Approximately 15 people left today. The balance, possibly including me, will be notified next Friday. It felt dreadful at work - I left early.
However, I’m still continuing my project as before and, thankfully, everyone on it is too. If I do go, I’ll probably chill for a couple of weeks - maybe with a visit to boyf (or he could even come here).
Phew! That was an effort.
Back to our regular programme: today they announced required (compulsary) redundancy numbers from each part of the company (management, engineering, IT, etc.). Scary. It made me quite miserable. I’ve lost one guy from my project team through voluntry already - he was told today and is leaving tomorrow!
I have a phone conference with the customer tomorrow. He’ll be wanting to know why progress has slipped and I’ll be tempted to say because they’re all too busy updating their CVs.
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* KABOOM! *
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My hosting provider, UK Shells, managed to trash the database that contains my diary, only to realise that their backups weren’t working properly. They could only restore up to 11 January. My own backup went up to the 14 February (serves me right) and Google cache has come up trumps in taking it all the way up to 22 February. However it’ll take a while to restore that bit.
In the meantime, here is some light music and a test card (while I seeth over UK Shells minimally grudging apology).
Birthday today, but I’m hoping if I keep quiet it might go away. Then again I got some cash, a little magnetic toy and an acre of Ecuadorian rainforest. Can’t complain.
It also sufficed as a good excuse when I overslept and forgot to go to a sit-down protest against the war in Guildford High Street.
Things were somewhat spoiled by boyf’s reply to a recent email where I mentioned how miserable I’ve been about these forthcoming redundancies. His words of support? “Stop whining.”. He also forgot it was my birthday. I was not best pleased and made it so very clear.
Referrer logs are wonderful things (which is why I keep going on about them ad nauseam). For example, I can learn that today someone in Henderson County Public Library in the state of Kentucky, USA did a search on Yahoo! for my name. I may never know why.
In other news, the early universe was only 4% ordinary matter. Apparently the rest was dark matter and dark energy (and AOL CDs).
Today I notice Blair seemed to dismiss it oh so very quickly. Hmm. You know why I went? Because I wanted to? No, because I had to. Saddam does have to go but my beef is with US imperialist policy but I won’t rant about that now - I’ll just present Exhibit A.
Epilogue
All in all it was a fab day and the atmosphere was great. I kept thinking that this would mean the media would ignore it as they only report riots. I certainly didn’t see any trouble - not even people getting miffed with having to wait around. The final figures varied wildly, with the police putting it at 750 thousand. Then again, apart from a few odd routes they made us follow, the police were visible but stayed well out of the way. I thought they looked bored and like they wanted to join in.
I leave you with images of banners and placards, which were simple but effective or cool or bizarre or made you think or just hmmm?.
Part 5
By that time, of course, it had practically finished and was already getting dark. The stage was empty and announcements came over the PA to leave (half an hour after I had been there and people were still arriving). Amongst the only thing left were the Communist Party stalls. The temperature dropped and people threw their placards into piles to make bonfires, which annoyed the march stewards - they ran around trying to stamp them out.
However, I had made it to the end and now headed back from Bond Steet tube (one of the ‘officially sanctioned’ tube stations) to Waterloo with Ivan where we parted and I caught a train back and finally got home around 2050, having been on my feet since 1010…
Part 4
About twenty minutes later Ivan arrived and we set off along Pall Mall and onto Regent’s Street to Piccadilly Circus, which felt no more crowded than a normal Saturday. However, this was 1630 - I found it comedy that speeches had begun while I was still on Waterloo Bridge.
We moved slowly along Piccadilly (it was still packed with people) only to be directed by police through Hyde Park underpass! The first and last time on foot, I suppose - cool.
Through Knightsbridge and into Hyde Park around 5pm…
Part 3
Someone mentioned the numbers were at around 1.5 million, which stunned me as it was well above my guesstimates. We turned into Whitehall and were able to pick up the pace a bit, which was good for Nick and myself as we both naturally walk fast.
I didn’t get the chance to hurl abuse at the gates of Downing Street as police had set up a cordon 20ft in front.
When we reached Trafalgar square, Nick took his leave and I hung around waiting to meet up with Ivan, who had arrived slightly later (we had been SMSing each other previously) but had made up the time. Meanwhile I munched my sandwiches and watched people climbing over the lions…
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