Yesterday, Craig and I went to the Victoria Centre to spend the £100 of vouchers that I won at work.

The day before I bought Super Monkey Ball Deluxe and FIFA 2006 for my Xbox. I decided I’d buy more games, so I bought Worms 4 (which I don’t really like), Dead Or Alive (the one that gives you DoA 1 and 2, which I’m also not so happy with), and Amped 2 which is a cool snowboarding game 🙂

The person I spoke to at the counter was a nice lady named Verity. We had a little conversation, which was very nice. I said she could keep the 3p of change and spend it on something nice for herself 🙂

I also bought the Arctic Monkeys album, so that’s good.

I still had £50 of vouchers left over so we went to Millie’s Cookies and looked at them for a while. I asked the lady if she accepted Victoria Centre vouchers and she said that she did. I then asked her how many cookies I could get for £25 😀

After a couple of minutes of working out she told me she could give me 4 boxes of 18 plus 5 extra. So 77 cookies. I said ok, and they started to round up pretty much all of the cookies they had left for me 😀

Craig and I walked out of the centre just laughing and joking about the whole thing. I still have another £25 to spend somewhere in the centre, so I might have to do it again.

So yeah, we came back to my house and started playing games and eating the cookies. There are still quite a lot left. I think we ate about half of them though.

I went out last night for the first time in quite a while… I think the first night this year in fact.

A bunch of my team mates and I basically just went out for a couple of drinks, and then Craig gave me a lift home. It wasn’t really anything special, just made a nice change.

On the way home Craig and I stopped to borrow some flashing lights that they stick on top of road cones. They don’t have an off switch though, so I had to put it in my wardrobe so I could get to sleep last night.

We also took a trip to Asda and I bought some of the most random things. I bought two pillows and cases, 2 Kinder Eggs, cheesecake, pizza, deodorant, beef jerky… o_O

Craig and I ate pizza while we were watching a quiz show tat I can’t remember the name of on ITV. It was the most frustrating quiz show I’ve ever watched in my life, but also pretty funny at the same time. I don’t know how often I’m likely to stay up until that time to watch it though.

Well, now I’m at work and my shift is going to start in about 15 minutes or so, so I guess I should get going.

David just pointed out a quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence that I wanted to share with you all:

They were soon at Mansfield, that once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town. Hilda stopped at the hotel named in the motor-car book, and took a room. The whole thing was utterly uninteresting, and she was almost too angry to talk.

So yeah, that’s where I live 🙂 How nice.

I’m officially looking for a new job now. I’m not expecting to stay at Capital ONe for a whole lot longer… The calls are going well, I have the highest quality calls in the whole team, which is nice, but I also somehow manage to have the lowest sales rate overall. That’s not a good thing in a sales department.

So I figure I have about 2 weeks left now before something happens. So I’ve started applying for a different kind of job. Something that doesn’t involve me spending all fricking day talking to the public trying to help/influence them.

It’s pretty nice that the quality of my calls is so high. From a customer’s point of view that must mean I’m doing a damn good job… But from my manager’s point of view I’m doing a terrible job. She drew on my forehead today with a board marker. While she was doing it I drew on her hand with another one though. She only put dots on mine, but I wrote “HI” on hers. Plus, she was standing behind me while I was sitting down when she did it, so I think I did a pretty good job.

A little while later she came over and sprayed me with women’s deodorant to make me “smell like a girl.”

Sunny said something funny about it stinking and my manager pointed out that it was her deodorant. Straight away I said “you should try using it some time.” It was brilliant. Everyone who heard it laughed 🙂 Everyone except my manager anyway, but she took it quite well.

I tried out my remote control car again which was cool, but the battery only lasts about 30 minutes before the whole thing pretty much dies.

I don’t really have a great deal else to say about work for now… I’m enjoying it a fair amount because I’m making the calls such high quality using my incredible rapport skills, but I can’t seem to get any sales to follow. Unfortunately that’s what counts so I’m going to have to look elsewhere.

Hopefully I’ll just get a job writing code behind a monitor in some small closed-away room where nobody bothers me. Oh if only 😉

I was just talking to Sandra and she’s probably the most curious person I’ve ever spoken to. As in, she asks a lot of questions, not that she’s unusual (although that too :P). She said she was looking for a proverb about her curiosity and I said “curiosity killed the cat.”

Straight away I thought of about 15 years ago or so when I was talking to my dad and he said “you know what curiosity did…” I said that I didn’t know, and he said “I’ll tell you later.” I then spent the next 20 minutes pestering him about it and he wouldn’t tell me. I realised about 6 months ago what he was doing. Genius.

I hate realising that something I was doing was so stupid and that it would be so blindingly obvious now.

I did a similar thing to JonP earlier when he asked me what procrastinating meant. I told him I couldn’t be bothered and I’d tell him later.

But yeah, that’s just a little bit of a snippet.

Today was probably the best day I’ve ever had at work. Primarily because I hardly did any.

I did a bunch of Balance Transfers, which aren’t really worth a great deal to my stats because I kick ass at them anyway, but yeah…

The reason the day was so good is ebcause a bunch of other people came over to fill up the empty desks. Richard, one of my friends from school came over with Sunny, and a couple of other guys that I don’t know at all and we spent the whole day procrastinating 😀

Richard went around desks taking all the toys so we could play with stuff. There was a lightsaber and an axe, both of which made noises… There was a little helicopter thing, a remote control car, and a miniature scalextrics powered by batteries.

After a while Richard, Daz (one of the guys I didn’t know), and I hogged all of the gifts because Sunny was sitting a bit too far away to reach them. At lunch time Sunny and Daz went into Nottingham and bought their own remote controlled cars 😀

I pointed out to them that they’re both 27MHz and the same make so they’d probably interfere with each other. I know this because JonP and I both got Firestorms back in the day and we could never race each other because of that interference problem.

Not to be out-done Richard and I went into Nottingham during our lunch and I bought a much bigger remote controlled car (a Forumla One style car) for the exact same price 😀

When I walked into work carrying it the look on their faces was brilliant 😀

Unforutnately I hardly got to play with it at all because the battery needed to be charged for about 8 hours. I’ll be charging it overnight 🙂

We also spent a lot of time playing catch, and various other games. It was a really fun day. I like saturdays at work because my manager isn’t there.

I also had quite a nice conversation with Sandra by email again today. It’s so nice to have something from her to read when I’m in such a different environment. She’s cool 🙂

I sprinted away from Capital One to the train station, straight over to platform 6 where my train almost always leaves from. I found the platform empty, so I ran back to platform 4A. As I was nearing the top of the stairs to platform 4A I heard a whistle blow and my heart sank. I flew down the stairs in a hurry and ran up to the still standing train. The light on the button was off, so I couldn’t open the door. I was standing directly beside the door, a train operator on the platform who decides when the trains leave, and I could see one of the guys operating the train leaning through the window.

I begged with the guy on the platform to let me get on. He said there was nothing he could do at all, the train was still just waiting there at this point. The guy leaning out of the window from the train must have known what I wanted, but the train started to move away anyway. I was incredibly pissed off and I had wild ideas about somehow jumping onto the train and riding it to the next station, but I didn’t.

Instead I walked all the way to Victoria Centre bus station. I called Craig and my sister to see about getting a lift. They both said yes eventually, but not until after the bus I was going to catch left the station without any passengers on it at all because the driver is a fricking retard.

Yes, that’s two forms of public transport that have left me waiting in the station in one evening.

Craig gave me a lift home in the end. We played Halo 2 a bit and ate pizza. It was good.

I spoke to Sandra for a little while, but it was late so she had to sleep. We were talking for half of the day via email, which was really nice 🙂 Much better than just sitting around bored to death at work.

My first day back after my little vacation was … Horrible. It was nice to see my friends again, but it sucked to be back at work doing the same thing. I also had my investigation into why I’m not selling enough. My manager and I had a serious discussion about me not wanting to be a salesperson any longer. She told me that I can’t transfer to another department because I am in probation in Sales. If I go to a disciplinary process then I probably won’t get hired by any other department in the future… So my options right now seem to be limited:

1) Stick with the job and try to pass probation.

   a) Fail and never get another job at Capital One.

   b) Pass and then transfer ASAP because I still don’t want to be a salesperson.

2) Quit the job and apply for another department at Capital One.

3) Quit the job and look elsewhere.

Ah well, I guess something will come of it somehow. I’m in no position to quit my job right now, so there’s not a lot I can do about it. I should really be spending more time looking for a replacement job. I just don’t know what yet.

I need to pass my driving test in the shortest amount of time possible. Most jobs that involve driving I think I could do for the moment because I highly doubt they’d be sending me out by myself before I’d have a chance to pass the test anyway, thanks to probationary periods and such… Plus, one job I’ve been told about seems to involve a fair amount of work overseas, where I’m completely fine to drive. So I don’t know… I don’t think things would be too bad. I just still need to get it sorted right away.

I don’t know if I can afford to pay for lessons and a test while I’m in a precarious job situation though. Blah to it all. It’s so tempting to just lie about it and drive anyway. I know I can do it. I’m not going to though, I’m cautious with stuff like that.

Apparently the Blockbuster situation has been resolved. Laura went in with my card and the print of my statement. They said they’d be giving me $10.72 or something like that, which is actually more than they charged me.

So yeah, basically someone rented from my account, kept all the stuff, I got charged, I complained, they refunded Laura… I’m spotting a pretty major security downfall for Blockbuster there.

I could have gone in, rented on my own account, sold the movies and games I rented, got charged, gone in and said it wasn’t me, at which point they’d refund me all the money, plus a bit extra… So I’d make money selling the stuff and a bit extra to cover my hassle 🙂

The money can apparently be refunded to any account, not even the blockbuster cardholder has to be present. The person collecting the refund doesn’t need to have the card of the cardholder either. It’s more than a bit retarded, in my opnion, but never mind. I’m suree they’ll sort something out soon. Until then the Blockbuster scam is plausible. Obviously I suggest that you don’t go and try it.

My heart is warm with friends I make,

and better friends I’ll not be knowing;

Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going.

That’s a poem by Edna St.Vincent Millay. I don’t think I’ve heard a more perfectly suited series of words in a very long time.

I’ve had the last two and a half days off work because I just can’t face going in. :\

When I went in on Tuesday I was feeling crap because it was the first regular day back after new year, which was a pretty crappy time for me anyway. I found out while I was there that I’ll be going through an investigatory procedure to find out why I’m not selling as much as I apparently should be. Then I’ll be going through a disciplinary procedure afterwards that will almost certainly result in me receiving my final written warning. I haven’t even received any other sort of warning yet, but that’s one of the joys for a company with employees in probation, they don’t have to follow regular procedure. I think having probation based on sales rate is a bit shit.

So, I was off yesterday, and I got 3 different messages telling me that I’d just won £100 for selling well. o_O The stats are based on all products, and I sold one of them better than anyone else in the department for a week. Unfortunately I sold the others at a crap rate. So I won £100 for selling well while undeer investigation for failure to sell.

I know what it is that’s doing it. I hate sales. The thing I’m selling well is something that really does help people. I can see the benefits of it and it really does save the people money from the outset. It’s called a balance transfer and basically is just a way of consolidating debt on whichever card ahs the lwoest rate. So I’m helping people straight away, and I like it. The other products are insurances, whch I don’t like very much. They cover you if you’re out of work or whatever. One of them is absed on the balance on your account. So if you only have a small amount to insure then you don’t pay a lot for the insurance each month. If you have a higher balance then you pay quite a bit more. 79p for every £100 that’s printed on your statement. What it pays back is 10% a month for every month you’re off work under certain circumstances. So, if you have a small balance you have to be off work for a long time for it to be worth having the insurance… But you can’t afford to be off work for long anyway, that’s why you have a lower credit limit. If you have a high balance then you’re paying quite a alrge sum of money every month. You probably have a higher credit limit because your job is more secure, so the chances of needing the insurance are lower…

I hate doing it. I’ve been getting better at doing it over the last few weeks as well, which is saddening me. I’d much rather be in a position where I just help the people with a problem they’re having. Blah.

So yeah, I’ve had a weird few days. It’s been bad for those reasons, but it’s also been good for a couple of other reasons, that I’m not going to go into right now 🙂

Besides those, the complaint procedure with the British Transport Police is moving on steadily. The thing with Blockbuster might get sorted out over the next few days. So those things, at least, are looking up.

I think I just need to find another job that doesn’t involve me pressuring people to waste their money. 🙂