With apologies to the late Chris Rea.
Checked out of the hotel at dawn, having packed up the night before, and trundled my way to the station. Hadn’t really wanted to still be in temporary accommodation after over a month at the job, but getting Stafford landlords to actually respond to their own adverts was a challenge; The Christmas season probably didn’t help, but it seems like people don’t take their adverts down when they fill the room. Others just don’t check their messages.
The Company do a thing where they have a half day on the last day of the year, but it’s sort of unofficial, so they announce it at some point over the course of the morning. I’m sure you’re shocked to discover that this does nothing to boost productivity; It may actually decrease it below the standard Last Day Can’t Be Bothered levels, because there’s no point in starting any non-trivial task when you don’t know if you’ve got 2 hours or 30 minutes to work on it.
There were, however, Christmas Snacks.
Also Christmas socks, though those did happen yesterday; Not Quite My Boss got surprisingly heavy Christmas Crackers for the team, which turned out to contain Christmas Socks.
I got some actual work done, in the form of going through someone else’s code & removing all the bits that aren’t used anymore. There were a lot.
It’s a bit like they’ve had cowboy builders in. The work’s been done, and it does what it should, but you need to flush the toilet in just the right way or it won’t work, the pipes are exposed because they’ve not put the wall back, and they’ve left debris & packaging everywhere.
There are more efficient routes to get from Penkridge to Aylesbury, but they rely on knowing when you start, and with the uncertainty about finishing time I couldn’t do that. So I went with the simple option; Penkridge to Birmingham New Street, walk around to Birmingham Moor Street because I was not going to cut through the mall complex with a suitcase, then take the train towards London.
It’s a bit of a toss-up as to whether to go all the way into London, then back out to Aylesbury, or get out part way there at High Wycombe & get the train from there; Mostly it’s about timings, and in this case it was 50 minutes waiting at High Wycombe or 40 minutes waiting at London Marylebone, maybe ten minutes difference in arrival time, and Marylebone has more stuff.
Of course the train to Marylebone was delayed by the train ahead of it breaking down, and then was full to the aisles with the folks from that train, so 40 minutes in Marylebone turned into 10 minutes of “dude, where’s my train?”, but … It all worked out OK in the end.
Got into Aylesbury about 10 minutes after folks left work for the day, so I went to the pub they were at; Rolling suitcases don’t perform well on cobbles, by the way, just in case you were wondering.
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