Elton Welsby, Lat Am and the battle between some Americans

This week’s ridiculous search term to find my blog is……  “hotel room littered with liquor bottles”.

I must have missed that particular entry, which is not too surprising if the room was littered with liquor bottles.

Moving quickly on to matters concerning the garage, this week’s update is thus.  We have permission from the holder of our freehold to go ahead with the conversion, despite there being a term in our lease saying our garage can only be a garage.  It is quite amazing how little such legal documents actually matter when compared to the large cheque they can have in its place.  Of course, for them to take the trouble to look at our letter, consult the lease and write back we have had to cough up the Brazilian (or is that UK now?) national debt.  It seems their favour can easily be bought.

If they had not given consent, we would have been faced with a choice of not doing the work or buying the freehold outright.  In the end the costs were pretty similar, but permission ever so slightly cheaper.  It was tempting to buy the leasehold though, just to be free from their money grabbing mitts.  However my natural tightness prevented my moral outrage from out doing my propensity to save money.

The pain of actually getting an answer was massive.  It took around a dozen phone calls over two weeks, and a week of delay whilst they wrote to us, yes as in a letter, not an email, as they think it is 1976, to tell me they needed more information.  Now I know what the process entails it enrages me to know that we could have sorted it all out with two emails and a phone call in about three hours.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So the builder has the go ahead, and the critical event now is the moving of our gas meter from the garage to an outside wall.  Another small fortune has been squandered on that task as I moaned about last week, so I won’t again.

At work this week, I have been working with other departments, “bedding in” my new role and team alongside a change to the other department’s structure.  Not easy in a world of differing opinions and corporate egos, but I think we got there.  Once we’d done all of that, we then had to communicate it out to the rest of the company.

Being a global company it means a few “web meetings” with our international colleagues in Australia and the US. Whenever I hold meetings with my US colleagues, I have to remind myself that not everyone with a US accent is a Cast Member at Disney.  Alas our US offices are in New York and Arlington, and not Lake Buena Vista, but once I’ve got my feet under the table a little more I shall be suggesting a relocation, and a new US manager!!  Next week we do India and Lat Am.

Come on….seriously….you are going to let me get away with “Lat Am”?  It is used of course as a shortened version of Latin America .  Lat Am is the term used throughout our company when talking about our office in Buenos Aires.  The saving of the in and erica from the end of those words is just not worth it when balanced against the sacrifice of sounding like a character off of some corny American office drama.

Whenever I use it in the office (which so far has been twice), I either smirk or blush, at the sheer crassness of the whole thing.  I belive the folks in Argentina refer to us at Head Office as Great Man, sacrificing the er and chester for effect.

I hate corporate nonsense and buzzwords like this, and this week, I encountered another.  A colleague on one of these presentations was outlining a process, and was asked by a US colleague if we were open to ideas.  “Yes” he says,” in fact we’d welcome it, and we have a meeting planned next week, and in that we will reach out to all parties”.

Reach out????  Really???  This guy is from Wigan by the way.

Maybe I just don’t take myself seriously enough to buy into this nonsense.  I still feel like at some point soon I’m going to find a job that I really should be doing, rather than getting away with things in my working life, until someone finds me out.

 

 

I have, as you may have picked up on via Twitter, also being fighting a life threatening bout of mild man flu all week.  So this illness and a busy week of prep and meetings only served as a distraction from my constant monitoring of the sale of Liverpool FC to NESV.

I’m not sure if I have yet declared my colours football wise here, but I am and always have been a Liverpool fan.  I cannot really tell you why, I just have been so for as long as I can remember.

I guess being a child of the 70’s, if there was ever football on telly, then it was Liverpool.  Elton Welsby has a lot to answer for.

This week then has been fairly stressful, with more twists and turns than a twisty turny thing.  Thankfully at work I have full access to the internet and Tweetdeck (which I highly recommend by the way) which allowed me to keep up to date (when not buried under mountains of work of course).  I only hope the success off the pitch this week starts to be replicated on the green stuff pretty soon.

I like Americans as you probably know, but the exception to the rule are the two idiots that have been Liverpool’s owners for the past three years.  Hopefully, the new Americans will be much more like all the other Americans I have met, with the additional benefit of buying half a dozen world class players and a new stadium.

 

 

The arrival of this weekend then was very welcome, but it seems I welcomed it naively thinking I would be able to get some ass on couch time.  Not as yet.

We went to a gig on Friday night, at a local pub.  I haven’t been in this pub for so long that the last time I wasn’t drinking legally.  Since then, perhaps not surprisingly, the owners have changed, and they have done a great job of turning it into a proper music venue, with a decent stage, great sound system and lighting.

We were there to watch my brother’s band, Mustard, rise phoenix like from the ashes of a two year hiatus, to gig again.  We had a good night, and if anyone is looking for an excellent pop/rock covers band, let me know, and (for a sizeable commission) I shall put you in touch!

Saturday saw me in constant perpetual motion between chores and Mondeo.  I did get a slight lie in until around 10am, but then the next time I was still was in the cinema watching Social Network last night.

So after a visit to the gym, taking Emily for her new glasses, doing the BIG shop at Asda and picking up some of the girl’s friends for an enormous sleepover, it was a good job that the film was good or else I would have been asleep before the trailers ended.  I was wary of going to see this film, as usually any tale of some young and talented upstart making huge amounts of money with an idea I wish I’d had would just make me grumpy, and you know that isn’t like me.

The film of course did make me grumpy, as I want to be a billionaire too!!  However, it was interesting and enjoyable to watch, and I think reminded me that history doesn’t all happen two hundred years ago, it happens all the time, and we just don’t notice.

On our return home there were frankly too many teenagers to count strewn across the house, and I did have a slight sense of humour failure when we had to “politely tell them to go to bed” at some silly early hour as their noise was getting ridiculous.  I am just counting the minutes now until I get my house back.

Today is also packed with tasks, and of course a very important football game at lunchtime.  I do however commit here and now that somehow by the end of today I will have completed Day 12 of the trippie.

Promises, promises…..

Till the next time…….