', before gingerly picking yourself up and doing it all again.

There's a few reasons for this. One is that the whole project is gathering pace, and now we're properly into the thick of it. Once you get into the detail you tend to find out a lot about the people around you - how much they're really involved, whether they're actually bothered about delivery, how good they actually are at their job, what their personal expectations from this are and so on. Can be a tense time.

The other reason is that the Project Manager went on holiday yesterday and that sort of puts me in that position. Which is fine and all, but to continue the analogy-fest, it's a bit like being in the passenger seat of an 18-wheeler and looking over to find the driver's jumped out. I'm intending that when he comes back in two weeks' time he'll find himself surplus to requirements, but I'm not sure I can quite pull off that sort of coup just yet.

So the past week has been productive, tiring, a fair bit of fun and generally ok. Thought I'd share with you the view from our office in Dublin, too. It's rather nice, can be distracting sometimes. I've also managed to upgrade our hotel slightly, possibly a bit further than I thought: one of the chaps who came over last week asked me to get a better hotel next time, as we'd been relying on the client to sort that element of the logistics and although the hotel's alright, it's not great. I gently mentioned this to the client, who said that they only had an account with the one we'd been staying at so we might as well sort it ourselves. I found the next closest hotel on a map and asked our travel elves to book it for me, which they did.

Turns out it's Bono's hotel. Well done me. Thought I'd get a bit of stick about this but apparently it's a sort of thing they do at our place. The thinking being that if you're being forced to spend time on your own, in a foreign city and away from your loved ones etc, you ought really to at least be able to do this in a pleasant environment. Round of applause for my employers, please.

In other news, everyone should check out www.wefeelfine.org. It's ace.