UK Online Lottery Result Headquarters:
10th S4 Route 559
Earthpink Towers Inc.
Manchester D40/S,
United Kingdom.
TICKET NUMBER: 2752246896
SERIAL NUMBER: 652-662
BATCH NUMBER : AT-040SB06-03 AWARD FINAL NOTIFICATION

We are pleased to inform you of the release of the long awaited results of the UK LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL PROMOTION PROGRAM held on the 17th November,2006 at Uk Lotto Headquarters Manchester, UK.Your email address was selected randomly from official worldwide company’s/internet data web through online email addresses search engine with the aid of Google prominent search.Been entered as dependent clients email address with; Reference Serial Number:652-662 and Batch number AT-040SB06-03. Your email address attached to the ticket number: 2752246896 that drew the lucky winning number 2,which consequently won the online sweepstake in the 2nd category,in four parts.You have therefore been approved for a payment of US$500,000(Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars)in cash credited to file reference number:IPL/4249859609/WP1.This is from a total cash prize of US$ 5 Million dollars,shared among the first Ten (10) lucky winners in this 2nd category.Congratulations! once more as all participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from 50,000 (Fifty thousand) names of email users around the world, as part of our international promotion program.Due to mixed up of some names and addresses, we ask that you keep this award confidential,till your claims has been processed and your funds remitted to you.Your contact fiduciary agent is below:

Name:Mr.Peter Gozney.
E-mail:petergozney_fiduciary@yahoo.co.uk

UK LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL CLAIMING SECURITY AGENCY. YOUR SECURITY FILE NUMBER IS W-91237-H67/B4 (keep personal). You are required to forward the following details to help facilitate the processing of your claims and certificate which will facilitate the release of your winnings.
1. Full Names:
2. Date of Birth:
3. Marital Status:
4. Sex:
5. Residential Address:
6. Occupation:
7. Phone Number
8. Nationality:
9.Email Address:
10.Category Number:

You are advised to forward these informations to your fiduciary agent as soon as possible to enable her file out a claim for your prize winning package. Once again, Congratulations.

Yours Sincerely,
Mrs.Pauline Wiltshire.
Director/LRO
UK Online International Lottery Co-ord

---

Just how amatuerish can you get? Do people really fall for these?

For a smart guy, my old boss Z is a complete and utter idiot.

Remember this? When I called the Union in on him?

He’s only trying to do it again this year.

He’s trying to be more sly about it - he had a meeting with his direct reports, and told them allr equests to purchase extra holiday must be referred to him, and they had to have a very good reason for it to be approved.

This is rubbish. We don’t have to give a reason, it’s nobody elses business. I had spoken with one of the managers ho work for him, and told him that last year I was veyr upset when my manager hadn’t fought it, and that he should be fighting it on behalf of his staff. Especially as he was planning to buy holiday himself, and was very upset about it.

Z, who has been promoted since last year, and who has also been very smart in promoting his direct reports - in name only anyway. Officially, at the level they all are now they should be making big decisions, have their own PA, have several managers working for them. Instead, he has given them a very small pay rise, called them the next level up, and it means he doesn’t now have to recruit someone, and also all of them are stuck there, because there is nobody else who will emply them at their current level.

And of course, they now do as they are told.

Anyway, I digress. My friend works directly for Z, doesn’t report to one of the managers. She wants to get married next year. She currently only gets 22 days. Z refused to authorise her buying any more. First citing that 22 days was more than enough. Then saying, at 15 days sick this last year it was far roo much. Also telling her she won’t be allowed to take 14 days off in one go for her wedding anyway.

On several occasions he has made her cry.

So, despite being generally very meek, she has contacted the Union.

And this time it got nasty.

It has taken two weeks, and gone right to the top honcho of personnel, who, apparently, has come down on Z like a ton of bricks. He was told on Monday to speak to my friend and tell her it was okay to buy the holiday. Tuesday, she had heard nothing, so rang the Union herself, then also the personnel woman.

Yesterday Z called her in to his office. And had to tell her she can have the holiday. But is still trying to make her feel bad about her sick (which both the Union and the personnel are furious about, apparently there is nothing wrong with her sick record at all). He just doesn’t like to admit he was wrong, and is trying to save face.

He has to be careful - there has recently been a push on ‘No Bullying at Work’, and promises of immediate disciplinary action for anyone found to be bullying anyone else.

In my book, being so damned arrogant, to the extent it is making your staff cry is definitely bullying.

What an idiot!

Went to aerobics and yoga for the first time in weeks tonight. Obviously didn’t manage as much as I could before I stopped going, but I am pleased I wasn’t right back at where I started from.

And according to the yoga teacher I have very flexxible hips - all down to, “those children you have borne.” I told I hadn’t had any kids, and she seemed very surprised.

I didn’t tell her I’ve got mean pelvic floor muscles either!

Tomorrow I am on a course. I actually went on this course almost two years ago, but it was for a software package I then never used. I now need to use it quite a bit, so need to be retrained. Especially as I am now responsible for it - and the ‘trainer’ is one of the guys who works for me! So he gets to spend the day telling me what to do for a change!

Spend an hour and a half in a meeting today about the same old same old company bollocks, and how, as leaders, we get to move the business forward. However, with the big boss there, and me wanting to get made permanent as soon as possible I was on my best behaviour.

I did, however, make the point, when asked about the picture showing how we, as a company are planning to move forward, that it might be a good idea to actually wait for the bridge to be completed before we started to cross it. I don’t think it went down well with the HR person, but all the other managers jumped in with agreement, and said it would make a change if we did that instead of all running full pelt while it was still rickety, with barely any foundations.

Work

I sent the ‘techie’ guys the email I was going to send out to everyone about the solution I had to our problems.

The response I got was not the best. Basically, they thought it might free up a little bit of space, but was unlikely to make much of a difference.

In the meantime, one of my colleagues did a bit of digging, and came up with an alternative (prior to this I was just going to suggest people didn’t use it at all). I tested it, and it seemed to work okay, so an email was sent out late Wednesday afternoon to everyone, telling them of the issue, and what they should all do as an alternative.

Fast forward to yesterday morning.

The first thing I did was submit a job I had run the night before on a different date. It had been taking in the region of an hour and a half to run.

Thursday it took 15 minutes.

So I did a check of the system, checking usage. Instead of running at around 80-90% capacity, it was down at 20%.

At lunch time, one of my colleagues from my old department came up to me with a big grin on her face. “The system has been running like a dream today. Whether it is what you did, or maybe people aren’t running so many jobs today, but it’s a good thing.” Someone from my new department asked if my old department was on an awayday, since that is the only other time previously things had been running so smoothly.

Strike one for me!

LELI

Went out for dinner with LELI last night, as he is not going to be around this weekend, and I have hardly seen him for ages. We went back to the Lebanese place we found a few weeks ago.

It was fun - even more so as the waiter obviously remembered us (not that we are that difficult to forget - the fat woman with the bleached platinum hair with a big black stripe in it, and the arm waving Italian, probably not that many people like that).

I was hoping he had changed his mond about leaving, but it seems not. However, the date is moving forward (it’s handing in notice in March, leaving in April now), and the move will be to London. For 1-2 years anyway.

Reaching total womanhood

Before going to pick LELI up last night I went shopping. I was hoping to go into town, but I ended up working later than planned, so just went to the big Boots nor far from work.

I had over £30 in points on my Boots card.

I bought myself some straighteners!

These things are something I have never, ever considered before. The last time I had hair long enough to consider using them was in the days of big hair. I had several types of diffuser back then, including the ‘twist and curl’ type, to give extra volume to your hair. I had a hot brush, and curling tongs.

No way would I have considered something that would make my hair *flat* to my head.

But now I have some.

I feel a total woman now.

Spent most of the mornings in meetings, discussing our systems performance, and what we can do to improve it.

Then I gave my boss some figures which she expected to take a couple of days to pull, and I managed to get for her in an hour.

Then I decided to check the system performance, just because I can! And once again, there was one user in particular looking like she was abusing the system - again! I rang her, and was very nice to her, and asked her if she could send me the code for what she was running, so I could work out why we thought she was running 12 things at once, when she said she was only running one thing.

She sent me some code, which looked fine to me, didn’t seem to be anything wrong, except it was referencing something which meant she had to have run something else prior to this. I asked her to send me what she had run first, and she sent me the ’standard’ initialisation code which her team use.

And bingo.

There it was.

Something so silly - and something which almost everyone I know has embedded in most of their code (including myself).

I need to check it tomorrow, and come up with an alternative, but if I have really solved the problem, I expect to have a statue built in my honour!

Also been a good day, because I saw LELI, if only briefly.

Went to see the optician this morning. Apparently my cornea is still showing some scarring, but it is much better than it has been. I can’t feel a thing with my contact lens in, but he reckons I probably need a new fitting.

Only problem is, he wants to get some advice from the ‘experts’. So he is going to be ringing the lens manufacturers, and will get back to me once he has spoken to them. I am glad - because if he gets it wrong, it will end up making the situation worse, not better.

He is so nice.

Then, when I got to work, the manager whose job I am currently doing came up to me. “Has S (the boss) spoken to you?” “No, why?” “Have you got a few minutes?”

We went to the canteen, where he bought me a hot chocolate, and told me he has handed his notice in.

Well that puts me in a *very* good position. If he leaves (and his last day in the office will be Friday this week), then there is no reason for my job to be a secondment.

I also had a one to one with my boss today, and she told me she was very pleased with how much I have achieved in the short time I have been there (even with running at half capacity last week, and taking lots of sick days recently). She can’t tell me anything about my position yet, as the big boss has been away until today, and she hadn’t had chance to discuss it with him.

But I am hopeful.

Friday I went to see the nurse. Another 1 kg off, even with no exercise for the 3 weeks since I last went. That’s well and truly over a stone now.

I put my lenses in so I could drive to the doctors. And, naughty girl that I am, I kept them in all day. I was just enjoying being able to see so much, I didn’t want to go back to the blindness that has been my life the last 3 weeks.

Yesterday I decided I’d be good, and not put my lenses in. God, it was awful. I was getting more and more down as the day wore on. I considered doing some baking (got a couple of manky bananas, just crying out to be made into a cake), but I can’t see well enough to weigh anything.

I was going out with Lionel in the evening (after he had fixed my heating - something else you need sight for - seeing the dark grey on light grey control panel was just impossible). I knew I would be incredibly grumpy if I didn’t do something, so about half an hour before he turned up, I put my lenses in.

Amazing how quickly I cheered up!

After telling me he had fixed the heating (although it did come on at 7.40 this morning, a time I am not known for being aware of on a Sunday - stupid heating system, I need to get an engineer out I suppose), Lionel and I then squashed ourselves into his ‘car’, and went off for an Indian.

Mine was extra hot.

Which is a good thing, as I am now coming down with an awful cold, hopefully the chillies will have helped ward off some of the nastiness, and from tomorrow I will start to feel well again.

All is better with the world, LELI is back in the country.