{Cheese and Beans}

In between various work requests and support calls from customers, I sat at work this morning watching the clock – watching for 11am to arrive; knowing it would mark the end of a little life in a vet’s surgery a few miles away.

I didn’t tell anybody at work until the time had passed. I worried about calling home – wondered if I should or not. Wondered if somebody would want to hear from me, or if they wanted to be left alone.

In the end I did call, and was surprised at the upbeat voice on the other end of the line. We didn’t talk much. I asked if it had gone okay. I got a despondent “yes”. I volunteered that I might be able to finish early and pick the children up from school.

Thus began the task of requesting an early finish, and telling various female friends at work about the fate of our little man – a trouble we had not shared with many. The surprise was perhaps that both male and female staff were taken aback. Our little man had become known to quite a few colleagues over the years – singling them out for claws and footprints on their smart clothes while en-route for a night out (or a night in with pizza and rubbish movies).

I made my way down to school, and took a wrong turn. I went the wrong way in the town I have lived in for the last ten years. I got lost in the same roads I walk every weekday morning with the girls.

Fate decided that I would be breaking the news to the girls. Little Miss 4 didn’t really understand.

“Where Mummy?”

“She’s staying at home because she’s very sad”

“Why is she sad?”

“Because you know Simpson was very poorly? He died.”

“He died already?!” (a note of consternation – obviously the four year old brain still thinks the world revolves around them)

After a few minutes stood among the gaggle of Mums – many of which I know, and all of which totally ignored my presence (and Wendy’s absence), Little Miss 6 came bursting from school. Little Miss 4 broke the news.

“Simpson has already Died!”

“Oh no!”

“We need to get nother cat! Cheer Mummy up!”

“Yeah! Dad – we are going to get two cats…. (pause for thought)… can we get three cats Dad?”

I say nothing. She starts skipping.

“Yay! We’re going to get three cats. We’re going to get three cats!”

“I said nothing of the sort little madam”

“Awwwwww”

She then feigned tears, before brightening up considerably on sight of one of her friends, and went racing off to play in the playground while we waited for the eldest to finish school.

Without exception, each child’s first remark upon leaving school was “I’m starving – have you got anything to eat?”. It’s nice on days like today to have some kind of consistency.

1st Mile

Thankyou to the fat little man on the rusty racing bike who must have puffed and wheezed his self down the road in an effort to overtake me as dangerously as possible, and having completed said act of bravado, slowed to an asthmatic crawl. Confronted by traffic (which I stayed in line with), he first wobbled into oncoming traffic, and then onto the footpath – causing families to take avoiding action.

2nd Mile

Thankyou to the driver of the silver Ford that thought it was a good idea to try and pass me while approaching both a narrowing in the road, and an oncoming car. Well done indeed. I particularly liked the bit when you realised (while alongside me) that (a) I wasn’t going to slow down, and (b) you were on the wrong side of the road.

3rd Mile

Congratulations to the driver of the people carrier that became stuck behind me while waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. The few seconds you spent waiting – with me – for a gap must have been the reason you then did perhaps 50 miles an hour in as erratic a manner as possible for the next 100 yards.

This stuff happens almost every night. For some reason this evening I thought it worthy of recording in words – especially given a conversation earlier in the afternoon about the struggle to find anything worth writing about.

A higher power than myself has dictated that I must move locations in the office once more – and I find myself sat back at the desk I had early last year. I’m well on my way towards having worked in every office of the entire building over the last nine (!?) years.

I have moved early. The rest of the staff are moving around tomorrow (well… those that are in the office will). Beyond one of the new girls, I’m not really sure who else is sharing the office with me – my other half is expressing sympathy for whoever it is.

For the past two days I have commuted towards the southern reaches of London to teach a group of business people how to use a technology product I happen to know more than most about. It has been my first experience of teaching a group, and somewhat unnerving. I am not a teacher.

Somehow in my head I imagined standing in front of perhaps four or five people. Having signed into the building and followed a rabbit warren of corridors, I was greeted by a rather large room – full of people. I put on my ad-hoc teacher’s hat, consigned any natural shyness to my backpack, waved in a friendly manner to everybody and started acting.

I don’t know how to teach. Everybody who has seen the way I am with children always remarks how good a teacher I would have made – but this was a room full of grown ups. Luckily I have sat in a good few training courses over the years, so did what I’ve seen other people do.

We went around the room doing introductions, I wrote names down in high speed scribble (I even draw a diagram of where they were sitting – I saw another teacher do that on a course I was in once, and thought “that’s a damn good idea – I’ll do that one day”). Of course I only referred to one person by name during the two days, and I got it wrong.

Everybody knew my name.

Whenever I’m showing professional people anything vaguely technological, I’m always scared stiff of being found out – scared that some classroom know-it-all will know more than me about the thing I’m demonstrating, or discussing. I’ve never actually had it happen, so I’m guessing it’s another hang-up to put on the pile that make me who I am.

Of course, computers being computers, I always fear that things will not work too. When showing something to a group of people who are paying a lot of money for you to show them that something, strange things happen. The button you’ve clicked on five thousand times before doesn’t do what it did the previous five thousand times.

During the first day I stressed over absolutely everything. To the class I probably appeared calm, methodical, and knowledgeable. Unbeknown to them, my heart was in my mouth most of the time. It’s surprising how quickly you relax though – today (day two) was an altogether more relaxed affair. Part of the reason for that was down to me proving everything I wanted to do would work late the night before. Yes, I am that mad.

So, while I might appear to be a good teacher and might appear composed and clever, I don’t think I could do it as a career. I can almost guarantee that at some stage I would lose it (prompted by my own perceived failure to figure something out in front of the students). I would be found hours later in the street, talking to pigeons about strong naming in the dot net framework or something.