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Have you ever noticed people who wear suit jackets which don't match their trousers? I'm talking about different colours and in some cases totally different material. It always seems to be older business men who go with this 'look'. What's the reasoning behind this? In my opinion it looks awful. Sorry if I have offended anyone but I had to get this off my chest!
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Have you ever been talking with someone and they will pull random names out of the blue when they are talking about their lives, as if you should somehow know who they are talking about? Are you supposed to guess? Is it right to say, 'Who exactly is that?'
I can't stand it when people do this! All you need to say is 'My colleague, Ben,...' or 'My girlfriend Kate' before starting a story. Is that so hard?
Near to the my office there are a number of small sandwhich shops. Though one in particular is lucky enough to have me as a regular customer, on Friday I went into one of the quieter shops to grab a coffee with a colleague before heading back to the office.
The bloke who works there is friendly bloke. Though he's very tall his hands are huge, totally out of proportion to his body!
He started making our coffees and asked how many sugars I wanted. I answered and so did my female colleague. He turned to her and said, 'I wasn't asking you. I know you don't take sugar!' Touchy.
He stood still watching us talk, but said nothing so I assumed he was still doing something. Eventually we looked at him and he said, 'So you have finished now?' in a half friendly, half annoyed tone.
Just to finish off the bizarre story, as we paid for our coffees the bloke said to my colleague. 'I know you don't have sugar. If I ever need honey, I'll ask you. Scrape it off.' Woah, now that is a freaky chat up line.
A long while back a friend told me that under certain circumstances, if you are delayed on the London Underground, you can apply for a refund.
I tried applying for a refund following long delays on the 6th of March and today received a lovely letter containing a £4.00 voucher for the London Underground. I'm hopeful this can be used to top up your pre-pay Oyster card.
If you have delays over 15 minutes on the Underground then apply for a refund! It will only take you five minutes to go through the online form. What have you got to lose?
Fittingly 'Unsettle' is part of a project which I've been working on at work. In recent weeks I've felt an unsettled feeling within myself. This feeling is coming from many things in my life, many of which I'm aware of, perhaps others of which I'm not.
Do you ever go through periods where change seems to happening faster than normal around you? Situations changing, be it at the office or in your personal life? Even affairs under your own control seem somehow forced upon you, difficult choices.
I think there are two main parts to this unsettling feeling. First is lack of control, being powerless to stop something which you can see slowly unfolding before you. Second is sometimes you realise you need to make important changes in your life, even if you don't feel ready for them. Things never stay the same.
Another thing that puzzled me slightly when joining my current company was that quite a number of people eat breakfast at their desk. They have their own cereal bowls and cereal and eat while they work.
To avoid the morning rush I tend to leave early giving me time to kill before work starts. However, I normally skip breakfast at home so use this time to grab some breakfast and eat in the staff room at work. Lately this has meant way too many bagels and butter, not in fitting with my new healthier lifestyle.
A couple of colleagues have been following their ʽWeetabix Weekʼ regime and it got me thinking, I could do that too. So today I brought in my box of Honey Nut Shredded Wheat and ate at my desk. Looks like Iʼve been totally converted to the ways of my office.
Welcome to this year's fishing for good wishes 'birthday post'! Yes, yesterday I turned twenty seven, can you believe? By my calculations I must have been blogging for about five years now. Blimey.
Today was my first birthday at a British company since 2002. In keeping with strange English custom (yes, I'm English, but it still seems odd to me), I brought a rediculous amount of cakes and snacks into work.
I announced my birthday to the people surrounding me and dished out some cakes and biscuits.
There is something I've always wondered when seeing 'cakes in the kitchen for my birthday' e-mails from my colleagues: how many people actually reply to say happy birthday and how many people just nab the cakes from the kitchen without a word?
Disappointingly After moving the cakes to the kitchen and sending a floor wide e-mail, I got just three replies. One was, 'You look about six.' Great, thanks. By the end of the day, though, most of my cakes had disappeared.
At lunch I followed tradition again, rather reluctantly I'll admit, and bought some colleagues a round of drinks at the local pub.
Outside of work I was delighted to receive greetings cards from a few people I thought would have forgotten and wasn't all that surprised that most people had totally forgotten (even some of those who I'd spoken to about my birthday on Saturday!).
Thanks to all of you who sent me birthday wishes and cards or gifts. To the rest of you: I'm still waiting!
The appropriately named 'Jump' is a novel theatre producetion consisting of what I would describe as a strange mix of martial arts and gymnastics. At the weekend, I had the pleasuring of seeing the production at the Peacock Theatre near Holborn station.
My first impression was, 'My god, even for a martinee, there are too many kids here.' I didn't know that much about Jump until going to see it, but it quickly became apparent why it's so popular with younger people as well as adults.
The action is very visual and features large amounts of slap-stick humour, appropriate cartoony sound effects and tons of stunning flying kicks and summersaults.
The first part of the show featured a bit of audience participation and followed the martial art family's daily training routine. The best parts of this featured the drunken uncle. Though there was practically no story during the first half, the second half did have a plot of sorts, though it was essentially one long, very well done fight scene.
At the end I felt slightly let down but the lack of a story and some of the drawn out sequences, but now that I think about the skills that were on display I can't really knock it.
For ages I've been dying to eat at Nandos. After work yesterday a group of colleagues and I went out for drinks. The main part of our evening, as it turned out, was eating at Nandos. What great chicken goodness!
Today, I wasn't feeling particularly on form. I met with friends and somebody had seen fit to decide that dinner was to be at Nandos! Who was I to argue...
I'm all 'chickened out', as one of my colleagues put it yesterday. My stomach doesn't feel quite right - I think I had too much hot peri-peri sauce!
I like to listen to music just as much as anyone else on the commute to work, but not all the time. It's good to relax and have a bit of break sometimes.
However, it's often not long before someone sits down next to you or even stands across the carriage from you when you can hear annoying tinny music leaking out of their poor quality earphones. Do these people realise how noisy and intrusive they are being?
More often that not, you look at the perpetrator and see white wires trailing from their ears... an iPod. Surely the iPod earphones must be among the worst offenders for sound leakage and general noise pollution. The average iPod user it appears, seems content with their white earphones.
I'm surprised nobody has taken Apple to court over this. What do you think?
One of the English teachers I used to work for once described his English as blocking his Japanese. While speaking in Japanese he would often try to say something only for a similar English word to come to his mind first.
A few years on and I often find myself experiencing the same thing, but in reverse. This is not to say that my Japanese ability is anywhere as good as my teaching colleague's English!
Some days it rarely if ever happens, but on other days I really have to try hard to stop myself from speaking Japanese to my colleagues. It's really frustrating, actually.
At times there are shorter and more appropriate sentences in Japanese, but for some reason I don't feel that this is the only reason why this happens. You'd think that with English being my mother-tongue, that Japanese would hardly ever block my English.
For a truly bilingual speaker, I wonder how much this occurs.
At work there are various words that people use that could be said so much more simply.
Two of my favourites are 'action', meaning to 'do' and 'resource' meaning 'person'. For example:
Please can you action this ASAP.
We don't have a resource available at the moment.
Do you have any words like this at work?
Occasionally a friend calls me from his work number. If I don't know the incoming number, I answer if possible, in case it's my friend. Today my phone started to ring with a 'Number Withheld' message.
Really, I should have known. It was a job agency, calling out of the blue. At first I found the man I was speaking to friendly and easy going. I thought I'd hear him out and he started telling me about his 'great opportunity.'
It was the usual story, really. Those people are so persistent and persuasive, I find myself becoming defensive, even if I agree with what's being said. I hate being forced into quick decisions, but that's always what's forced upon you. What's more, even if the job being discussed isn't suitable, these consultants will often do their best to convince you otherwise.
After a while, I was really wishing I hadn't answered. I said that he could e-mail me the details, thinking he'd be happy with that. Instead, though, he persisted. 'This is really a no-brainer.' and so on, he continued. He even criticised my current job in the long term. How rude is that?
He then said, 'I'm trying to help you here.' To this, I replied, 'If you are helping me you won't mind sending me an e-mail'. With that, I finally got off the phone.
A while back, last summer in fact, I decided to 'go healthy', or at least to improve my diet. One of my goals was to avoid snacking on bad food before lunch and to eat more fruit.
While I've done poorly with the fruit, I have stopped eating practically all chocolate and don't touch crisps anymore. With all the cakes for people's birthdays at work, being good is quite a challenge.
One thing I love to kill my hunger at work until lunch is nuts, more specifically, almonds. I used to buy a pack a day (80g) but realised I was spending quite a lot of money. Now, I have my own little almond jar on my desk which I refil from a big bag of almonds from the supermarket. One downside is my colleagues see fit to help themselves (you know who you are!).
Now, I have had numerous discussions with colleagues about how healthy almonds are. Some people claim they contain quite a lot of fat. Others assure me that they are healthy but maybe not 50-100 grams per day like I eat. Personally, I believe they have a lot to offer (yes, ok, as part of a varied diet...) in terms of nutrition. Plus they taste great!
An interesting article I've found is from Former Fat Guy, which describes all the great protein and other nutrients in almonds.
Do you have to snack at work to make it till lunchtime? What do you eat? I'd be interested to hear your opinions.
With the strangely warm weather there was an incredible amount of children out in force in London's parks today. The playground at the park I visited looked like a rush hour in a twisted children's world.
As I entered the park toilets, a small building beside a cricket pitch, I felt a thud on the back of my leg. Immediately, this was followed by an apology by a young boy, I'd say between 10-15, as his football rolled back towards him. I looked at him briefly and then turned away.
The boy in question and a friend were hanging around the entrance to the toilets. They were in somebody's way and as moved to make way one of them apologised in the most sarcastic unsincere way imaginable. It was then that I realised that the little brat had probably kicked his football at me intentionally.
The number of kids with no respect for other people in London is frightening.
Since using Microsoft Outlook so much at work I've become attached to some of its features. After building my new PC I thought it would be a good opportunity to try changing my mail client from Thunderbird to Outlook.
I found a web page which detailed the process, which is rather long-winded. Using a program called IMapSize you can convert Thunderbird mbox files to Outlook Express eml files. Next you create the same folder layout in Oulook Express, then drag and drop all of your e-mails from Explorer. Finally, you export from Outlook Express to Outlook.
Things didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. Firstly, a number of e-mails appeared to get corrupted. They lost their subjects and they displayed oddly, with headers appearing in the main mail body. In the end I just deleted these.
The worst part of the conversion appeared to happen between Outlook Express and Outlook. While most Japanese mails appeared correctly in Outlook Express they became unreadable in Outlook. I spent a few hours fiddling with Outlook's font settings with no success (these are for mail composition, not display).
A test e-mail I sent to my work e-mail address appeared correctly. Then, after downloading new mails to Outlook my home computer Japanese appeared correctly. So the problem was the export from Outlook Express to Outlook.
My final shot at converting my e-mail was to use my Japanese laptop, on which I repeated the entire conversion process. My reasoning was the Japanese mails should be supported under a Japanese OS and by the export from Outlook Express. To my delight, I was right.
Finally, I copied the outlook.pst file from my laptop to my desktop. All of my Japanese mails finally appeared! I hope this helps if you are trying a similar mail conversion.
In the past I used to feel elated after work on Fridays. A time to relax, chill out, go out, have fun. In recent months, this has change, however. Nowadays a tiredness comes from nowhere and overwhelms me. Is work that tiring? Going to bed early on a Friday night seems so depressing, but hell, I like my sleep! Good night.
It happened in cafe Nero at Piccadilly Circus. I was talking with a friend, discussing a book. I noticed something out of the corner of my eye: the person sitting behind my friend unzipped a bag on the floor and put his hand in. The bag was my friend's bag.
I was shocked and stared for a second. The person turned his head and realised that I had spotted him. He took his hand out and left almost immediately with his friend. Thinking back, we should have confronted the two guys immediately. Luckily there was nothing of any value in my friends bag and nothing was taken in any case.
The would-be theif look young and fashionable. I couldn't help but think that he didn't seem like the type, but then, you just can't tell can you?
All I can say is be cautious with your belongings, especially in the West End. I always put my bag under the table in front of me, never beside me. Likewise on the Tube, I always carry my rucksack in front of me in crowded areas. You can never be too careful.
Last night was beautifully clear and I was admiring the stars in the countryside near Basingstoke. A full moon was also shining down on us as we drove down a pitch black road towards a homely country pub.
After leaving the pub people noticed that the moon no longer appeared quite so 'full'. Then I got a text telling me about the eclipse. By then a friend and I were trying to take photos.
I took the photo above when the the moon was bathed in a dark red during the full eclipse at about 11:30pm. Before shooting this image with a makeshift tripod consisting of a stick I must have taken at least 50 pictures. Quite a cool picture, even if I do say so myself.
>Lunar eclipse: 'Wonder of nature'
>Reader's Pictures - much better than mine
