Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Tomorrow is the last day of the school term. Probably not a good situation for work. Especially tomorrow evening when parents are treating their kids. That isn’t what this post is about though. There is something far more exciting going on. My parents and my sister leave for France on Saturday!

So the house party starts Saturday night and pretty much just goes on solidly for two weeks or so ;). Unfortunately they are only going for a little over two weeks (rather than their normal month) but I am going to enjoy it all the same. The house to myself, the car to myself, it’s going to be so good. I love my house, my car and the suburbs in general but there are all these other hippies that insist living here too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. But I also love my independence. I love been able to get out at 2am after a night out and watch ABC1 for the rest of the night. I love being able to go shopping to Tesco at 3am without worrying I am going to wake people up going in and out. It’s going to be grand!

Today I’ve been on the phone with UK Online, BT fault tracking, BT customer services, CCL customer services and Parcelforce.

Some good may finally be arriving though, I finally have my bag back (though I’ve not checked it yet) and, drum roll please, our BT line was finally turned on this morning! To the point where we can now use it at least, I just need to wait for the order to be marked as complete and it will show up in the database as a BT line when broadband providers run their checks. If it ever is.

Thursday saw me spend my day on the phone to Chemical Records, CCL Technical Support, CCL Customer Services, BT, Egg and UK Online.

Friday saw me spend my day on the phone to BT and the tax office. It’s now been 3 months since the tax year ended and I requested the tax they wrongly took from me to be paid back to me. I was informed it would be a good few months before they even processed my form as they were still dealing with mail from April.

Today was a nice easy day. I only spent an hour on the phone to BT and CCL.

It certain hasn’t been there in a while :p. But yeah, after months and months of being into my overdraft, my bank account is now into positive numbers!

I’m not actually celebrating though. It’s only actually in credit because the direct debits haven’t been taken out of my account for my credit cards yet so my server and my decks are still awaiting payment collection which will drag me back down. Still, for the moment, it looks so beautiful.

There is nothing like having to make half a dozen phone calls when you get in from work which you’ve been since 5:30am.

First of CCL Customer Services to find out where my hard drives are. They haven’t been dispatched yet nor will they be in the next week because they are out of stock with the supplier. Expected delivery date still says 29th June.

Next call is to Chemical Records to find out where my replacement bag is. They’ve lost it. Parcelforce says they have delivered it back to them but they don’t know where it is. They take my number and tell me they are going to ring me back.

Next call is to UK Online to confirm some details about their packages. More bad news there.

Next, I call Linksys for some product information. First off I end up at the wrong place. Second time I get through to some outsourced call centre which tells me to ring another number which is business support. This gets me through to another outsourced call centre that tells me to ring pre-sales. This turns out to be the first place I called.

Next, CCL Technical Support to try and sort my server out. They tell me I need to send it back to them.

Next, eBuyer to find out if they actually have the hard drives in stock or whether they were just pretending like CCL were. They have it in stock so I go looking on how I can order from them as I don’t have enough money on my credit card until CCL refund me for their order. Looking at my back accounts I find Leeds Uni have paid me a load of money and I don’t know why.

So I then phone Leeds Uni who put me through to accounts payable. I then get put through to someone else at accounts payable. They can’t find me on my system but suggest I ring my old halls.

I phone accommodation services. I’m not sure if it is my accommodation desposit given the amount is more than the desposit itself but I give them my details anyway so they can look into it. They take my number and tell me they will get back to me. They actually did call me back a few minutes later (while I was at the door signing for a delivery) and left me a voicemail explaining it was my accommodation deposit refund.

While this is going on I get a text from CCL saying my order has been dispatched by Citylink. I go to check the website and it says I’ve now been invoiced. Time to ring CCL Customer Services again. They tell me they will be with me tomorrow (ha, heard that one before).

I want the last two hours of my life and all my phone credit back.

Friday night saw the first of what is likely to be quite a number of house parties at my new house. Having packed the back of my estate car with the sound system and moved it over we set the stage for quite a evening of dancing, drinking and stripping (of which there was actually unfortunately quite little of).

Attendance wasn’t bad for an out of term time event and with my decks having recently arrived I shipped those over too so we could get a decent beat going. It didn’t go as well as hoped due to the floor being unstable so the records kept skipping when people were walking about plus we started playing records before people were too drunk to notice that a) it was dance music and b) that none of us could beatmatch lol. However once we reached the early hours Kieran managed to get the crowd going with some classic cheese.

The partying went on till about 4am before drawing to a close as the sun rose. All in all, not a bad night.

These opens are killing me. I’m having to get up before 5am! I’m not normally in from work by that time. Fairly easy shifts though, there isn’t really much of a rush at any point like you get on closes over dinner time. It’s got the fairly nice and laid back feel which is the best thing about closes. Which I’m back on tomorrow. Too much sleep pattern adjustment for my liking.

Saturday 30 June will go down in history as the day Michelle got her breasts out in Bar Censsa.

Having done my second ever open at work in the morning (I actually made it to work at like 5:50am, go me) I went to pick up my keys for the house in the evening and help Michelle move some stuff. Afterwards I headed home to sort some stuff before going back to town to meet Michelle as well as some friends from work.

We ended up at Sports Cafe for a few hours followed by hitting Bar Censsa where we spent the rest of the night. It was a pretty good night, it’s free entry all night and the music is along similar lines to most places. Plus it’s not the busiest place so you get served at the bar at a decent speed.

It’s been a long week. I was on the close at work last Friday. And Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. And last night. 7 closes in a row no less. I like to think that’s pretty hardcore. It’s lagging a bit behind the store record but now too far behind anyone who is still currently working there. So over the last week I’ve done somewhere in the region of 70 hours worth of shifts.

It’s all good though because I have today off. I mean sure, it’s 2pm now and I’ve only just got up because I didn’t get to bed until 6am this morning and sure, I need to be in bed by 9pm tonight because I start work at 6am tomorrow morning so only have 7 hours of my day off to actually enjoy but other than that it’s all good.

Ah the joys of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

But bad grammer aside, Owen has anounced that in fact our group, Parrot, achieved the highest mark in SE24. Factoring in every part of the group project we proved our ability to work as the best team, functioning as one unit working to maximum efficency.

Of course it didn’t work like that in the real world. Safa did way more coding than anyone else having the most commits (followed by George, Raby, myself and Sumara) and the largest commits (followed by myself, Raby, George and Sumara). We were never really working together on the code – I started it off before Easter then had Rationalist Week to deal with at which point Safa and George started coding while Raby need the UML and Sumara just did nothing. Go team.

Still, I’ll take it as a victory in a time of year that is causing an insane amount of stress, Plus it shows it may actually be giving News a read once in a while.