Today is furniture day. A 20ft container is due to arrive outside our house and eject its contents.
Our trusty inflatable bed that has served us so well for the past month was let down today. I played “The Last Post” in my head as it deflated, tears welling in my eyes. Goodbye old friend.
There was a short planning session this morning to work out where the larger pieces of furniture are going. The rest of the boxes are going to be stacked in some seemingly random fashion in the garage (that's gar-IJ and not gar-ARJ).
Yesterday was an all-hands meeting at work where most of the company gets together and the CEO presents the state of the union. One of the after-show events is to introduce new members of staff or those people who have changed positions. As I have changed country, I was required to give a short speech about who I was and recount a story that people wouldn't know about me. The story wasn't particularly inspired but my delivery was faintly reminiscent of Jerry Lewis in its professionalism. My favourite opening line in any comedy speech I do is one that I release into the public domain under the GPL (mainly because I'm sure I stole it from someone else).
It reads:
“Being asked to make this speech is like making love to the Queen Mother. It's a wonderful honour but nobody really wants to do it”
You should pause to let the laughter die down and then your success is assured.
Looking back on this, the Queen Mother died in March 2002 so it makes the above line a little creepy. I was thinking of changing it to reference Camilla but, then again, maybe not.
I won a Scalix bag on the basis of a clap-o-meter-style audience survey, so, my tip for this week is to make sure that you are all show and no substance and you'll go far.
Nothing of note for this week except for a confusing situation in Mervyn's. Mervyn's is a clothes store from which I purchased several casual shirts last week. The label on them said L for Large but, I believe, there must have been a faulty batch because, when I got them home, they certainly weren't as roomy as I had expected. I asked Sam if she could return them and swap them for a larger size. I made sure that I had kept the receipt so there was proof of purchase.
Sam did this yesterday.
The clerk behind the counter refused to do a straight swap for the shirts because Sam had no proof that she was me. Instead, she was more than happy to refund the money. Something to do with the fact I got the shirts at a sale price.
Er…hello !!