Invisible Man In my defence, Officer… everyone else was doing it

5 days

So, there are just five days of work left in this placement. I’m looking forward to the end, I guess. There’s a lot I’ll miss about the place, but most of it was not the work. The people are really nice. The ferry trip in the morning is fantastic. I love the crossword lunches, which also feature the ritual reading of the quiz (when those level nine bastards haven’t pinched it) and  lately, foosball.

At the end of the day, what have I left? A monitoring tool which is apparently useful, a configuration database, some magic deployment tools and some silly applications I made to amuse my friends (a countdown timer, an XKCD mass downloader,  a crossword tray application).
They’re all pretty cool things which do make people’s jobs easier (or make their procrastination more subtle…), but there’s not really five months’ worth of effort.

Because I didn’t put in five months’ worth of effort. They didn’t demand it, and I never pushed for it.
I don’t particularly want to be content with apathy, but I am good at it.

Five days to go, featuring a hopefully awesome presentation, some sort of party at the end, and maybe a few hours of work in the middle.

From five days in the future to a 5 day retrospective. Segue!

Pretty quiet week, actually, right up until the point at which it got very loud.  Turns out, one of my friends does a real university course, and only just finished exams this week. Celebration was required; giant schnitzels were vanquished. The Bavarian is always fun, as is the Redoak.

At work, we finally got our (REDACTED), which is part of our big project to make (REDACTED). It didn’t work at (REDACTED) but I think it got fixed because it’s been fine since. It’s pretty cool that I’m one of the first people to have a (REDACTED).
It’s still secret, obviously.
To celebrate, they handed out some tshirts and caps. The tshirt says “I helped build (thing)” but is missing the footnote “And all I got was this crappy tshirt”. The cap is white and boring, but I wore it backwards to be ironic. I can do that, you know.

Last night was fun too. I went to the Pumphouse with Steve (not that Steve, the other Steve) and met his girlfriend (it now feels like the previous qualifier was unnecessary). Note to self : Redback Cristal is meh.
We’d planned to meet up with Ciaran and Mickey at Scubar, but decided that didn’t actually sound like something we were in a hurry to do, and had a curry instead. We met up with them at Bar Broadway instead, had a couple of drinks and then went to Purple Sneakers.

That was fun.
At midnight I went to find a friend on the dancefloor, and then didn’t see my other friends for the rest of the night. Whoops?

Sneakers is not what I would normally call my sort of place, neither was save FBi. I had a surprising amount of fun at both.
It’s nearly 1pm and my ears are still slightly ringing, 10 hours after I left. Loud music that almost completely prevents conversation isn’t actually the worst thing for someone who doesn’t talk all that much anyway.
Sleep is quite difficult to achieve after what must’ve been at least six jaeger bombs. It’s one of the few things that can get me dancing, though. (Actually, several things need to coincide for me to dance, possibly including a full moon. Seeing me dance is like seeing a yeti: rare. Also ungainly and with quite a lot of hair).

The taxi ride home cleaned me out. I literally poured everything out to pay the driver, but he was good enough to return my key. I needed that, and presumably it’s not a very good tip anyway.
The fare was reasonable, it’s just that I’d spent the rest on alcohol.
On the plus side, I’d withdrawn the exact right amount from the ATM earlier in the night.
On the negative side, I thought I’d withdrawn enough to cover several days.

I’ll admit to feeling a little bit hungover. I need food, and/or a stomach pump. Worth it, even though Red Bull tastes like oblivion.

I need to try and stand up now. I have a beer tasting to attend!