Frohe Weihnachten jeder!

Greetings one, all, and the rest, to another exciting blog from your legend and lord himself.........



.....me!



Well the remainder of last week was a slightly annoying one, as I found out that all the good things that my boss was saying to me in reviews ('sorry for putting you in such a lowly position in the firm', 'you have a bright future here, so grab every opportunity to prove yourself', 'you are the sexiest person alive'...... ok maybe not that one!), has been said to every other person, including the teenyboppers, in the department, which annoyed the crap outa me. I have my 6 month review next wednesday, so it will be fun trying to guess when the little soundbites will come along, and in which order. Its actually really annoying, especially as I'm 26 and have taken a massive gamble in dropping wages big-style to come to a very office junior-type role just to get myself a career, but we shall see what happens in the near future, as you will find out shortly.



The best thing about last week was the arrival of the Frankfurt Christmas Market, which has just set up residency in the city centre. Its probably the most christmassy thing you will ever go to, as they have fresh food, proper sweets in big jars that are probably banned under some EU code of conduct, proper frankfurters, and german beers, to name but a few. Its really great, and well worth the visit to Birmingham for a look, as I will guarantee you that you will come away from there with loads of Christmas spirit, which is never a bad thing!



The weekend saw us going into solihull to try and get rid of my remaining £10 voucher that I had from College when I left. I've spent most of it on clothes for the cruise and was hoping to put it towards some 'deck shoes' (you'd know 'em if you saw 'em), but instead my mom bought them for one of my xmas presents, so we are pretty much ready for the cruise next year now, clothes-wise anyway.



This week has been a bit of a fight with the NHS over my next operation. I've been waiting, as you'll know, since the end of september for my next operation to be sorted out by Russell Hall Hospital. Now (deep breath), my consultant at redditch hospital sent the referral letter to my new consultant in dudley, whose secretary said that she hadn't got it, so I called redditch and asked my consultants secretary to fax over the referral letter to my new consultant, which she did. I phoned to confirm they had recived it the day after and my new consultants secretary said that the consultant had got the letter with him and would be allocating it to an urgent case as soon as possible, which of course never came! Now annoyingly my new consultants secretary has been off sick for most of this week, so when I phoned her on Thursday she said that she had thought originally that the consultant had it with him, but he didn't and she hadn't even seen it round the office so redditch must not have sent it in the first place.........

.........The red mist descended.....


...so in a major strop I called redditch back to have a go at them for not doing their job properly, and spoke to the secretary, who confirmed that they had not only posted it at the time, but faxed it when I called last time, and had the fax confirmation on my file (ooh I have a file, ok not the point but I liked that!). She then went into a right old tizzy on my behalf because, as she rightly pointed out, I had been waiting since september for an appointment, and nothing had come of it, so she was going to phone my new consultants secretary to have a go and get this sorted out!

(Still with the story? Good, there will be questions at the end!)

I called to confirm this had been done late on friday afternoon, to be told by the new consultants secretary that they had it all along (*&$%?) and that an appointment had been made to go to dudley and have my favourite hosepipe-related operation performed yet again on the 19th December. Seriously, it doesn't take 20 rocket scientists going 'Hmmm, I wonder', to work out that the problem is going to be in the exact same area as the 2 before it!

There are 2 highlights of the week, one is a new job thats come up at work, its in our Claims Validation Team, which is basically the team that finds out if your insurance claim is a fraud and then proceeds to countersue and lock you up for a fair old time. The job itself is a really meaty one, as it involves making loads of searches against the person suing, just to make sure that they are relatively upstanding members of the community, or even better, are Nazi-loving, puppy-kicking ignorant chavs who deserve to be locked up for a good few years to relieve the court system of any more ASBO's. The cut-off point is the 19th December also, which is quaintly ironic, and so far only 2 people including me have gone for it, and the other person is a mate of mine who probably won't get it but would like the chance anyway.

Finally the other highlight of the week came today (Friday). My mom and some old work colleagues from college came to the christmas market, and we had a wander round, just forcing ourselves to gorge on frankfurters, sweeties, and Gluwhein, which is damned good!

Merry Almost-Christmas Everyone!