Let me tell you about my Friday…
As has been the case for many years now, it started well but not too early. Breakfast being the cursory affair it is sometimes, involved an apple, a yoghurt and a cuppa. I sometimes don’t bother with official breakfast these days as I have determined that my 2pm-10pm work shift actually shifts my whole day and I had drifted the habit of a four-meal day, breakfast at 8, lunch at 11, work lunch at 5 and snack time when I get in at 10. However you look at it, not good. For a Slimming World devotee like myself, the road to ruin.
So, brunch at 10 usually replaces both breakfast and lunch. All this detail serves no purpose. Sorry. I have probably mentioned it before anyway. It’s just that the weight-loss has slowed and I need to add variety to my eating day and resist the urge not to eat. Yes, it’s true. In the space of a year or so, I have gone from eating anything and all the time to not wanting to eat most of the time. This has the effect of making you even more hungry and less fussy when you do eat.
Anyway, it’s Friday morning. It’s the end of my last week of being “released” at work. This basically means I don’t have to do the usual job of keying and instead have to work on other things. This for me, inevitably means spreadsheets, spreadsheets and the odd spreadsheet. I don’t really mind this but it’s quite a shock to suddenly find yourself involved in something involving a little pressure. I usually a terrible one for procrastination but not this time. Every moment of the past 5 or 6 weeks has been full of typing and numbers. On Friday, it all got out of hand and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, Mr Migraine came to call.
But, I am getting ahead of myself.
This Friday started nicely with coffee on the Hoe with some chums. Ok, so I could have had decaffeinated but the Latte would probably have suffered. I could have probably gone without the butterscotch syrup too.
After a pleasant hour, it was off to work. Here’s where it started to go wrong. For some reason, I decided it was a good idea to grab a coffee in the canteen on the way. More caffeine. An hour later and I could actually feel my heart thumping. What an idiot. No worries though, plenty of relaxing Excel work ahead to take the edge off.
Unfortunately, at this point the true scale of the amount of work I had still to do dawned on me. Time to fess up and ask for some help. A few minutes and an understanding manager later, my chum Scott (fellow Excel nerd) was despatched and also released from his duties to help. So pleased with this was I that I made a stupid error and erased the previous 3 days work. Irrecoverably. Well, almost. I had a backup at home.
There was literally no choice other than to drive home and get it.
At 5.30pm. In a city.
At 10pm, the journey home is a care-free, speedy 15 minute drive. At 5.30pm, it is a frustrating 30 minute crawl through traffic hell. At one point, I was going downhill behind a 7-seater people-carrier doing 20mph. When they eventually reached the top of the valley, they actually slowed down to 10mph to crawl past a speed camera and then they forgot to speed up again.
At home, the file-copying took 10mins and I was soon heading back to work…and the migraine from hell decided to accompany me.
At work, I took pills but it didn’t help. My new assistant helped in a big way and in the space of an hour, solved about 5 problems that had been bothering me all week. I rewarded him by being grumpy and cross most of the time.
By 9.30pm, the pills had worked and it was time to go home.
It doesn’t seem like much, now that I write it down.
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