Perhaps not Missing out

I haven't had Gmail chat connectivity for a LONG while. as in more than a month.

 

I can log in to fring on my celery (mobile phone) but with connectivity speeds and the health of my battery it usually doesn't happen much or for long.

 

And what I have noticed is that I honestly, really didn't notice until a week ago that I haven't been on Gmail chat for ages! around the same time as I noticed that I formated my phone memory and haven't reinstalled Mxit.

 

The funny thing is that my Dad was saying just the other day the companies are beginning to phase out email and bring in instant messaging for corporate communication (I assume on a intracompany level). My company strongly frowns upon using instant messaging ... something about it being too distra...oh look a butterly...

 

The funny thing is that I find often when using Gmail Chat I spend more time waiting for someone else to instigate a conversation. (feels like a primary school disco all over again - does no one want to dance with me?) or else lurking around wanting to chat to a specific person. ("Oh great she/he's online! lemme give her/him 5 minutes so she/he doesn't think I am that eager" ...<5 minutes> ... "oh she/he's offline")

 

Now I went through a phase a little while ago where I got tired of persistently eing badgered by some friends on chat and also being tired of waiting for other people to chat to me and them being unresponsive.

 

and so like a wicked person I Blocked Them! (for those with stalkers, you look offline to those you have blocked) Now I want to unblock them... and I can't! well not without Gmail Chat functioning again :/

 

Serves me right for being unfriendly...

 

But perhaps it is a good thing. I do value personal communication above gettign the same lame ass demotivationals and jokes forwarded to me However without the distraction of the chat I seem to focus better at what my work laptop was supplied to me to do.

 

On a slightly different idea

 

I have a new theory that you can actually rate how internet-savvy and wired your buddies are by when you get the demotivational posters from them popping up in your inbox (and You know you'll always get them at least 5 times)

 

In the week the poster/scam/joke/amusing photo is published - pretty savvy - your average well commencted nerd

The following week - friends of the savvy - a subnerd culture called - "I am a friend of a proper nerd and thus am nerdy by association"

In the course of the month - normal people

within The following 6 months - those who use Outlook for all amusing electronic jokes and use the internet well for uumm... a confusing blue icon on the desktop. They are fed jokes by those who have the time to save pictures from blogs like failbook, lamebook, awkwardphotos, lolcats, loldogs,lolbuts, demotivationalposters, you get the idea, and then send them out all over again.

 

of course after 6 months everyone has their brains wiped and all jokes are fresh again and can be circulated all over again.

 

 

Oh the Joy of filling the inbox and Wasting time.

 

(don't get me started yet on panic emails about drugs and missing children and viruses)

work work and then more work

I have turned into a very sad person who's day is divided into three sections
1. sleep
2. work
3. evening commitments

I seem to eat dinner at home about once a week and wash dishes about as often (I am horrified with myself at this). I am almost seeing my parents more often than when I was actually living at home!

Anyway when I get free evenings (rare as they are) I have started watching the entire series of Sex and the City. (oh and is my mum is horrified...)

It sort of transpired when I watched the second movie and decided I really did not know the story that well. It just so happens that my local DVD store has a 8 DVDs for R99 special on at the moment so it is pretty easy to afford them! And what I have concluded is that the strength of the show is not that the represent all women between the 4 main characters but rather that the represent every women with all four characters.

Women have MOODS. and depending on the day the week the month the age and the weather these moods chance and so we women identify with Carrie/Miranda/Samantha/Charlotte.

Some days I am neurotic and arty and I am Carrie
Some days i am career motivated and strong willed and I am Miranda
Some days I am conservative and have girlish dreams and I am Charlotte
Some days I am adventurous and won't let people tell me what to do and I am Samantha.

and Bizarrely some days I find people annoying and clingy and I identify with Mr Big...

Anyway what annoys me most about being so busy every single evening is that I haven't had time to catch up on my story in more than a week!

It's like my one luxury - escapism - altho I usually finish each season disk with a strong craving for fashion and shoes and cocktail parties...

And watching is also usually accompanied by my other favourite secret luxury - Amarula+Hot Chocolate... It's like a nutty sweet warm nightcap :) (Go on, give it a try)

Uuummm.... huh?

.... no further comment....

Travelling

So I went to site yesterday. The great joy of getting to fly was overflowing in my cold head yesterday at the crack of dawn which was about the time I arrived at the airport. Let's break down the time line here since I am in fact Still in Gaborone (yeah yeah one day trip right? NOT)

4:00am alarm goes off
4:30am run out the front door (freakishly scared I have forgotten something - I did)
5:15am find parking at airport (trying hard to remember how to get back to my car)
5:20am booked in and told to be at the boarding gate on the OTHER SIDE of the airport in 5 minutes
5:30am at boarding gate - it is closed
6:20am liftoff! wheee
7:30am landing - I try to fake nonchalance by being asleep as we touchdown - I get a fright and leap in my seatbelted seat - not very blase Frank...
7:45am find a seat to wait to be collected from airport and try not draw attention to myself by cracking up while reading Pratchett.
10:00am Leave for site (we had to wait for someone else to arrive too)
12:45pm arrive on site for 13:00 meeting
12:59pm discover meeting postponed to 14:00 because people must lunch
13:00 - 14:00 phone people, be annoyed, get dust in eyes, get gently verbally abused by contractor
14:00 meeting commencement Yaay! Wait I am supposed to run the meeting?
15:00 realisation that meeting is not progressing as well as that to make our flight home, we must leave in 30 minutes.
15:30 decide to stay the night in Gaborone and wander about the dust bowl for another few hours
15:30 - 19:00 wander about dust bowl, avoid enormous trucks, furtively eat mini Cheddars (aka lunch) get ash on clothes, climb sand mountains, be laughed at in Italian, make a grasp at thorn bush, try and not swear while picking out thorns
20:30 arrival in Gaborone
20:45 get lost finding hotel
21:15 arrival at hotel
21:30 dinner (the meal following 6am aeroplane breakfast)
22:30 start typing minutes
00:33 CRASH zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Today
8:00 put on yesterdays clothes - feels icky
8:15 attempt to use hand cream as face cream - feeling 1% less icky
9:00 abusing free internet at hotel.


And so I am sitting in my room trying to avoid the pile of work waiting for me back at the office - Imma gonna have to go make other people as of tomorrow - but right now I think I should take it a teeny tiny bit easy before I go out and make the most of being in the same city as my client again... (seeing him later, we shall have words, hopefully good ones)

and that is the story of the one-day becoming two-day trip to site. (to quote someone, "No body ever died of a little dirt...")

I don't know the answers to your questions!

I am bordering on a full scale panic attack breakdown meltdown quit my job and move to the mountains kind of day.

Causes:

• People going on leave simultaneously
• People quitting their job before seeing their own work to completion
• People quitting their job when they haven't left enough information to manage without them
• People being lazy
• People using 20 year old designs - as in - before computers went mainstream
• People taking leave on a Friday after a Thursday public holiday
• People making demands of me - who has not enough technical experience to not have a guilty concscience about any answer I give you.

 How the story ends:

 

"And so Frances squeezed her eyes shut, pressed Send and prayed that no one would call the lawyers. The End"

 

I am off to the happy place inside my head. (see photo) 

Fridays Realisation

I am so glad facebook was not around when I was a teenage girl because now I have much less reminders of how seriously I took my slightly sadly life.

I happened to come across the facebook profile of a girl I sort of know. She is 11 years younger than me and she pretty much owns a fully paid up membership to the club of "I am so Emo and Goth Right Now". Along with a whole album of her in eyeliner and fringes frowning at teh camera looking So Hard Core Right Now. And statements about hating people and being hated and hating life and hearts all the way through the text.

 

(Side note: ever notice that 90% of teenage fiction in the bookstore contains some element to do with the supernatural - Co-incidence?)

I feel a little sad and yet feel a little amused at how she portrays herself mostly because she reminds me of being a teenager. Trying to find a balance between being yourself and trying so hard to copy all the cool things about your friends.

It paid off in the end I guess.

I gained a ton of self-confidence from seeing and copying how my friends interacted with people of the male persuasion.

I learned about responsible underage drinking (does stealing teaspoons of cooking brandy count?).

I learned about how listening and going with what your friends say does not always pay off. One evening in the middle of August in a borrowed short skirt results in a week of unhappy sniffles.

I watched friends mope over boys and learned that break-ups can be pathetic and drawn out and resolved to avoid doing that at all costs.

Most of all I saw how annoying it is when people copy you and I resolved to figure out what I loved all for myself. I wish I could say I succeeded.

Funny enough I can attribute a lot of who I am and who my friends are today to one single person. The weird thing is that even tho he is dating the Lindt Fairy and thus firmly part of my social circle, I don't think that either of us would have ever thought that he would be a pivotal person in the creation of Frank2010.

(This revelation is unfolding in my head as I type it)

 I turned from boy bands to enjoying rock music under his influence. Rock music took me to being friends with other people and wild nights at The Doors . (wait this is me, No so wild nights at the Doors)

 The timeline of how The Gang came together stems from our friendship and the subsequent his group of friends and my group of friends becoming friends... and then joined friends friends...

Okay I only have two reasons so far but I look back to who I was at 14 or 15 and I am so relived to not have a posted-on-the-internet reminder of who I was. I guess the reward is that easily influenced teenage girls eventually do grow up and become not easily influenced wiser young women eventually. We'll just roll our eyes at them in the meanwhile... (I would so add a picture of Frank1999 if I had one right now)

Fasting...or not

So I confess I only really made it through Two proper days of fasting. Then Somebody had to send me roses and I kinda went on a bit of a spiral of catching up of pretty much 3 days of non-viewing. No twitter yet. Trying to keep this all under control.

 

My big mistake in the effort to clear my head was that I was bored on Wednesday evening and may have rented a seasons worth of a particularly girly show - 12 episode later, my head is way too full. I did however gain some insight into relationships. (is it bad if I identify more with the male characters than the female characters? "Yeah break up with that pathetic whining woman - Man it out buddy!")

 

Anyway speaking of men, I sit next to two different chaps, let us call them Sally and Sue (everyone gets a girls name on my blog this week - because... well... it's my blog I make the rules) Both Sally and Sue are reasonably nice looking chaps, pretty hair, nice clothes, cool personas.

 

Now Sue is the same age as me and kinda has girls making sure they are around to catch his eye where ever he goes socially. He has a foreign girlfriend-not-girlfriend who moves mountains and time schedules to make time for them to see each other. It seems that the hardest he ever needs to work on a relationship is to arrive. (do not mistake him as a womaniser - he is a good sort of chap)

 

Now Sally is perhaps maybe a year or two older than me. I tend to catch him on the Computicket website a lot buying tickets. He is however not a cultural enthusiast, he buys tickets for girls he likes and fancies or is friends with. Yet, he doesn't seem any less single. Does the gifts approach work?

 

That said, having roses delivered to me at work where I had to collect them from reception and walk all the way back to my desk holding them for all to see - Greatest satisfaction ever. (Men: Note this.)

 

And so I am pretty much as confused as I was before. Some moments I am flying high in the knowledge of what I want and next moment I realise something else and crash down.

 

I think I worry to much. Wait I am a woman, do I even need to say that? Let me rather say, I have a trick brewing up my sleeve and I need the courage to carry it out. Let the final words today be: Banish Self Doubt!