Our Man In Brisbane

I recently had the chance to see that Lyndon, who I'd previously thought of as being a very down-to-earth bloke, in fact is quite arrogant.
He'd come to the bank after being at least a T/L in another call centre, and made no secret of the fact that if all went well he wanted to rise through the ranks. Ambition being a good thing, everyone was happy that he felt that way.
After Glennis' SuperTeam dissolved, he found himself in Falcon's team. He'd started doing some part-time study around this time, so dropped down to part-time work, and also ended up with some rather serious health problems which meant that he wasn't really there most of the time.
Shortly before the restructure was announced, he quit.

Talking to him on Facebook last night, he presented his resignation as being caused by the restructure, which he'd heard rumours about before the announcement. On the surface, quite a reasonable claim.
He then followed it up by saying that he felt that the restructure would have put paid to "the team leader role people were talking about me for", so he headed to greener pastures.

I'm sorry, but what team leader role? At the time he left, he was a recently-minted Level A, and there were no concrete plans for my intake (the one before his) to do Cards training, let alone for his intake to do it. You couldn't become a T/L without having done Cards and been a Level B for a while, and even then there was still the need to get into the T/L Development Pool and get tapped to second as a T/L. Falcon - Lyndon's T/L at the time - was only on his second stint seconding and was hardly secure in his position (witness the fact that he wasn't successful in the restructure), and surely that point would have been made.
The bottom line is that there were no would-be T/Ls in a position to show their mettle for more than a fortnight or so while the existing T/Ls were on holiday (Andrew essentially ran Bec's team for a while longer, but Lending behaves differently), and if Lyndon honestly believed otherwise, he clearly had the wrong impression.
Perhaps, of course, someone might have given him an inflated opinion of his position, rather than an honest one that he misinterpreted. If so, whoever that person was (and I do have my suspicions) really needs to pull their head in.

But on a lighter note, another Great Moment in Telephone Banking:

Me: That's a lot of money to have in an account that doesn't earn any interest
Customer: True, but I'm planning on buying another vehicle. So I guess we'll have to see what kind of a hole I put in it before we see what savings I can make
Me: A hole in the vehicle, or the savings?
Customer [taken by surprise and laughing]: The savings, I hope
Me: I guess if the hole's in the vehicle, we'd be talking loans rather than interest-bearing accounts
Customer: Probably, yeah
Me: Well, I'd be talking them. You'd be sitting there feeling like a dill for not having the interest-bearing account before the vehicle had the hole
Customer [breaking up into a fit of the giggles]: You know, you mightn't have got me to open the account, but you've really made my day
Me: That's what I'm here for
Customer: Aren't you guys just about opening accounts and things?
Me: That's the sideline. If I'm not cheering you up, you won't feel happy about the account I'm talking about
Customer: You're too good for this job

Looks as though the outfit I dealt with are cowboys. At least, what else are you meant to assume when they refuse to answer phone calls because asking why they did certain things is "being rude and insulting", and then other companies you call to see about fixing the mess seem shocked that they're still in business?
Admittedly, I can be more than a touch abrasive when someone does something stupid, but when you work in customer service it's hard not to be. I have standards, and one of those standards is that people fixing my computer won't suddenly cause my precious Kenan Dogulu albums to disappear. Currently, it looks as though that's the only data which has vanished, but a real professional's going to have a look through it tomorrow and see what else was done of a damaging variety.

Perhaps working in customer service spoils you for dealing with customer service reps elsewhere. I mean, not every organisation is as dedicated to surprising customers with brilliance as we are, but when this particular company overcharges for a very poor service, you have to wonder what they are dedicated to doing.
And to think that my earlier call today to iiNet, who I normally dread calling, actually solved the problem of our missing phone connection in about 20 minutes...

The minor annoyance is that when I try to use the arrow keys to scroll, they don't work. The up arrow flat-out refuses to scroll at all, while the down arrow seems to only return me to the top of the page. Obviously my mouse has a scroll wheel, but if I'm reading a long page, I'd really rather use the arrow keys if possible.

The major one is that apparently uploading is nearly impossible on this system. I can attach files to Emails, which is good, but if I try to upload to Mediafire and similar hosting sites, the upload goes at a million miles an hour but then freezes when the site's "verifying" it. The same would seem to be true for uploading photos to Facebook, although I'm yet to try this.

Any ideas here, clever people?

It seems as though Mum paid the bill for this by credit card (she was able to do so quickly, which is what they wanted, and I'll pay her back), so I've told her to be ready to dispute the transaction, since the goods were patently not fit for the purpose. I've contacted the company informing them of this fact and demanding they fix their handiwork, and it looks as though I'll need to get someone like Pete to have a look at what the bill covers and work out how much of that should really have been done in the first place.

(Still getting the hang of this insane new OS, so let's just have a meme)

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My computer's motherboard died on Monday, and the technician apparently couldn't find a copy of Windows XP to install. As a result, I now have Windows7, arguably the most annoying thing in the universe at the moment, to learn the ins and outs of.
If anyone has any experience with this OS and can give me some ideas about how to do any of the following, please let me know:
1. Make the icons a sensible size. Right now, "small icons" look like they're in a large-print book, and this seems to be the smallest they'll go.
2. Make the top bar of a window not be transparent, which frankly looks stupid.
3. Bring up a list of programs near the start menu that I can modify (so that I can have things like LastFM, Winamp and friends sitting around without having to hunt for them).
4. Make Firefox windows actually name the page they're on (so this one would say "Post an Entry"), rather than just having a Firefox logo smiling up at me.

There's probably more things I'll add to this list, but we'll see how we go.

For those of you who haven't yet heard of him, my new favourite singer (for the next couple of days, at least, until I hear someone else new) is Max Raabe. He sounds roughly like this:


There are more "modern" songs he does too - I've heard a cover of "Sex Bomb" and know of a cover of "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" - but the main stock in trade here is spot-on covers of 20s and 30s music as it would've been played in inter-war Berlin. Sheer glory of glories is all I can say.

I had an interesting discussion with Drew over lunch today (Drew's lunch involved pizza that was apparently not "meat-based" or "chicken-based", but rather "green-shit-based", but that's another story) about culpability.
The more long-standing people from the old team obviously know exactly where I stand with Night of the Long Knives, and I know I'm safe to talk quite freely with them. So I argued that Ros had basically forced people, such as Kelly, out of the bank. Drew's response was that she'd definitely forced Glennis and Stacey into redeployment and probably forced Bec into redundancy, but Kelly had never been planning on staying forever and hadn't been directly impacted by the Long Knives.
I find that argument to be a bit disingenuous. As I see it, Ros' actions are the same as someone selling a drug to someone. The buyer then overdoses and dies. Sure, the dealer didn't actually shoot the customer or anything like that, but they provided them with the means to end their lives (either intentionally or not), and that to me is nearly as bad. The dealer should have the user's death on their conscience as such. For me, this is true even if the user was already an addict.
The same applies at the bank. Ros didn't physically fire Kelly or give her the choice of signing redundancy papers or taking a step backwards in her career, but she brought about a situation where Kelly brought forward her plans to move on. Lest it be said that the plans may always have involved leaving around this time, I doubt that quitting a job in the middle of building a house and preparing a wedding is what she was intending to do.
Ros should therefore have Kelly's resignation on her conscience, as well as Bec's forced redundancy and those of any of the redeployed people who end up on the scrapheap as well. We've established that she probably doesn't have a conscience, of course, but that doesn't prevent her from being culpable in all this. If everything blows up in someone's face, that someone should be Ros. My experience of administration types, though, is that it never will blow up in their face, with the underlings being expendable.

Ruminations like these aside, I'm a lot less fragile now after a week back at work than I was afraid I would be. There are still points when I realise just how fundamentally different things will always be, and so many of these would normally come under the heading of "the good times". Seeing Marty act like an idiot, or Anne cracking jokes while we look at a troublesome customer, or even looking up the row at Donna teasing Troy and realising that Dan's not there to cover people's computers in confetti at such a time keeps reminding me of what I've lost. Even today, when Donna told me that she'd be in training next Tuesday and I was therefore allowed to do whatever I felt I needed to do during my coaching session, kind of felt a bit weird, since I still won't have had that return-to-normal feeling there.
At least it's not the constant raw pain of the weeks leading into the break. This is more a dull feeling that happens only sometimes - kind of the way I felt near the end of school or uni as I realised all the fun was nearly over there as well.

In other news, I've decided to convert my Hons thesis into what amounts to a book. Not a professional book, just one done by someone like Snap Printing, but still it'll be better than a bunch of loose A4 pages held together by a bulldog clip in a rather dodgy looking manilla folder.
Some of the guys at work have wanted to see what I spent my time doing before coming to the bank, and I figure I may as well frighten them with the results.

For the first time in a very long time, I think I can say I was happy at work today. Perhaps not for all of the day, but there were several moments when I was genuinely enjoying myself and not forcing a smile at the crazy antics of the team.
The major reason, as far as I can tell, was that Donna was back from rec leave and I was able to see her in her position as Team Leader (or "Customer Service Leader", as nobody calls them) again. It's been one thing to know that I'd come back from rec and have Donna as my Team Leader still, but quite another today to actually have her to talk to some times about tricky customers and the like. Monday and Tuesday were perhaps more negative experiences because she wasn't there, and the more irrational part of my brain was afraid that was the way it would always be.
The major downside of the day was that some things came up at the team meeting which really explained that the Night of the Long Knives was worse than it seemed. Gus was at the meeting, since he was talking about some really good changes (yes, there are such things in this universe at the moment), and it came up that he and Marty were originally slated to be in our team, with Drew being decamped to another team. For various reasons, we retained Drew but at the cost of both Gus and Marty, who in a sense equate to one BR as they rotate on and off the phones for complicated reasons. The fact that we actually had to choose between retaining Drew and retaining Marty further underscores the hypocrisy of the claim that "the team will stay together", as there's no operational reason why our team couldn't have had at least Marty and Drew, regardless of Gus, that I can see.
It also emerged that Anne's been moved to the other side of the centre, and is in Mac's team. Sad as it is to see Anne - one of my biggest influences ever since the first day on the phones - go, it's kind of pleasing to know that Mac actually kept a team, rather than returning to the phones as rumour had it. He's a good bloke, and deserves the success. Again, though, I fail to see why our side of the centre had to get a whole bunch of Team Leaders from next door, when Mac was clearly doing a great job with his guys on our side.
Nonetheless, I made the point of stopping back after my shift ended to tell Donna that it meant a lot to be able to see her again. I think she was confused a bit by the comment, but it made sense eventually.

It's interesting, in a way, to think back to the really important mentors I've had in my life to date. A lot of them seem to turn up at times when I'm really doubting myself, and end up turning me around entirely.
I think here of the late Mr Glover, who really took me under his wing when I was going nowhere at school, as well as people like Pastor Puk who did much the same thing (although admittedly it was his job). From Mr Glover, I acquired the confidence in my abilities at school again, as well as the desire to do well.
Then there was Renee at uni. Again, after a bad experience with Law, my uni experience was going nowhere until she came along and inspired me towards an unusual degree with a lot of enjoyment in it. As she left, causing more uncertainty for me, Bob emerged to really convert the promise Renee had seen into the polish they both knew I had in me.
And of course there's been Donna. She and I are both amazed when we look back at where I was in February - confused, panicky, downright wrong a lot of the time and generally a liability to the team. As with Renee, she was able to see the promise in me, and inspired me to turn it around and become the polished performer I am now, and one who others tend to learn from and who can be left to his own devices.
Perhaps the moral of the story is that, as one perceptive person once argued, I really need a mentor relationship in my life most of the time. I never responded as well to "teachers" as I did to "colleagues" and "mentors", who would treat me as a bit more equal and remind me that I could be like them one day.

What all of this really means is anyone's guess.

Krista's seemingly posting more day-by-day stuff from the trip, as well as photos, on her journal, so anyone curious in that regard can have a look over her way. Otherwise, you'll have to put up with my recollections.

We spent 7 nights in Singapore, arriving on Tuesday evening and leaving Tuesday morning. This was intended to give us the chance to see as much of the city as we wanted to, as well as to satisfy my curiosity about Singapore as a destination, rather than just a handy stopover point with some cool food.
The major thing I'd point out about Singapore is that it's very hot and humid. Most of you will probably think that goes without saying, but there really isn't any way to prepare for the feeling on your first morning as you set off to go sightseeing and realise you may just melt in this place. The guidebooks are very insistent on drinking water and making the best use of airconditioning, and my advice would be to take their advice.

That being said, Singapore's a wonderful place to visit. With a combination of Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures, as well as the British colonial legacy (and strange pockets of Portuguese, Armenians and Arabs among others), it's the kind of melting pot you have to see to believe. The country is, not to put too fine a point on it, a family-run dictatorship, but one that genuinely works in probably the most brilliantly efficient way possible. As a result, it's tempting to see it as a place to experience China, the Malay world and India without the difficulties of language barriers and inefficiency. Yes, the real China is probably a million miles better than the Singaporean version, but as a taster you can't beat Pagoda Street in Chinatown.

We divided our time between various cultural expeditions - the Asian Civilisations Museum, the National Museum and the Chinatown Heritage Centre are all must-sees and there are any number of other places if your interests go off in other directions - and doing more touristy activities such as the Singapore Zoo (an absolute must-see as well, with the added bonus for me of being out in the Heartlands of the city and requiring a bus trip to get there) and ambling around on the fabled Orchard Road and being variously amused and worried at the rampant consumerism around us there, as well as ducking into the shopping malls to take advantage of the airconditioning.
Having already studied Southeast Asia at uni, I knew roughly what to expect in the various museum and so on (I'd been to some last year, in fact), and I got the impression that Krista was very taken with the new cultures she was able to experience there. Even the Chinese community - being mainly from the Hokkien and Teochew ethnic groups, rather than Cantonese or Han, as they tend to be around the world - is a different one to what she's come across in Chinatown here in Brisbane.

For me, the other success of Singapore was the food, and I won't lie and pretend that this wasn't something I wanted to experience again after last year. We ate at several of the more well-known Hawker Centres - Lau Pa Sat, Newton Circus, Tiong Bahru, Gluttons' Bay and Maxwell Road - and devoured many of the specialties of the city, while enjoying the quintessential Singapore experience.
I've lost count of the number of icecream sandwiches we ate, including several durian-flavoured ones as I made up for lost time last year. Indeed, when I discovered a stall at Maxwell Road selling ais kacang with durian topping, thus combining two of my favourite things in dessert form, I could hardly resist. Considering that neither could I really resist the Hainanese Chicken Rice from the famed Tian Tian stall (also at Maxwell Road), nor other delicacies such as ikan bakar (barbecued stingray) and sambal sotong (octopus in a blindingly spicy sauce, possibly fatal in the wrong hands and requiring no end of Tiger beer to cool down with afterwards), it probably should come as no surprise that food was the biggest expenditure in Singapore. I also picked up a taste for drinks with "pearls", otherwise known as little balls of tapioca that are added to things such as bubble tea.

The major downside was definitely the heat. Both of us suffered from it, and Krista significantly more than I did. We saved money by not staying at a place that included breakfast, but in retrospect this was a silly move as it required even the mundane task of finding breakfast to be accomplished in high temperatures and energy-sapping humidity. Were we to return to the Lion City, I'd organise accommodation which included breakfast, as I feel this would have at least started our days on the right foot.
Possibly as a result of this, the stay in Singapore may also have been slightly too long. Admittedly, our last couple of days involved popping up in unusual places to see things we'd been planning on seeing all week, but a lot of that was due to our late starts as we mentally prepared ourselves for the day again.

Still, Singapore remains a fun place to visit, and I imagine we'll be seeing it again sometime, even if just for a night or two en route to or from Europe.

I'd been intending to write a bit about the trip, but since today was my first day back at work since the holiday - and since what turns out to be the Great Restructure - I feel I should write about that.

There've been so many more wholesale changes to the centre than I think anyone realised, or possibly than Ros was prepared to admit. It seems as though today was the day that all the new teams started operating as cohesive units, too, so in a sense I wasn't the only one feeling rather confused by the clash between what we were told versus what we saw.

The good news is that the new additions to my team are generally pretty amazing people. There are two who I know by reputation only, and who I'm kind of neutral about, but a lot of the others are friends already. We've got Steve, Lisa and Dale, for example, who were among the first people I got to know at the bank. Indeed, Donna put me in between Steve and Lisa, which I think may turn out to be a great place. We've also got Dione - or will have when she's back from her honeymoon - and she's terrific fun. Of the newbies, we've gained Rebecca (who seems to be a very impressive performer) and Sharon (who's an absolute gem). My desk is also a lot closer to Donna's, which I think I need after some of the experiences recently.
The bad news, though, cancels some of this out. Despite constant promises that nobody was going to shift sides of the centre, and even that Donna's team would stay intact, both things have happened. Clare and Mahomed look to have gone to Card Originations (the technical term for Card Applications), although I suspect that was their own choice. Marty's now one of the SMEs-in-rotation, but no longer in our team, and Brett and Dan have been moved next door to join a team of roughly 30 part-timers.
Of the losses, I probably feel most strongly about Marty and Dan, and possibly Clare. Marty's become a really close friend recently, and I remember one of the things she kept saying during the tough times was "We're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere", and of course now she has done. The SME role will suit her down to the ground, but it's a very high price to pay for it. Dan and I go back a long way, and it'll definitely be weird when I eventually hear that laconic "You're speakin' t' Daaaan, y' senior c'nsult'nt" and realise that I can't look down the row and see him pulling faces. Clare's a different one, in that I've always been sitting near her since probably just before Christmas last year, and it feels very weird to have her down the other end of the centre. Much as we've often had huge arguments, we've learned a lot from each other, and while I can hardly begrudge her the chance to move into another role if that's where she is, there's definitely an element of splitting up an award-winning duo there.
It sounds really weird to say it, but one thing I'm really sad about is that the team rap could only be done that once before I went on holidays, and Donna wasn't there to see it. On some level, I'm sure nobody would mind a farewell performance, but it doesn't seem right to perform the thing anymore when five of the figures aren't there anymore. I guess I'll have to rewrite it with new BRs in it...To think that Dan even promised to work out a video shoot for it, too.

On some level, I'm sure the way I feel is accentuated by the fact that I've just got back from three weeks away, and I'd feel similar even if no restructure had happened. After all, people left the Delighteners every so often, and Anthea at least would have difficulty recognising even the old incarnation of the team if she came back before today. Now, she'd basically have no idea at all.
Still, I'm certainly not regretting being away when I was. If I'd been there for the last team meetings or even just when the Night of the Long Knives really occurred (yes, I'm not the only one calling it that), I wouldn't have been able to handle it. I think here of someone like Kelly, who's much better adjusted than I am, but who actually resigned because of the poor implementation of the restructure. I would have been hard-pressed not to follow suit if I were there at the time.

Another part of me says that I don't really know what's happened yet, since Donna's on rec leave and will be until Wednesday (my day off for the month). When I get the chance to talk to her and hear about why it's a good idea that Marty's moved teams or whatever, perhaps I'll take back some of the distrust I feel about the entire thing. I definitely know that Thursday will be an important day for me, because I'll even just be able to see Donna, who's been one very important constant in all of this.

Of course, a lot of me agrees with Steve's comment that if they don't start hiring soon, the centre will see a lot of its best people leave. This is true anyway, since a lot of the best people were long-termers who've moved onto other roles in the bank (Amanda being a classic example) or bigger and better things (the amazing Debbie) or finally got sick of the place (Kelly). But an uncharitable view of the restructure would definitely have it demonstrating to a lot of respected people that they really don't count for anything in the New Order unless they can sing the metaphorical Horst-Wessel-Lied with the more vocal ones.
Again, I'm inclined to give it some time. Even if nothing else, I couldn't walk out on the place until mid-year next year after Krista's visa is finalised. If I'm mean, I honestly want to see some of these "exciting changes" blow up in Ros' face when they do (which they will). The reaction from the higher-ups will really demonstrate which way my attitudes towards the bank go. If they remove Ros from her position and never let her do this sort of thing again, then I'll know their rhetoric has meaning. If they try to sweep it all under the carpet, then I'll know the rot extends further upwards.

I have no idea if this is the original or official video or not, but it's of a song I NEVER thought I'd find anywhere on YouTube:

Fettes Brot (and roughly 90% of the German hip-hop scene in the north at the time) - "Nordisch By Nature", the FULL 9 MINUTE VERSION:


There are so many brilliant jokes in this song and zillions more I know I've missed over the decade I've known at least some of it.

So it turns out not to be the original official video - indeed there may not be such a thing. It's still an amazing track.

One of the more impressive fortnights of the recent past has come to an end, and the jetlag's not too bad, even.

The details will follow sometime soonish, although the upshot is that Singapore is terrific fun for a while but eventually gets rather irritating. Macau, on the other hand, is nothing like we'd expected, and part of me would run a mile rather than go anywhere near the place again, although not because it was a bad experience.

This afternoon, the plane leaves for Singapore with us on it. We're in the Lion City for a week, a lot of which time I intend to spend gorging myself on delicacies such as chicken rice, barbeque stingray, chili crab and the amazing ais kacang. We'll also fit in some sightseeing, and hopefully a fair bit of amazing Krista at what Asia has to offer.
We then duck over to Macau for another 5 days or so, during which we fully intend to walk into Mainland China and earn a major feather in our caps, as well as enjoying what seems to be a very distinctive place in its own right.

After the last few weeks, this is most definitely what the doctor ordered. Unlike last year's epic, I've really resisted going overboard on the planning front, so it'll really be a case of waking up in the morning and seeing what we feel like a lot of time.

Back on the 26th, at a crazily early time in the morning to boot, with then another week of holidays to go before I finally return to work.

Today, I can honestly say I did something I never thought I'd do in public. I performed a song I'd written.

Well, before anyone thinks I've been secretly holding out on you with awesome musical skills, I should add that it was a rap - so there's bound to be a few of you who've decided that what I did was actually not performing a song in public.

Still, it went over seriously well. The rap was basically about our team, as well as the "Four Key Drivers of Customer Success", that the bank wants us to focus on in our calls. The key drivers part doesn't sound as strong as the team introduction part, generally because the team part is full of references to funny stuff we've done (Drew gave a talk about how we had to sit for OH&S reasons and delivered it in a ridiculously official tone, Troy has weird eyebrows, Sharon's constantly singing the theme songs of old TV shows and so on), so when everyone recognised themselves in the sketches there were lots of cheers.
I've honestly never enjoyed myself at work quite so much as seeing a bunch of my closest friends - as well as one highly impressed Falcon - getting into it by contributing a stomp-clap beat and joining in the call-and-response parts and choruses.
I wish I could say it was a highly talented performance, but I chose to stick pretty closely to my strongest influences, the sounds of the Old School such as the Sugarhill Gang and the Furious Five, so there weren't any clever internal rhymes and broken beats such as you'd hear on the charts today. Still, it was so much fun having everyone enjoy something creative I'd done.

Rumour has it that Graeme Baker - the boss of my boss's boss, to give you an idea of where he sits - has already been sent a copy and he and Ros may want to see it performed when I'm back from rec.
Following those rumours, I've already started work on verses about the special guests, even though they currently feature rhymes such as "Ros" and "Buzz" (works in an American accent...just) and "Event-ah" with "Centre". Still, after the last few weeks, this was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Perhaps the best summation of the thing was from Falcon, who was taking our team huddle today. Having never seen what we did before, he was wide-eyed and asked "Is that what you do every time?" Jess and Clare immediately responded that it was!

And now for three weeks' holidays!!!!!

It's only early October, but I think I'm listening to the album of the year right now. Baba Brinkman's "Rap Guide to Evolution", released to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's "Origin of the Species", is simply brilliant.

Admittedly, I've been a fan of what Baba does ever since I saw him at Writers' Week a few years ago doing his "Rap Canterbury Tales" and had the chance to have a brief chat with him about the project. Quite frankly, in a hip-hop scene which focuses far too much on attitude, Baba's an absolute breath of fresh air - one of the most literate performers out there (complete with an MA in Literature) with a wicked perspective on the world.
The more I listen to his work, the more impressed I am. He's able to take quite complicated concepts in literature, politics or science and convert them into gloriously catchy hip-hop which doesn't dilute the message at all. Even being able to fit the words "deoxyribonucleic acid" into a rap is an impressive feat, I'm sure you'd agree, much less construct a rap explaining what it's all about.

Sheer genius.

Sonata Arctica and Ensiferum are playing in Brisbane on 3/1 next year. The tickets seem to be comparatively well-priced, too, clocking in at under the $80 mark per head. Given the size of the bands (you've never heard of them if you don't know metal, but these are big names), that works for me.
Ensiferum I can take or leave, but Sonata Arctica would be an amazing third metal gig ever, following on from the incredible Dream Theater and the legendary Iron Maiden. If that riff from the start of "In Black and White", one of the first metal songs I really got into, were to play, I'd absolutely lose it. As for the chance to sing along to that chorus and scream "We've no rights/Just passion and RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE", just wow.

And a little-known (heh, heh) Swedish act called Amon Amarth are playing the same venue in late November for a similar cost. Now that would be truly entertaining.

Someone in one of the travel communities here just made the comment that on a 5hr layover in Istanbul they managed to see almost the entire city.

Presumably, Istanbul for them is either one endless gridlock or a whirl of locations that mean absolutely nothing. In all honesty, you can't possibly land at Atatürk International, clear customs, get into anywhere useful (well, Taksim's useful, but realistically it's about as Istanbul as it is New York), see even the major sights, get back to the airport and check in again in that time. Topkapi Palace itself is a 5hr time investment if you actually want to do more than poke your head in and say "Wow. OK, time to move on".
Before anyone suggests they did one of those bus tours many airports offer, that would mean they got stuck in the traffic to and from the airport. There goes the better part of an hour during the day at least.

Something tells me this is one of those silly people who simply wants to say "I've been there", without actually having done anything significant other than getting the passport stamped. I don't want to say "typical American", since many Americans I know are very clued-in to the world around them, and the poor sap may in fact be from a different country, but it's also Americans who tend to spin the globe and pick a point at random to cross off the list.

This will probably make no sense, except if you know me in real life (which altogether too few of you do), but the last few days have just seen so many awesome people prove why they're true friends.

I've had people turn up early at work - and/or stay late - to talk about things with me. I've had Donna spend most of a day reading through an Email purely to make sure I didn't say anything stupid. I've had Rachel detailed to keep an eye on me even though she (and I, to be frank) had no idea what she was watching for.
And today I've seen conclusive proof that the gang at work are utter legends. If I'd known before today that they'd all applaud, I would've done it a long time ago.

Plus, I got the guarantee Donna told me was impossible to get. It's not entirely a guarantee, but I think it's the best result times roughly one million.

Yep, none of this makes sense, but I can't say anything more without getting rather emotional.

The following is almost verbatim the conversation I had with our landlord before dinner tonight:

Landlord: So, as I said before, the lease is nearly up. Any plans?
Me: Nope.
Landlord: Fancy staying on?
Me: Sure.
Landlord: Well, we won't be upping the rent on you. So does 6 months sound right again, or would you prefer 12?
Me: I'll have to check with Krista.
[Krista seems amenable either way]
Me: 12 sounds good if you're happy with it.
Landlord: Considering I've hardly heard a peep from you since you moved in, I'm happy with whatever suits you best. The documents are in the mail and should be there sometime this week. Just get them back to me when you get the chance.

Background: All credit cards with Rewards Points (Frequent Flyer and so on) that we do have a Visa or Mastercard, as well as an American Express card. The AmEx is there so that people can earn more points if they want to, but most customers don't do much with them as you don't find many places that take them without spending zillions of dollars in fees in your daily life.
This fact confuses a great many customers, and infuriates others, so one of our primary duties in Card Services is to explain that the AmEx doesn't replace the other card at all.

Today I had a customer who'd managed to cut up his Visa after receiving the AmEx and whose wife had got him to call and query why he suddenly had a different card. The man was hard of hearing, and not all that well up on banking anyway, so it took a long time to explain the above.
During the call, I heard what sounded like "BLAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHH" in the background, which he told me was his wife. I initially thought she'd seen a mouse, but as she got closer I could distinguish the words "FUCKING AMEX AND FUCKING WESTPAC WE HAVE A VISA AND WE DON'T NEED A FUCKING AMEX". Every now and then, he had to put the phone down and tell her to shut up so that he could hear me.
Eventually, he fetched up on his balcony in the pouring rain to end the conversation. I told him he could cut the AmEx up if he wanted to, as I'd reissued the Visa. He said rather resignedly, "I think my missus already took the meat cleaver to it anyway", while I distinctly heard the sound of someone beating the crap out of a credit card from inside the house and more screams.

Needless to say, I couldn't stop laughing after the call. One of the funniest things I've ever come across, and this in an industry where people do get strangely attached to one type of card over another.