I’m being asked questions. Questions like “Is this your milk?” followed by an explanation that the guy who bought it had moved her milk to the shelf of the fridge instead of the door, in order to make room for his milk. So her milk was now on its side. I asked “What difference does that make?” to which the response was “It might pour out!”, said with some militancy. I’m not saying that’s not a legitimate grievance to have, just that I wouldn’t normally consider it a big enough grievance to actually open my mouth and emit words about it.

There then follows a discussion of the many apparent crimes of this man. They all seem to centre around him not constantly reminding them explicitly that they never do their own washing up, and instead skulking around the place brooding and dropping hints. Hints like a note saying “Do your washing up” left by the washing up. You know, that kind of secret brooding.

The other woman starts talking about why he wants to put his milk there and not in the other fridge, that apparently this is a tactic by him to keep his milk separate and that he thinks she never buys any milk but that actually she does buy milk.

So that’s the milk then. Three fucking paragraphs about the milk. It’s this kind of over-analysis of totally inconsequential shit that stalls the Middle-East peace process time and again. Not the settlements, just some bullshit about milk. It’s a good job that I just started drinking soya milk thus removing me from this whole milk situation. I guess that makes me the house of Saud or something? Or maybe the UN. I feel about as effective as the UN in dealing with this whole milk business.

So anyway then I’m doing my washing up and looking for a tupperware to put my mince beef and butternut squash dopiaza in (it was delicious trust me). Then one of them starts saying how she’s washed out my usual tupperware box and it’s on the side and that apparently the other one put some vegetables in it the other day, and they had a discussion about how I would apparently be angry about this. Then I said something irrational and insane like “It’s only a tupperware, I could just use another tupperware”. Then there’s some awkward silence which I try to diffuse by jokingly saying “… but then maybe that might be someone else’s special tupperware!” which met with a very cold “yes, that’s why I said it”. God knows what conspiracy theories these two are coming up with about tupperware when I’m not there.

I know these little things build up in a house share, which is why I think the best way to house share is to live with randoms and just have a respectful relationship with them, and make sure you take care of your share of the chores. Deep down people know when they are not doing this. Working out your fair share of the house work is not the hardest piece of mathematics to do, and it’s when people (myself included) know deep down they are not doing this that they start to get wound up with ridiculous territorial arguments about milk and tupperware.

But… none of this helps when you’re surfing the crimson tide of course. Maybe in a few days they’ll be back to acting normally… which consists of ignoring me and acting extremely frostily for one of them, and alternating between being affectionately sociable and in a random huff for the other one. This is why I have an Xbox. Wait… is that what the “red ring of death” is supposed to symbolise? Haw haw haw…

Also… I’m loving the Rebecca Mayes album! No songs about milk so far.

Boss 1: Listen, we can’t possibly show this web site to the client. It’s so big it goes off the screen on smaller monitors and scroll bars appear. We can’t possibly show it to the client with scroll bars.

Boss 2: It needs to be shrunk down to fit the screen.

Me: Well, firstly shrinking it down will be a lot of work, because every element of the interactive scene will have to be shrunk individually, otherwise things will happen like the text going illegible.

Boss 1: Well, it’s gonna have to be done. Talk to Middleman 1 about what size it should be.

… hours pass as I perform the fiddly and tedious task of shrinking everything…

Me: So, Middleman 1, I’ve shrunk everything but it’s way too small and bunched up. I don’t think this is a solution.

Middleman 1: No, it’s fine that size. Shrink them all.

Me: OK, are you sure because once you’re committed it’s a lot of work.

Middleman 1: Yes, go ahead.

…. fortunately at this point I managed to delegate the rest of the work to the new guy… two weeks pass until the new guy has nearly had a nervous breakdown from all the tedious, fiddly work. It is now one day before the website is shown to the client, who is flying in from another country. An emergency meeting is suddenly called.

Boss 1: Right, we can’t show this website to the client, it looks shit. Why is it so fucking small?

Me: We discussed this, we needed to make it so it fitted on smaller screens, so they wouldn’t have scroll bars.

Boss 2: People know how to use scroll bars. This part of the site needs to be as big as possible! What are you working on today? Can you spend the day making everything big again?

… I should add for project management gurus that this wasn’t simply a case of rolling back to an old version as other parts of the content had been updated in the interim period. Because we use Visual Shit Safe for source control, I wasn’t able to practically do any kind of quick rollback or merge, and ended up spending the day manually merging everything back together with an out of date backup…

the time is now 5pm.

Boss 1: That looks much better, but can we get rid of the scroll bars?

(sound of revving chainsaw).

Tony Wilson who managed Happy Mondays, New Order and others once said that musicians are all tossers, and I’m starting to agree with him. What that means I am, I have no idea, but let’s leave that discussion for now.

What I want to say here is that I really fucking hate it when a total penis tries to recommend music to me, because it doesn’t matter whether the music is good or not. Good or bad, from that day on whenever I hear that music I will think of that person. That fucking penis. If they recommend music that I already like that’s even worse. Goodbye to my unfettered appreciation of that album…

I don’t know if you’ve ever met someone who seems to feel that it’s their job to introduce the music of the Beatles to you. Firstly, what kind of idiotic shit is that? Anything else you’d like to introduce me to that you think I might not have heard of? How about food? You fucking arrogant cock. Now every time I listen to any of the 13 classic Beatles albums I will think of you. You and your stupid penis face. You have ruined one of the greatest bands of all time for me. Thanks a million you fucking wretch.

And then I start thinking – if the vast majority of all musicians are like this person, then ALL music starts to remind me of them. The fucking musicians have ruined their own music for me! At that point I end up putting Radio 4 on, but that drives me nuts too because it’s so posh. I mean, I’m a middle class person, it’s not like I claim to represent the miners or some shit, but could they ever crowbar someone onto hat station with a Northern accent? Fucking hell, how hard can it be? Then I start putting music on again because I’m getting worked up about Radio 4, and the cycle continues.

Fame clearly makes people into tossers. I should really listen to more Creative Commons stuff on sites like www.jamendo.com (I don’t know how to add a link, that’s pretty lame I know). Some of it is pretty good and christ, it lets me escape momentarily from the horror of successful entertainers and their warped, soul-crushingly awful personalities.

People slag off the Star Wars prequels, but frankly if you watch the original trilogy there’s plenty of unacceptable cheese in there too. What the original trilogy had was a wonderful dark edge, which they finally got right again in Episode 3, revenge of the midichlorians.

There’s a program on Radio 4 over-analysing diaries, so I decided to update my own while listening to it. Like most programmes about the mundane on Radio 4, they’re completely overanalysing everything about the activity of keeping a diary. Saying the diary is private but the blog is public. They’ve obviously not kept a blog. No-one ever reads them! Unless you’re mister interesting penis.

And the lead on my headphones is going. This is unacceptable as I have to listen to 99% of all my audio on headphones these days, owing to the fact that the wall between my room and the next is so thin that everything that happens in one sounds like it’s happening in the other too. What the fuck am I going to do if I get a woman in there? God, why is everyone on Radio 4 so fucking posh? There is no entertaining way to end this post. Goodbye.

I really need to get laid.

The fucks at work have been trying my patience today. I made a new years resolution to stop being a child with a pointless hate blog and be pleasant and happy in all I do. It’s quickly wearing off. I can’t work out how to pleasantly approach someone who stands there at the end of conversations saying nothing, just watching me work. I feel like saying “Our conversation is now complete. What you do now is up to you but social norms generally state that, because you are a project manager and I am a developer, I should now implement the changes we just agreed on, while you should go back to your desk and continue to discharge your own responsibilities. It’s a bit of a curve ball to adopt your interesting alternative strategy of standing next to me saying and doing nothing for a number of minutes.”

Another new strategy he has adopted is to review my work before I’ve actually finished, meaning there will inevitably be things wrong with it. This is compounded by the fact that he has no idea how to clear his browser cache, meaning he frequently sends me e-mails saying the work is not done because he’s still looking at the old version of the web site. If I have to show one more person how to clear their cache I’m going to clear my fucking bowels in their face. If your job is to manage website development some might say a basic requirement is to know how to refresh the page properly.

Tomorrow I will go in with a fresh face and empty bowels. I will make this resolution work if I have to eat one of my own arms.

Marketing is a soulless industry filled with impossible deadlines, and as a result if you actually try and dilligently do a good job you’ll just end up looking bad, or slumped over the wash basin in tears. The only way to get ahead is to be two-faced, rude, aggressive and intimidating to everyone around you.

Or take cocaine of course.

As I refuse to do either, I need to get out of this industry doubleplusquick.

It was still doing its thing when I got to my stop, so I had to stand on the platform with the laptop open like a muppet waiting for it to finish. If I had turned it off during this fiasco with an update half complete, who knows what kind of system instability would have been heaped on top of the existing instability of Vista in general. By this time the battery indicator was flashing red and there was a very real chance that the machine would lose power while accessing some vital system files, making it impossible to boot up. At this point the only option would be to re-do all the work I did at home last night, or remove the hard disk and install it as a secondary drive in another machine to copy off the uncorrupted files.

To summarise – WHY.

Program on the radio this week about thinking positive. People say it’s important to think positive but also that it’s ok to be sad, and that’s important too. Basically life now must consist of a fraught psychological battle to maintain a delicate emotional equilibrium between ecstasy and depression.

I say fuck it. I’m only happy when I’m listening to a gentle Radio 4 comedy and playing street fighter. Everything else can chew my special set.