I feel the need to share this. Day to day I take cases for customers who have problems with their computer servers. It can be quite monotonous with little reward, but every so often we get cases that can only make you smile. Yesterday I took a case which had a summary of “something exploded and system shut down. but when powered back up worked ok”. I arranged to have an engineer go to site to inspect the system and this morning I saw the following in his site report: “On powering down and removing the lid I found the…

Gareth arrived back in Madrid last night. Gareth is a Welsh chap who we worked with before he left for Australia back in December. He’s back in Europe for a couple of weddings and is paying his work colleagues and friends a visit this weekend. A group of us last night went out for a wonderful steak in Cebon, a restaurant that Philippe & Jon have raved on about for ages that until last night I’d yet to sample the goodness. The place certainly lived up to its reputation producing large succulent steaks that we were able to cook to…

I’m somewhat pleased. A mail has just gone round the office stating the following: “Me gustaría recordaros que la jornada intensiva comenzará el 1 de julio y finalizará el 31 de agosto.” Ok, so you don’t read Spanish, but it is good news. Basically we will be working “intensive hours” for the whole of July and August. Intensive hours means getting into the office by 8 and having no lunch break, but the bonus is we only work a seven hour day and get to leave the office at three! Not sure my boss in the UK is going to…

Espe, as part of her Red Cross Volunteer training, is having two day’s worth of practical training in an Ambulance. The first of these took place on Monday night, and the events of the night make for a pretty good story. She joined the ambulance driver, trainer and another trainee mid afternoon. A brief tour of the station was interrupted by their first alert. A reported labourer had an limb injury. The other trainee somehow heard this as a limb amputation and got out of the ambulance at the scene of the muttering something along the lines of please don’t…

Back at work after two weeks in Poland, and to be honest I can’t stand it. Made that little bit worse as due to one of our rotas, three times this week I’ve been unable to go to lunch with any of my colleagues and friends (including missing Isabel’s last day in the office celebrations). I get back home, and after witnessing a taxi driver t-bone a parked car I have to put up with all the incessant hooting that for some reason half of the imbeciles in the city think will clear the traffic jam in front of them.…