Work has been really hectic this last couple of weeks, so I’m glad to have the next three weeks off. A few months ago the company changed one of the applications, and were having a few issues in reconciling the data migrated from the old one (a installation and migration project that we hadn't been involved in).

“Could you give us a hand”, I was asked.
Sure; how difficult can it be? You’ve got a set of records in one system and a set of records in another. All you need to do is match them up and spot what’s missing.

Yeah, right. They'd not recorded the unique keys from the old system, and managed to change a lot of the textual entries. Oh, and the new system contained several tens of thousands of entries that weren't even in the old system. Where did they come from?. It's been a nightmare. Three late nights this week but I was determined to get away in good time on Friday. At about 2:00 I did a hand-over to a couple of colleagues, then gave them an hour to work through it all and see if they could understand it. At 4:00 I asked if they were ok, and they said “yes”, so I said “in that case I’m going home – see you at the end of the month. Oh, and don’t bother calling me if you have a problem ‘cos it will be the middle of the night and my phone will be switched off”.

Thursday evening as I was going home my boss said “you’re not back after tomorrow, are you?”
“well, I will be back – just not for three weeks”, I replied, to which he joked “if we don’t get this data sorted, none of us will be back”.

I had the pre-travel scary dream the other night. I dreamt I was getting on the plane; and in my next dream I was home.
“I must have slept the entire flight” I thought, “as I don’t remember anything after getting on the flight.”
Then: “hang on, I don’t remember getting from the airport to home – did I sleep through that as well?”” and “what about the plane change?”
I was getting quite worried now, as I seemed to have forgotten these recent events. Then, to my horror, I realised that I hadn’t even been on holiday yet –I was remembering a flight that I hadn’t even been on. That was even more worrying, so I was relieved when I woke up.

I had a look on the airline website to see what movies were showing – and there’s very little that I would generally choose to watch. Not enough to fill 24 hours, anyway.

While I was on the website, I noticed a “make a bid to upgrade your seat” link. Well, let’s give that a go, I thought. I’ll offer £50 and see what I get. Well, not very much, was the answer. The minimum “make us any offer” amount was £750. Per flight. So that’s £1500 in total. I’ll give that a miss.

The Future Mrs Barefoot can take me to the airport tomorrow, but as I return daytime midweek, I’ll need to make my own way home. Well, that should be no problem – there’s a rail-air bus link from Heathrow to a station on my line and you can by a through ticket – or could last time I travelled that way.

So I search the national rail site for a ticket – all routes came back taking 2-3 hours, several changes, and via London. That can’t be right – where’s the direct bus service? After a bit of hunting I find a reference to the rail-air link – “operated by National Express”.

OK, I’ll look on the National Express website. That also suggests a long trip and several changes. What is going on. More searching to find details of the rail-air link. Oh, here it is: “operated by the train company”. I give up.

But I did find a coach to Basingstoke leaves an hour after I land – that will do. I can then get the train or bus back to Smalltown.

National express, btw, is the UKland equivalent of Greyhound.

Big Sis needed a part for her car - something to stop the wind messing up her hair. I pointed out that they have invented cars with roofs on, and if she is worried about her hair style, why buy a convertible? Anyway, she couldn’t get this thing in NZland, so had the brilliant idea of ordering it in the UK and getting me to bring it over.