Friday 13th

Friday 13th. Hah! Too bloody right!

My plans for today were simple: try to leave work a little early, go home and get a couple of hours sleep, then put on my very best dress (if something I bought in a Tesco sale can be considered ‘very best’!) and go off to a tango party.

Then yesterday happened!

As soon as I got into work yesterday morning Patrick (who is not my boss) pounced on me and said that Jill (who is my boss) had volunteered me to create some posters for him, and that he needed them in draft form by 5pm. Great. I just love being given work by people I don’t even work for.

I was just settling down to start the posters when the Visa Office phoned. Jill’s application for a visa for China, which I had couriered off to them yesterday, had been refused by the Chinese Embassy on the grounds that there was not enough room for the visa in her passport. What did I want them to do? Er – magic up a visa anyway?! There then followed a series of frantic phone calls with visa/passport people and conversations with my boss to see how we could get both a new passport and a Chinese visa in a turnaround of just two working days. This was not helped by the rather dim lady at the Visa Office who said she was going to post Jill’s passport and the application form back to us to arrive by Monday latest. Erm, no… we’ll have a courier bike it to us today I think!! Anyway, it seemed as though everything might just be possible with some very tight organisation, so I set about getting all the logistics sorted out. Panic panic! The horriblest thing, though, was that, because Jill had meetings on Friday, it looked like muggins here was going to have to travel into central London and spend my day queuing to make the passport application and then waiting for four hours while the new passport was prepared. Lovely.

In the middle of a phone call with the Visa Office Jill popped her head around my computer and motioned that she would like me to find a lead for her laptop, as she was just about to go to a meeting and needed it to give a presentation. Right now please. I had Jill in one ear, the Visa woman in the other ear, both talking to me at once… I was supposed to magic up a laptop lead from nowhere at the same time… and it suddenly occurred to me that I was also supposed to go and fetch the teas and coffees for Jill’s meeting. Aaagh! Jill ran off, leaving me to finish talking to the Visa Office. But no sooner had I put the phone down than she rang me… there were strange people in her meeting room, what time had I booked the room for?

“1.30 till 4.30”

“But I’ve told everyone it starts at 1.00! They will all be here in a minute and there’s people in the room!”

“Well you can go in and kick them out, their meeting was supposed to finish at 12.30.”

“OK, I'll do that. By the way, when you go to get my laptop lead I need you to walk via the canteen and pick up three people to bring them to the meeting. One of them has white hair, so you’ll spot him.”

Dear god! Visa on hold for the moment, I dashed off to IT, rudely interrupted a conversation someone was having in order to ask for a laptop lead, picked up a pile of completed printing while I was there, carried lead and printing off to the canteen, managed to snag the correct white-haired man (not easy on a site of 1000 people!), dragged him and his confused colleagues round to the kitchens, grabbed my trolley of coffees and teas, rattled and clinked at some speed to the building the meeting was in like the Flying Tea Lady (strange men still in tow), squashed us all into the creaky old service lift along with the trolley, and got everyone and everything upstairs to the meeting.

Trolley back to the kitchens, printing back to my desk, sit down and carry on with the passport application process. Bugger – the London Passport Office is full. But they can make me an appointment in Peterborough if I like? Peterborough!!! I don’t want to go to bloody Peterborough! I want my nice early home time, and my nice sleep, and my nice tango party in my nice dress! Not getting up early and stinky crowds and trains and a long day and late home! Crappy flipping crap!

The next few hours were spent running to reception to pick up the couriered items, filling out application forms, dealing with a couple of urgent emails that had popped into my inbox inconveniently demanding my attention, running to clear up the meeting room, take coffee pots back to kitchens, laptop lead back to IT, and sending boss off to get passport photos done in town.

I finally got round to Patrick’s posters at 4pm. That’s my normal home time. I wanted to go home. I wanted to punch his nose and run away. I wanted to tell him to go stick his posters up his bum. But I sat there for two and a quarter hours doing one poster. And doing my best to do a damn good job of it too.

And then he actually had the cheek to look a little pained and ask me when I would have the second poster done!

“Erm – not tomorrow, I’m in Peterborough!”

“Can’t someone go to Peterborough instead of you? I need you here to do these posters.”

Aaaaaaaagh!!

Anyway, here we are. Friday 13th. I’m in Peterborough Library waiting until it's time to go back to the Passport Office to pick up Jill’s new passport. I am frantically emailing one of the admins at work to arrange couriers for Monday. I’m tired and I have a sore throat. I am surrounded by ‘teenage’ books and chatting people and a very sniffy girl with loud headphones (I thought libraries were supposed to be quiet places where librarians go “sshh”?) and on a shelf next to me is a book called “Does Snogging Count as Exercise?”

I think I’ll go and see what it says…