Random Venting

There was a refreshing chill in the air this morning as I left for work. It couldn’t quite be described as ‘crisp’ but it was a kind of autumn-morning chill where you could see your breath as you exhaled, but it wasn’t so cold you recoiled from it.

It’s been a long week this week. I start work at 08:30 – and I am not a morning person. As a result I inevitably fall out of bed too late to bike it in and have to get on an overcrowded, overheated train without any breakfast. Because I’m travelling early it costs more, so I end up with a miserable commute and pay £25 per week for the privilege. All for not having the will-power to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that one of the things that makes humanity so successful is our ability to reason and learn and adapt. I guess somewhere along the line I got demoted from human to sheep.

Mind you I’m not the only sheep around. Something else I read noted that when humans were hunter-gatherers, man only had to work about eight hours a week to keep his family provisioned. I regularly put in over eight hours a day – and that’s not counting the travelling to and from. When I get home, if I’m not too worn-out, there’s a narrow window of social time before I head to bed. And when I’ve done this for another twenty-five years, I get to retire and (assuming I’ve worked hard enough, saved enough and been reasonably lucky about who I trusted with my pension funds) I’ll be able to stop working for someone else and start living for myself. Unless of course I get casually murdered, die in a road-traffic accident or contract one of the many forms of cancer and/or degenerative neurological diseases that seem to be occurring with increasing frequency in our super-sanitised modern world.

I think I need to think outside of the box.

Is this what they call the mid-life crisis? Should I be having it at 35??

In other news, the day was okay. I got stuff done at work – part of the day spent reading up on Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) which we are probably going to be implementing sometime soon, and part of the day spent building a new server from scratch, which still has a certain frisson when it all works. In between times I had lunch with Oz and his friend Nick who was very pleasant. It certainly made a nice change from sandwiches at my desk!