Everything's gone green

Some days are just shit. Everything conspires against you. The laid-back among us, the blessed, take this all in their stride (that is, until the suppressed stress finally sneaks up on them and gives them a heart attack). I, meanwhile, get more and more fed up with everything and just feel like throwing in the towel, selling the flat, buying a three-bedroomed house with a barn and one acre of land in Bulgaria for £40,000 (yes, I was channel-zapping the terrestrial channels yesterday afternoon, how did you guess?) and spending the rest of my life as far away as possible from the English-speaking world.

All minor things this morning, really. First I can't access the "S" drive from home, even though the connection is fine and my e-mails are great. So I have the choice of coming into the office (with a fixed negative expectation) or staying at home and gambling that everything will turn out alright.

Now, here my risk-aversion really came into play and I showed myself to be different from the general population, because I immediately took the fixed loss (coming into the office and wasting 45 minutes) rather than staying at home and trusting to luck that I could sort things out from there (possible negative expectation either zero or a hell of a lot). As you know, empirical experiments have shown that people will often take a fixed percentage gain rather than gamble for all or nothing, but when faced with the small chance of a large loss, or a fixed small loss, or nothing happening, then they tend to gamble. Not the Birks. Gimme that hedge out, and gimme it now.

Once I got in here, (the situation wasn't resolved until 9am, so I was well behind on just about everything) the farce of the printers continued. All of this really just reflects a general dissatisfaction that I have with group situations, and I know that I shouldn't let it get to me, but it does. Finally the printer scenario I had been warning about for ages (that the workload assigned to the printers was too great) has come to a head and one of them has given up the ghost. The particular abusers of printers, being those types of people, just shifted to another printer, which upset the marketing people, because, of course, overuse then caused that printer to malfunction. No-one took responsibility early enough to prevent what is just a load of headless chickens running around looking for a printer that will print their 150-pages of interim results (x8). Heads in sand, heads in sand.

So, of course, I lose my temper and all of a sudden I'm the bad guy, not the ostriches who did nothing for months, just happily printing massive PDFs on machines clearly not up to the task.

And so I sit here, still in the office, pissed off with life, my co-workers, my job, and the fact that I have to come back to more of the same on Monday morning.

Except I won't. I'm going to work at home. And if I feel badly enough about it, I might work at home on Tuesday as well, and continue to do so as long as it takes me to calm down.

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On the plus side, evidence of how far and wide does the word of the Birks spread, I received this communication:

Came across your message while googling. We are indeed playing again though no plans yet to make it as far as London. And our old 'friends' the Stones didn't invite us to play this time around.

We have a myspace http://www.myspace.com/tv21official so do keep in touch. Hopefully posting some new stuff sometime soon.

All the best
Ally Palmer

Of course, it's only an attempt to generate interest for the TV21 myspace page, but at least it's a personal interest, which makes a difference (well, it does for me). Maybe life isn't completely shit - just 99%.

Now, I need a photoshop expert to send me a picture of a pigeon wearing trainers. Can anyone manage that? Think of it as something that might restore my currently (very battered) faith in human nature.

Strange posts of the year -- a Birks fed-up post not related in any way to a poker loss.