My unsorted life

It wasn’t a bad weekend really, even if most of it was a distraction from what I’m supposed to be doing, which is sorting my life out. After a few of the comments I’ve made about my job, Andy said I had to see Office Space, a movie set in a software company during the late-90s IT boom. So I bought a copy of the DVD off TradeMe. It could have been better, and was very much of its time I thought – back when shares in NoAssets.com traded at stratospheric levels – but it still made me laugh, and that makes a comedy a success, doesn’t it? At times things got a little too close to some of my experiences in my own job.

On Saturday night I went with Julie to see an amateur production of Little Shop of Horrors. I loved it. The only musical I’d previously seen was Cats, several years ago in Australia. Cats did absolutely nothing for me, but I really enjoyed this one – it’s funny, it’s dark, and unlike Cats it actually has a plot. I’d never appreciated how much work goes into this sort of production, especially a musical where there are so many extra lines to learn. And I’d never realised how much skill is involved in writing a musical in the first place – getting all those rhymes to work is very clever stuff when you think about it. I reckon I’d actually prefer this type of production in an intimate setting to a professional performance in a big theatre. It’s cheaper for a start, the performers are very passionate about what they do, and if you do get the odd fluffed line occasionally (on Saturday that happened maybe once), is it really that big a deal? Perhaps they could have made the surroundings even more intimate by allowing the Audrey II plant to spread its “tentacles” over the front few rows of the audience.

I had another go at that badugi tournament yesterday. This time I came 215th out of the 6590 who entered. I probably should have been knocked out at the half-hour mark – I was down to a few hundred in chips, went all in, and hit a six badugi on the last draw. I survived another two hours, my luck finally running out when I got involved in a three-way pot with my pat 8432. One of my opponents, the one I wasn’t worried about, made a six to eliminate me. These freerolls are a bit of a time-waster, but considering I’ve made the top 5% three times in five attempts, including one top-64 finish, I’ll carry on with them for the time being.

Yesterday was my mum’s 60th birthday. My parents are currently on holiday in Vietnam. There’s plenty to do and see there (it's a world away from Geraldine) so they should be having an exciting time. I just hope they’re not finding the June heat too oppressive and that they aren’t spending too many dong. Yes, the dong is Vietnam’s currency, and you get rather a lot of dong for your dollar. There are 11,000 dong to one New Zealand dollar, or 30,000 to the pound. On the subject of low-valued currencies, I recently bought this note on TradeMe:











It’s a Zimbabwean 50 trillion dollar note. That’s a five followed by thirteen zeros. All those noughts are a bit of a joke on the face of it, and certainly make for an interesting collector’s item, but really they’re just a measure of how a once-prosperous country has totally gone to the dogs.

All this talk of dong also reminds me of Friday’s meeting at work, when I had to describe to the whole marketing department what a dongle was. Not a dong, but a dongle. As you can imagine, it isn’t easy to even mention the word dongle (which is in fact a mundane piece of computer equipment) without sending people into fits of hysterics.

Work is still driving me barmy. Tomorrow I’ll be going to see my psychologist – I still have to prepare for our session – followed by the men’s group. Maybe after that I’ll be one step closer to sorting my life out.