RAGE!

This is going to be one of those days. I can just tell.

First thing that happened is that I slept in. I mean, not a lot, but enough so that I did not get my early morning faff. Oddly enough, I feel better for it, so I suppose that's not bad; just annoying.

The tube train I was on stopped for at least three minutes at every. Other. Fucking. Station. Grrrr. We stayed at Camden Town for five minutes. Double grrrr. And then, when we finally got to Tottenham Court Road, guess what? Central line completely shut down! Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's on the bus I go, and of course the bus is fucking packed and the traffic is insane. However, despite everything, I managed to get to where I needed to be and still had enough time to stop at the bank without being late for work.

Or so I thought. I got in the queue and it wasn't terribly long, but when the guy at the head of the queue went to the newly freed-up teller, he turned out to be a Problem Customer. He pulls out this A3 envelope and proceeds to nearly drown my favourite bank teller in a sea of small bills -- according to this man, approximately £3000 worth of small bills. And he wants her to count them. All. Right now. I keep telling myself it could have been worse, that this arsehole could have waited until the lunch hour rush before monopolising a teller for what must have eventually come out to a half-hour (poor thing had barely started counting when I finally left ten minutes later) but it doesn't help. This total dickweed could have made the whole process go a lot faster if he'd just, I don't know, at least separated the different bills into piles so that the teller didn't have to do that part of it and could just put piles of bills on her little weighing machine. But instead, he dumped piles of wadded bills in front of her and let her sort it out. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Finally, I got to work. James is conspicuous by his absence, which isn't surprising as it's Editorial Board Meeting Day and being here on EBMD could mean getting roped into helping me make coffee and tea for twelve people, and of course we can't have that... Anyway, I get in thinking that I will actually be able to get some work done today, in between making tea for the Editorial Board, but it seems that even that is not to be. Because, following on from yesterday's nightmare of server malfunction and associated shit, it turns out that our entire e-mail system is down for the day because, despite the fact that I have spent days deleting extraneous matter from my e-mail subfolders to spare the server, and despite the fact that most of the server action shows that I did so, it acts like the information isn't actually gone. Hence it thinks that Entourage is dangerously overloaded, hence it not. Fucking. Working. Hence my spending my morning retyping all the instructions etc that the Grammatically Inconsistent One and the nice associate editor left for me yesterday and are continuing to leave for me this morning and waiting for early afternoon, when I can go and be kitchen wench for the Editorial Board.

Want. To. Kill. Everyone.

And more rage

*snarl*

So the morning passed. Every time I turned around, someone wanted something from me. Bloody Editor of DOOM will not look someone in the face when he talks, so I wind up having to translate "British male muttering into paper" into something resembling English, invariably miss points and look bloody stupid. Nice editor lady, meanwhile, is also throwing various tasks at me without waiting for me to finish the first few and expecting me to know what became of papers that are still filed as of May of last year (for the record, people, I started in September, which means that if it went past this desk in May, I WASN'T HERE TO SEE IT!). Bloody Editor of DOOM, of course, waits until I'm supposed to be getting out for lunch before deluging me. Tired, hungry, impatient, pissed off and trying to make sense of muttering rambling crap while picking up the phone and buzzing people into the building for the Editorial Board meeting.

Then my lunch break. After a hastily scoffed meal, I went down to get my travelcard renewed. They have upped the cost of a monthly Travelcard (zones 1-4) by five quid! Given that the Northern Line was halting and stupid all morning, the Central Line wasn't going at all and generally speaking we've seen no improvements in service despite the fact that we've had three increases in public transport prices since this time last year, I'd call this extortion. I call it extortion because frankly, a lot of us don't have any choice but public transport. I don't have a driver's licence and can't afford a car ... although at this point, I'm thinking a motorbike would be a preferable option to any of this shit.

And then, of course, the afternoon. They finally got the e-mail working so all the work I did preparing for the e-mail going back up was not for nothing. But of course, they finally managed this about 45 minutes ago, right around the time the Editorial Board people went on tea break. Now, after I spent the best part of twenty minutes boiling kettles, washing teaspoons, fishing teabags out of the big kettle so that the tea didn't steep too long and generally being a fucking skivvy, I get no appreciation for the hard damn work. What I get is Bloody Editor of DOOM turning up and muttering at me, asking if I've received X document (NO! The e-mail's been down for the last twenty-four hours; I have received jack all!) and asking me to photocopy a 20-page document for one of the other people at the meeting despite the fact that this is the first chance I've had in two days to get any work done! Plus he then spent the next ten minutes hovering around my desk with said person (who was at least appreciative of the fact that I got right up and got her the photocopy), talking crap while I was trying to work.

And then, of course, the week simply would not be complete without me having to spend ten minutes stamping envelopes.

Hate Editorial Board meetings. Hate public transport. I don't even have the patience to have a proper rant about, for example, Mr Now Uncloseted Lib Dem Bigwig and a culture that feels the desperate need to devote more media time to a politician's sex life than they do to his bloody political platform (which, just for the record, is supposed to be the very thing you voted him in for, so why the hell do you care about where he spends his bedroom fun-time?!? For pity's sake, the man could be shagging syphilitic hyenas for all I care, just so long as he's doing his job the rest of the time). Just *snarl*

January must die. It has been Month Of HELL!