Category: Uncategorised

This past weekend I faced a terrible dilemma. My best friend hosted a massive party out in the countryside for her twenty fifth birthday but my parents were away so I had no-one to take care of my cat. Normally when I need to go away for the weekend I drop the cat off with my parents but this time I had to leave her in the house. I returned to find my kitchen in absolute pieces. She had someone turned the tap on in the sink and flooded the room. The cabinets were completely scratched to pieces and she had even managed to crack a few backsplash tiles! 

After trying to do a bit of a DIY to make it look presentable again I decided it was time to invest in a whole new kitchen. I had been wanting to do some renovations anyway because I am thinking about selling soon and a few of the rooms need a bit of an update. I did some research into kitchen renovators in Melbourne and found a pretty good kitchen design and construction company not too far from me. It doesn’t need to be too fancy but I figured now was as good a time as any to get a fresh look in there, my cat obviously thinks it’s necessary. I met with the kitchen design company in Melbourne and made plans for a construction timeline. It’s not a massive kitchen so it looks like it can all be done in about two weeks, and the best thing is the renovators consult on the design and see it through right to the first flush of the new sink. The benchtops are going to black marble. I will definitely be keeping my cat out of the kitchen and she will be attending any weekends away from now on if my parents can take her.

Worst. Conference. Ever.

Nice conference venue, surroundings were nice and the food was okay. Terrible speaker, though.

Maybe I’m a traditionalist, having been in the office game for a few decades, but I miss the old days when you could go to one of Victoria’s conference venues and actually learn something. This one had too much meditating, writing down your goals on a piece of paper and talking. We did SO much talking, to the person next to us, to somehow we hadn’t yet met, to a person who had the same birthday as us (and trust me, just because Jan and I were both born on August 19th does NOT mean we’re fast friends).

What’s wrong with a good trust fall? It’s a flawless way to tell which of your co-workers are good people, and which of them would stab you in the back to get to the last bit of coffee in the percolator. You think I’m joking, but for you, I have two words: Sally Edgerton. My second job working for the electronics firm. This was back in the day when companies sending off their employees to a conference centre was still a bit hip and edgy instead of standard practice. Sally came along, and grumbled the entire way because she sat at the desk, answered phone calls and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of us. You’d think it was because her job didn’t involve much teamwork, but she was just generally a cantankerous old bat.

Anyway, when it came to the trust falls, she jumped back at the last moment because she thought she’d mess up her nails. And one morning, she actually thrust out her foot and tripped me so I wouldn’t make it to the coffee jug, then used to confusion to steal some for herself.

Co-workers can be terrifying, which is why you need hard and straight methods of sussing out the bad eggs instead of…whatever that was.

At least we got those days off. Got myself a swanky Great Ocean Road hotel, had myself a good time. So at least I came back to work refreshed.

-Clive