Mites live in coffee machines and dishwashers explode...

Apologies up front for the delay in getting this one written, it was a busy week and I'd intended on writing this up on the Sunday, but as you'll see stuff came up that made this not possible! As such we're gonna fly through it day by day!

Monday

My week started with reports that the 3d department had something wrong with their kitchen... At Rushes we have the main kitchen that the runners work from and where most of the staff come for lunch. But the 3d department is big enough to qualify for their own kitchen area. They have their own fridge, water cooler, microwave etc... and their own coffee machine...

The first people in to 3d on Monday noticed something odd about their coffee machine... where it was normally black it was now black with little white specks, which on closer inspection were moving.... The coffee machine had contracted mites... as had all the surfaces, and a cupboard too...

So my first job fresh from the weekend was to gut the 3d kitchen, throw away ALL the food (LOADS of it) and completely bleach and disinfect everything. I did about 2 hours worth starting with the worst hit areas, stopped for the lunch time rush and by the time I'd got back to carry on the mites were back and covering the coffee machine again. At this point we figured out they must be coming from that machine so we threw that out (storage for "big" rubbish is on the roof garden... more on this later) and went back to cleaning. The kitchen was finished being blitzed Monday, was fumigated Wednesday (for good measure) and was back in action by Thursday!

The other highlight of Monday was getting the rota for the next few months (up until around august). Needless to say, I didn't much like it at the time... I figured I'd be getting a lot of weekends off, so I'd be able to be popping home at least every other week (funds allowing)... BUT it turns out that weekends are covered by a MAIN and a STANDBY, so if you're on standby, even if you dont end up working, you cant leave london on the off chance that you're needed in work. This bummed me out a bit and by the time I'd gotten home I was in a bit of a down mood and wasn't loving life. I went through my calender, marked all my shifts and other commitments in and realised that I was only gonna be able to make it back to folkestone for 2 weekends out of the next 3 months... not what I was expecting.

Tuesday

The following day brought more headaches and bad vibes... I got 2 consecutive voicemail's from my old landlords from Folkestone, the first (rather arseily) telling me that "even though you've moved out early you still have to pay for your full months notice you know..." - which of course I knew... this is why I'd handed in A MONTHS NOTICE. DUH...

The second voicemail was from the inspector who'd gone to view the flat and assess how much of my security deposit I was allowed back...  he basically listed off a whole bunch of stuff before telling me that if I wanted any of my deposit back I would need to get it all sorted BY TOMORROW otherwise he would be taking over half of my security deposit.... needless to say I called both back fairly swiftly, told Mrs Pay Your Notice that I was still waiting for a bill to my forwarding address (Oh, I just sent that to your old flat... even though I knew you'd moved) and told Mr Inspector that I'll be taking until the end of my notice period to sort it all thankyouverymuch... Bastards.

Couple of things did happen at work of note - I was sent to the bank by our finance department to change £300 from twenties to fivers... I got to the bank and was told that they had no fivers left... I simply said "but you're a bank" and the guy huffed, got off his chair, walked off and magically came back with a wad of 5s... stunning...

I also went on a run to a place called Randall and Aubin, basically a posh nosh place in soho, and check out who served me!

Not many places brave enough to employ The Hulk!

Tuesday ended with me buying a webcam on my way home so I could finally skype properly (instead of from my phone) - I got home, set it up and upon taking my first skype call with it realised that the camera I'd bought was utter rubbish and was breaking up image quality every 30 seconds of use - the only fix being turning the camera off and on again... I gave up and went to bed moody... I was not having a good week at this point!

Wednesday

I decided as I woke up that the only way to be in a good mood was to force it for a while and see if it caught on. So I trundled off to work with the words Joie Do Vive bouncing round my head (wise words to live by!). I got to work and was told that my first job was to assist the Building Manager in clearing the roof garden of all the rubbish (told you we'd get back to it).

Now, as we're based right in the middle of soho, where all the roads are relatively small, disposing of big, awkward stuff like computers, monitors, wheelie chairs and the like can be a bit of a pain. Especially when the building is a rat maze of stairs and corners. So all our big rubbish (stuff the council wont take) is dumped under a tarpaulin on the roof and once every few months we have a guy who comes to collect it from the back. So between me and the building manager (lets call him Robin... cos thats his name) we took all this crap, lowered it down a floor, from roof to a lower roof, then again from this lower roof to yet another lower roof, then stacked it all neatly ready for the guy to arrive. Then we lowered it down again to ground level and threw it all in the back of his van. All this, outside, in the rain, with lots of heavy lifting and carrying. Fun! Joie de fuckin vive!

I was not to be put off my quest for a good mood tho, I had plans that evening to meet Chester, a friend from Folkestone who also now works in London. So after work I headed to Angel to meet him, we had a pint and a catch up and just the simple fact of seeing an old familiar face helped lift my week. We went to Pizza Express for dinner - I get 2 for 1 through Orange on a Wednesday which is cool, and as the meal came to a close Chester made the silly mistake of gambling who pays for dinner. The deciding factor was to be who took part in the first TLC WWE wresting match... I knew who it was, chester thought he knew who it was... The idea was proposed by him, I told him he'd loose the bet and I gave him plenty of chance to back out... but he ended up going through with it and after a quick mobile based interweb search he paid for dinner!

We went for a final drink at The New Rose, the pub Andy Wintie used to work at when he lived in London for a spell - and I managed to locate his MegaDrive above the bar:

Thursday

Thursday was BUSY at work, under normal conditions it wasn't actually too bad, but a couple of things made it seem worse, for starters we had a big meeting downstairs that we had to set the table for - no biggy, but the meeting room is 3 floors below the kitchen so you end up literally running up and down stairs many many times in order to set the room up as such...

Then, the dishwasher blew up... we have a restaurant style dishwasher - nothing too wonderful, but it makes life a lot easier when it works. When it doesn't the whole kitchen ends up looking like a bomb site for the lunchtime rush... not fun! What's funny is when I say "blew up" I actually mean it went with a visible flash and audible bang!

I ended Thursday very tired and was cheered up no end by a video call from Kate and Rob - made me smile a lot, I knew I missed my friends from Folkestone, but seeing them and their stupid faces made me realize just how much!

Friday

The end of the week came and my joie de viving was working, firstly I was handed free breakfast on one of my first runs! BOOM!




Secondly our dishwasher got fixed! This made life a lot simpler... for about half hour... when it went bang again. Oh well...

Rest of the working day was pretty standard.

I managed to organise myself some training on Smoke after hours, which was cool. One of the VFX artists showed me the process of adding name titles to video... doesnt sound that interesting written out... and probaby isnt... but still - Was good!

My evening plans for Friday involved going to see one of the guys from work play in his band The Hounds -  I went and got a maccy D's after my training and then met some of my colleagues at a pub just off Old Compton Street. At this point my week REALLY improved - I got a call from my girlfriend:

"Hiya baby, what you doing?" I say "Aint you supposed to be in your Tech session at Uni?"

"Yeah, that got cancelled" she says "Where are you?"

"I'm in a pub just off Old Compton"

"Oh, Ok, Come outside, I'll be along in a moment!"

Stunned silence punctuated with multiple instances of "What?" was pretty much the best I could manage! My wonderful woman had come up to London to surprise me and surprise me she had!

After meeting and hugging it out in the middle of the road we headed back to the pub and had a drinky before heading over to the gig venue and watching a load of very fine live music. The first two acts were very folky and really fun - the second band especially had a lot of Flogging Molly style energy but without the irish!

The Hounds came out third and really knocked me out - They're a straight up rock act with overtones of blues - a bit Them Crooked Vultures if I had to compare to anything, with a good solid performance, nice and loud, some really techy drumming, great guitar tones and some corkin song writing - I highly suggest you check em out if you like that kinda thing.

The 4th and final act were an electro pop act who wanted to be Erasure I think... 2 synth players and with a very shiny looking old dude in a suit jacket singing... By this point we had drunk our fill and really needed to be heading home!

Saturday

Another gig! But this time I gets to play! I'd been looking forward to Saturday all week, as I was getting to see Kizzy, Wilson and Andy, play some music and generally relax for an evening with some familiar faces. The fact that I had my woman with me now too made life even sweeter!

We headed to the venue which was in Stockwell at around 4ish... when I say this place was shonky you need to understand just what I mean by shonky... There were more boarded up flats opposite this place than there were habitable ones... it was not a nice place! PERFECT for an Associates gig though! We did a sound check which sounded great, the function room had a decent PA and some good house cabs, we were handed a crate of lager as a rider... it was looking to be an awesome night.

8pm rolls round, we've drunk our rider, 9pm rolls round and the first band, Insult, go on... but there is still no paying customers in the function room. Ho hum....

Then the landlord breezes in to the room and starts throwing around all the empty cans of lager and snatching all the full ones from everyone and storms straight back out the room. Turns out the promoter hadn't thought to clear it with him that he was bringing a rider for each band in to the room... and since no-one had turned up to the gig he hadn't earned any money yet over the bar... This was all made even more hilarious because the promoter (a guy from folkestone around 18-20) had earlier decided that the best thing to do would be to write COCK in permanent marker across his forehead and draw a curly tash on his face for good measure. Watching him try and calm down a very angry looking landlord was really quite entertaining!

We didn't have a fancy banner like Insult, so we made our own out of A4 paper and chewing gum...

Anyways - We played our set to an empty room in London instead of the standard half empty room in Folkestone - which is better? you decide? Either way I got to play with the guys again which was awesome, it'd been about 3 weeks since we'd done a practice properly, and about 2 weeks since I'd last picked up my bass - we'd all had a few drinks so it all went smoothly!

The evening finished up with me and Ellie heading away with Kizzy and Kelly, we went to their parents little place near Oxford Street and had a few more drinks - sleeping was put off in favour of chatting and catching up and lights out didn't happen until 2am... which made the getting up at 7 all the more horrid!

Sunday

7am Hurt... We got up and went back to my flat and slept til 11... 11am hurt less so we got up, showered and met my dad at Charing Cross - Sunday was London Marathon day and one of dads old photography clients was running so we went to a cafe, ate, and then headed to St James park to find a spot near the finish to watch from.

After an hour or so of watching people run Ellie and I were both knackered again so we headed back home and went to bed.

Week 2 done. Sorry for the rambling length! I think splitting the week in 2 may work better as its shorter... but its finding the time! I like telling stories too much I think!