Home sweet home

I arrived back in Sweden last Saturday. The jetlag wasn't too bad, I was back on track in two days. Went back to work on Wednesday, where several people told me I looked really calm. One colleague wanted to rub up against me twice a day to absorb some of it. Sort of like rubbing the belly of a Buddha for luck.

My hope is that this zen-like trance will last at least a week. On Wednesday it felt like I was a spectator, watching from outside as others ran around like headless chickens in the office. A smile on my face all day long.

Something which didn't put a smile on my face was my grandfather passing away on October 1st. Olov Larsson, the rock of my family, was finally eroded by the river of life to a point where he fell apart. Everything points to him going quietly, just going to sleep, which is a relief. He was 98 years old, had spent the last few months in a care facility and refused to eat for the past few weeks, so no one is surprised he passed. Still, I'll probably cry like a baby at the funeral. 'tis what I do. I'm thinking about buying a pipe to leave instead of flowers. I think he would have liked that.

Look out, Paddy Power, someone's just parked a tank on your lawn

I haven't written anything here in a while. I've been busy with other things, like planning for my trip, working and hugging Mah Girl. Hopefully I'll find more time and inspiration during my vacation, so I can chronicle it here.

Today I realized just how badly I need a vacation. Over the past two months or so I've ranted three times at various things at work, things that I could have handled in a much calmer fashion. They've ranged from small-scale to monumental in terms of the changes it will bring should my gripes be listened to. Time will tell. I believe this is the very definition of my job description: “constructive criticism”. Though I'm not sure its been all that constructive lately...

There's been a lot of construction (con-structive, con-struction. I know, not even a pun, really) going on outside our apartment though. They're building some sort of youth center across the road. As if the daycare below our window wasn't bad enough. Soon we'll have pimple-faced punks tearing it up on their mopeds outside. Hell, we have Homer in the apartment across the hall (as in Sport Fanatic) so why not Pimple Faced Kid a.k.a. Squeaky Voiced Teen across the road? Gods, I'm old.

Also, a couple of months ago they installed what looks like a traffic gate from Blade Runner. It's a big metal rod smack dab in the middle of the road into the yard outside our apartment, topped with red lights. The whole thing slides down into the ground when we use our electronic key on a post on the side of the road. You can stand on it and rise into the air as it slides back up. I'm just waiting for someone to tinker with it and have it go catapult.

Recently they realized it wasn't enough, and started sinking giant rocks into the ground around the road and across the expanses of grass on either side. I guess they're aiming at stopping cars from driving around the traffic gate, but it looks more like they're trying to emulate the Maginot Line. I mean, Flemingsberg is not the best neighborhood, but I seriously doubt Ze Germans are arriving in force anytime soon.

And the funny thing is, it looks like they put the massive rocks on the sides of the gate too close to it. I doubt a truck or a fire engine will get through there. I'm going to measure it at some point, just because that's the kind of annoying guy I am.

Two working days left, and then I need to worry less about work and construction and more about 23 hours in the air over two flights and bringing 240 prescribed pills past two sets of customs officers. Wish me luck.

A salesman minus enthusiasm is just a clerk

So like I said yesterday, I spent Friday in one of our two newly opened stores. Unlike our competitors here in Sweden we've never had our own stores, and have reiterated our standpoint on having stores many times over the years. Not for us. A waste of money. Etc. But finally we did a 180 and got ourselves two stores, one in our own neighborhood, in the shopping mall within a stone's throw of our office, and the other in a big shopping mall in the southern part of Stockholm.

See, we're the cheap telecom operator. Oops, sorry, not cheap. Inexpensive. Big difference. Whatever. We're always aiming to have the lowest prices of the four operators in Sweden, and throughout the years we haven't really been associated with supplying quality services. So it's a stretch for us to launch concept stores, but that's what we've done.

And the orders from Up On High was that everyone in mobile product management should work two days in a store, to gain understanding of the business and our customers. We have a similar policy regarding customer service, in that all employees of the company should visit customer service once each year to listen to and preferably take calls from our subscribers.

I was really nervous about going to the store. I don't consider myself a sales person in any way, shape or form, and felt that perhaps potential customers might be a bit apprehensive about the whole “big bearded guy in huge pants” thing. So I dressed in jeans, all be it big ones and in a very dark blue, and combed the beard. Hell, I comb it at least twice every day, but it sounded like something you should do before going to work in a retail store.

Like the employees at the store I got to wear a tee sporting the company logo across the back and the symbol for one of our subscriptions across the chest. I almost felt like I belonged.

I acted customer service, I acted expert on the sales tool (which I am in fact somewhat of an expert on), I got to talk about subscriptions and phones and even had to answer some questions about SAR values (that's Specific Absorption Rate, go Google it). I even facilitated four or five sells that I handed over to the store employees. Commission for them, personal satisfaction for me. Oh well.

In all, a weird but rewarding experience. I'm going back on Sunday for four or five hours. The weekends are more chaotic, so I may not be so positive after that. We'll see.

At the store, they have 100% recycled toilet paper. The worst job in the world must be recycling toilet paper.

Walked into the bathroom at work today and found this:


What the hell? I sincerely hope it's one of the janitors doing this and not just some random employee who sees folding the toilet paper in the hotel way as his personal quest. Because that would just be weird.

Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day

My day began nicely enough. Slept in for 30 minutes and then managed to catch the train just as it was pulling into the station. Vacation time is evident not only in the fact that I can pick and choose where to sit on the train, but also that conference rooms at the office are readily available.

Yesterday's top quote, from Handsome Karl:
Let's hold the meeting in USA, so we don't have to walk so far.

We had booked Luxembourg, which is at the far end of a corridor. USA is at the beginning of the same corridor. And by "far end" I mean thirty meters away. Hardly far. Needless to say we held the meeting in USA.

And yes. Our conference rooms are named after countries. Its better than at one of our competitors, where conference rooms are named after rock bands. I've had a meeting in Iron Maiden. Now there's a perfectly ordinary English sentence.

Back to my day. I got some serious reading time on the train. JPod, by Douglas Coupland, again. Geek lit. As the train passed out of the tunnel from Södra Station I looked out over the gray, choppy waters of Riddarfjärden, under an overcast sky, while This Will Destroy You played in my headphones. I felt at peace.

Then I got to sit onboard the non-moving train as it stood between stations just outside Karlberg. Not so much at peace anymore. Not so confident comments from the driver over the PA system. "There's a problem with the train. We're doing what we can to fix it". Sent angry texts to Mah Girl.

Knowing SL, the train was probably displaying the Blue Screen of Death, or a "This train has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down". Reboot required. All is then well in the Mofosoft world.

My inital thought was that if we had to evacuate the train because they couldn't get it moving again, I would just turn around and go home. There is no way a day that starts out like that can turn out to be anything other than a disaster.

After twenty minutes we were on the move again. The train shook and rattled in oh so reassuring ways. But we got there. Hooray!

The day so far is parsecs ahead of yesterday, in terms of clusterfuckedness (it's a word!), despite the train incident. Why? Not really because the problem is smaller. Today, I don't really care. I have reached some zen-like oneness with the world. Or maybe I just can't be bothered. Who knows?

Only after disaster can we be resurrected

It's always nice to have someone around to make you laugh. And I mean really laugh.

My day began with the realization that I had forgotten my work laptop at home, tucked away in its rather stylish bag. I realized this as I walked across the parking lot outside the office, and seconds later I came to the conclusion that going back was not an option.

Work continued as a total clusterfuck. FUBAR. It crescendoed in the afternoon, with a meeting where I wanted nothing more than to storm out of there and go home. Angry emails will be written, and I'll be told to forget what has been and look ahead instead. I won't. I don't forget things like that. They take root and grow into a twisted tree covered in nasty thorns that keep lacerating my mind. OK, a bit over-dramatic and gothy there, but whatever. Close to the truth, anyway.

We're a very fast and adaptable company, yes we are, but we totally suck at learning from past mistakes. Suck-didely-uck. I am determined to at least let people know that they made the same decision twice and because of it we be fucked. Which will be seen as unacceptable. Which means I'll have to make some sense of a lot of things that don't make sense, launch it regardless of whether it makes sense or not, and proverbially tape it all up with proverbial duct tape to keep it from proverbially going all Titanic on me.

If Mah Girl hadn't been around (digitally, that is) earlier in the day to make me laugh, I may just have gone postal.

And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.
- Narrator, Fight Club

Won't happen though. I'm Swedish. I'd much rather internalize all those feelings and bitch about them here. Plus, I don't wear Oxford cloth. Ever.

So I was at work, chipping away at my inbox and trying to figure out how to send my old laptop back to the company that handles our IT stuff, when my girl, otherwise occupied with Word Twist, suddenly realized that the TV was playing something that might be worthwhile looking at. “There's a cave with something egg-like in there, and a guy walking in to investigate”. Now, as you all should know, walking into a cave where there are egg-like things is never a good idea. Have we learned nothing else, this we should know.

Dan realized the litter box was overflowing. Again.

Then came what might be the funniest thing I've ever read on MSN.

“...and now he died”. I laughed so hard I cried. Co-workers looked at me with a “he's cracking, he's cracking” kind of panic in their eyes. I laughed so hard I lost my breath. Yes, yes, I was, and still am, really tired, but still. It was funny, huh?

Here's the story, if you care:
The story begins with a team of astronaut miners who complete a daring space expedition and embark on their journey home. But by the time the craft returns to Earth, their commander has gone insane. Three years later, a link between the mystery of the commander's madness and a series of bizarre disappearances in San Francisco brings archeologist Lloyd Walker and entomologist Marianne Winters into conflict with police and government officials who have been taken over by aliens masquerading as humans.

Ooooh. [ begin irony ] Intriguing. [ end irony ]

Later, I fled work, went and got myself vaccinated for my trip this fall, and then came home to “pizza-smörgåsar”, which I can't even begin to translate, and chocolatey snacks. Happy happy joy joy. Now I've reached some semblance of normalcy, and might just go and shoot some Nazis before I go sleep. A good ending to a crap day.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter

Today and tomorrow, customer service roadtrip. This is where a bunch of us (this time The Taliban, Don't Spell My Name Wrong, You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Hungry and I) pile into cars with our company logo proudly displayed on the side and drive 1100 kilometers to get to two of our customer service sites and hold reference group meetings.

A reference group meeting is where we sit down, we being product management, with representatives from our customer service, and have them tell us things we should fix. This can be anything, from text on our web page to the way one of our fundamental services works. It might sound extremely boring, but its actually very useful.

The meeting today was good, and then I had to run back and forth to solve a fairly major product problem which has been a thorn in my side for quite some time now. So close now. A simple process update tomorrow morning, and I should be on track. I'm not celebrating yet, though. I have run into far too many walls so far, so until I see a free and clear road ahead of me, I'm still paranoid.

That was one of our founder's mottoes. Always be paranoid.

And it's true. You can never be too paranoid. You never know enough. There are always questions to be asked, decisions and negative opinions to question. That's a big part of my job description. To be a difficult, annoying pain in the ass. Constructive questioning, my boss calls it. Potato potahto.

This afternoon we drove to the next site, and tonight we met up with three other colleagues. Let's call them ADSL, VoIP and PSTN. They had decided long ago to go out tonight, eat food and have a few drinks.

We found a restaurant and got a table. ADSL started eyeing the waitresses. And the women at other tables. Anything with a pulse, really.

I left early. No alcohol for me today, though lots of mirth and laughter around the table. I work with good people. I walked over to the bar and paid for my food. The girl behind the counter was the same waitress ADSL had been eyeing. "Take good care of my friend", I told her before I left.

Twenty minutes later I texted You Wouldn't Like Me to let him know that I had rescued his laptop from our parked car. "Let ADSL know I told the waitress to take good care of him", I added. The response came quickly: "She already told him herself". Mission accomplished.

Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him

The Headache has been tormenting me for a couple of days. Its hard to describe how unfocused I become when the attacks punch through the haze of Neurontin. Before the pills, before they diagnosed me, the attacks were so bad I cried, and I spent two months cooking, reading and talking walks. Woke up several times each night from the pain. Sitting in front of a computer was impossible, and I could only get through a movie with a couple of pauses.

Since I started poppin' pills this time around, which was in January 2007, its broken through the drugs a few times. Two weeks in late 2007, when I had to stay home, and an odd day here and there. And now.

This time around its nowhere near as bad as in November of 07. I had to stay home from work Thursday and Friday, because I couldn't focus and didn't get enough sleep, but I intend to work tomorrow, unless it gets a lot worse. There's only three working days this coming week, so I should be able to get through it regardless.

Staying home and feeling the headaches has allowed my mind to wander. When it hits, it obliterates every single thing going on in my head, and my mind just zooms off into the distance. I lose focus. I think of odd things. Some tie into other things I've had going on, stuff I've been writing or just thoughts and feelings, some are completely new. I write some of them down, I forget some of them when the next attack comes crashing in.

The Headache sucks. If I could change one single thing about myself here and now, it would be that. Remove the headache. Screw losing 20 kilos and screw thicker chin hair and screw winning the lottery. The Headache must go.

I have a telephone appointment with my neurologist next week. My guess is she'll say the same thing as last time, “you should be happy the pills work”, and I want to talk about redoing some tests and whatever. I've done the CT and the MRI and all that, but I want to do them again. Check it all again. I already have a second opinion, which is from the neurologist I'm seeing now, but whatever. I need to be sure.

Because when the mind wanders, it sometimes wanders off in darker directions than it should.

Empty. The opposite of full

I spent a few hours at our Other Office today. It's where our Billing and IT department sits, so lots and lots of really smart people, many of whom do things I couldn't even begin to wrap my head around.

It's a fairly big place, three floors of office space and one with conference rooms. And it's so quiet. Sitting here, I have to stop tapping away at my laptop to even hear other voices anywhere. I fully expect tumbleweeds made out of disused LAN cables to roll by at any moment. It's like an IT ghost town.

And really, it's not about the fact that there's about two empty workspaces for every one that is occupied. It's about the silence that seems to rule unchallenged here. That people just sit down and work. I was quite shocked when two people walked by, talking loudly. Surely these had to have been from outside, from another company, or another office at least?

And now I heard laughing. Distant. Muted. Through an open window, no doubt.

I'm not being an asshole here. I'm just curious as to why a company can have two offices so close to each other that feel completely different, on a cultural level. While being a bit of a smart-ass about it.

Grown ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets

My day, in short.

Woke up. Had myself a turbo morning. Went to work. Had meetings from eight until four. Lunch during a meeting. A chicken sallad. Wrote a Change Request for our statistics system. Finished a Commercial Description for a new project. Took the train home. Finished The Terror by Dan Simmons. Excellent, excellent book. Noticed the girl had cleaned the entire apartment. Squeaky. Fucking. Clean. Smile. Ate hamburger. Watched The Others. Scary-ass movie. Cuddled in the couch. Watched Eddie Izzard's Circle. Laughed. Soon sleep. A good day.

If I thought for one second that you were betraying me, I'd be forced to suspend you head first in the Bog of Eternal Stench

Today they're using the cleaning product that smells like vomit at work. Mmm, good.

Why oh why would you even consider manufacturing a cleaning product that smells like vomit? How hard can it be to add something that makes it smell better? Hell, I'd settle for urine.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect

I walked outside at half past five this morning. The sky was already a lighter shade of blue. Pink in the east. Cold. Winter's last hurrah. In the parking lot where cars burn now and then, people were scraping the frost off their car windows.

Spring was in the air yesterday. "This is the first day that doesn't smell like winter", a friend said. It was true. And we all felt it. Spring in the air became spring in our souls.

This afternoon, in a car going to our pitstop for the night in Gothenburg, spring felt very far away. A landscape drenched in fog and rain, dotted with farms and ten foot milk cartons spread out around us. Endless traffic. Two people crammed into the backseat with me, and I'm not a skinny guy.

Now I'm sprawled on a hotel bed, the TV on, laptop on my lap (hence the name), and a book within easy reach. The backseat boys are trying to lure me down to the hotel bar with promises of beer, but the way things look now, I'll stay right here and go to bed early. Spring is very far from both soul and body right now.

I'm gonna be sore tomorrow

Today a full-length day with the team I work in. Talk of strategy, product development, the future. Fairly interesting and thought provoking. Afterwards, we played curling. Curling! Boule on ice. Or maybe chess on ice. Whatever. It was fun, and more exhausting than I thought. Now, chili and beer. Sweet. Oh, the pic is good beer, bad beer.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time

I've never been much for planning ahead. This is where everyone I know go “Liar!” but we're talking about two different things. When it comes to my day to day life, meeting up with friends, etc, I do plan ahead. A lot. In fact, I'm a real control freak. If I leave the office for lunch and don't have at least an idea of where I'll be eating, I become a nuisance. A pain in the ass. A never ending tirade of questions about where, when, how, why.

When I say I don't plan ahead, I'm instead referring to life. To the bigger issues. Work, for example. I never planned on being where I am today, as product manager at Sweden's second largest telecom company. It's all circumstances that have brought me here, circumstances and knowing the right people at the right time.

I don't really have a goal when it comes to my working life. And long-term, I usually don't have goals when it comes to other aspects of my life either. I'm very much a go with the flow kind of guy, in that respect.

And so it is with writing as well. On some level I have aspirations of being published, but I think I never really considered it as a viable option, until a guy in my writing class got a book deal a year and a half ago (I think it was). However, work and life in general has, as many of you know, been getting in the way of my writing, and I haven't taken any significant steps forward in a long time.

This is about to change. I now have a very specific goal with my writing. On February 20th 2010, I need to have two freakin' perfect short stories, of 2500 – 6000 words each, ready and polished and tweaked. I am applying to a six week long writing sci fi/horror/fantasy writing workshop in the US, and need them for the application.

To put this in perspective, the longest story I've completed and feel content with, is 683 words... I do have longer things written, but not finished and certainly not good enough to send away.

So. I have a goal. And my work cut out for me.

A home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections

Back to work today after a week away from the office, a combination of being sick and having a day with our department to discuss strategies and the future.

This morning I got up at six, like I do most days. Sat for a while on the couch, like I do most days. Wrote a note for Mah Girl, like I do most days. It started out as any other morning. Took a shower, packed breakfast, plodded down to the train station, read the paper and started on the latest issue of Wired. Did you know you can get 155 bushels of soy beans from one acre of land?

Walking across the parking lot outside the office just before eight, a sense of unease wrapped itself around me like a wet, cold blanket. I texted Drunk Carl (if anyone reading this works at the same company as me, you know why. The rest of you will have to live in ignorance) and asked if there maybe was a chance I was supposed to be somewhere else. He mocked me.

So I got half an hour of staring at my over-flowing inbox (also a combination of being sick and having a day with our department to discuss strategies and the future), before I took a taxi to our second office. There I enjoyed seven hours of solution presentations for one of my personal Holy Grail projects (that begun back in November), before aiming for home again.

Waited for Mah Girl at the train station, as she was only three trains behind me. Read more Wired. Levees in the Netherlands will be built to specs making the risk of breach 1:100000 in any given year. The levees in New Orleans are being rebuilt at 1:100. Spheres have a lower surface-to-volume ration than cubes, so ice spheres melt more slowly, cooling a drink longer with less dilution.

Walked home, hand in hand, through the snowfall. Made fast food, and then nestled in the couch, Xbox controls and laptops at arm's reach. Arks were raided. Temples were doomed. Crusades were...last? Discovered Frou Frou and Imogen Heap. A good night.

This is the best meeting that we have ever had

I go to a lot of meetings. A L-O-T. My problem with that is if I have meetings from 8 am to 5 pm, I won't get squat done and my to do list will just keep growing.

"8 to 5?" you say. "What madness."

What can I say? I'm a popular guy.

I sat in on a two hour project meeting today. A very good meeting, though the Friday mood permeated the whole thing, and we went off on quite a few tangential discussions. None of which will be sampled below.

The best quotes/expressions from the meeting:

1. "Optical orgasm."
As in "This presentation is so good, it's like an optical orgasm". Note that he was hung-over. A brain marinated in alcohol works on different levels. PowerPoint never ever induces an orgasm, in any shape or form.

2. "Shorter gigabytes."
I can't even remember where that quote fit in. But of course, one gigabyte can be shorter than another. Right.

3. "Add that requirement to a separate list, cause we're cutting it later anyway."
See, part of a project's first phase is listing all the requirements that we have on that particular project. The quote above shows a very realistic view on requirement gathering.

Tonight, Mah Girl is off to a birthday party. I will spend the night watching football (as in "not soccer"), eating sushi and shooting terrorists. And sleep. Remains to be seen if I will be able to go to sleep early. Doubtful (he wrote and yawned).

No one knew they were robots

This is how I felt at work today.

"What? Square and made of plastic?", you ask. No. Like running away. It was that or run around screaming. Or do the Swedish thing, which is sit around and fume. Which I did for a while. Until I went home. Escaped. Yay for me.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will

Back in the real world after three days of writing exercises, workshopping and hanging around intensely creative people. In the real world, I'm battling a cold that sent me home early today, and trying to wrap my head around a lot of stuff going on at work. The next 12 months are going to be extremely interesting, work-wise. In a very positive, and positively exhausting, way.

Physically, I sure wasn't energized by the weekend, but my mind is in overdrive. All that creativity rubs off on me.

Here's some stuff I wrote this weekend.
- Three, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the afternoon on top of the water tower, watching people through my telescopic sight.
(the above was the result of a writing exercise. And on some level inspired by a Strong Like Bear song)
- Dreams are the fragments of other worlds, trying to push through the veil of reality, to be born.
- For some reason, I always fantasized about dismantling that refrigerator.

I bring a lot of fragments and disjointed sentences back from Västerberg. Ideas, embryos, just words. The best stolen idea this time around was of a memory morgue (Livia's term), as in an actual morgue of memories, where they are dissected and autopsied. For what reason, I don't know. I might find out later. The other one was of a man that makes himself different people depending on who he meets (sort of Katti's idea). Both of them sound promising, at least to me.

Oh. I also learned that a crutch can look like it's been constructed by Heckler & Koch. Who knew?

There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature

I spent three hours in a meeting this morning with a bunch of people from our billing and IT department.

The meeting in and of itself wasn't bad, but not spectacular, either. For me it was the beginning, other than the collection of basic requirements, of a project that I consider The Holy Grail right now. In a very non-Monty Pythonesque way. If we pull it off, it's going to solve a lot of problems and open up a lot of new opportunities.

What was fascinating was watching the people there, a selection of requirement analysts, solution architects and project managers, go about their business. “Their business” being the theoretical deconstruction of every single step in the processes we're looking at. It was...frightening.

Now, I'm a fairly theoretical guy, in the sense that I like disassembling a problem in it's component parts. The best meetings are when I get to draw on a whiteboard, trying to figure out how to solve something, especially if I get to do it with input from other people, discussing, toying with ideas. But this...this was on a whole different level.

That level was theoretical beyond belief. My job requires me to keep a very firm grip on reality, since I work a lot with the operative side of our products. Today I felt that reality slipping from my fingers, down into a morass of process flow charts, definitions of terms, and discussions about where one logical part of the solution we're looking at ends and another one begins. We're very far from practical applications and integration at this stage.

I don't ever want to be a requirement analyst. But I'm happy someone does.

I wonder if someone dreamed about that as a child? Your friends wanted to be fire fighters and astronauts, but all you wanted to be was a requirement analyst. Probably not.

I hardly think a few birds are going to bring about the end of the world

I woke with a persistent headache this morning, like someone had fixed a metal ring to the inner circumference of my skull and kept turning screws making it expand ever so slowly.

Thick fog shrouded the world outside, and I couldn't even see the school below our apartment building from our kitchen window.

Stevie Wayne: Well, my gauges must be wrong. I've got a wind blowing due east. Now what kind of a fog blows against the wind?
Dan O'Bannon: You got me.
Stevie Wayne: I'm not so sure I want you.

Walking outside felt like a dream. Sounds were muted, colors bleached of intensity. Whoever was inside my skull kept turning those screws, slowly, gleefully.

At the train station, hundreds if not thousands of jackdaws perched everywhere. On pylons, on power lines, along the outlines of the station house. Their eyes seemed to follow me. Some of them moved from pylon to pylon in sync with my steps. Music by Bernard Herrmann should have been playing in the background. I looked for masses of seagulls, but saw none. Exhaled.

No birds awaited me as I got off the train. Exhaled again.

Over the course of the day, I've managed to if not destroy, then at least distract the bastards playing with the screws. Ibuprofen, a big club sandwich and solitary confinement in a conference room so I can actually get some stuff done has helped.

Believe me when I say I will be on the lookout for flocks of birds on the way home...