{"id":56,"date":"2003-03-13T19:43:36","date_gmt":"2003-03-13T18:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pete.nu\/blog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2007-02-28T15:56:59","modified_gmt":"2007-02-28T15:56:59","slug":"a-full-evening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/2003\/03\/13\/a-full-evening\/","title":{"rendered":"A full evening"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>7:30!<\/p>\n<p>Yes, tonight I was back in the flat for 7:30pm. I dropped my keys, I was so eager to get in.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got my whites in the machine, a Pulp CD on the music making compact disc player machine apparatus (the volume control creeping a little bit further clockwise with every track), and a can of Guinness Original by my side.<\/p>\n<p>I have deemed it to be too cold and windy to walk to the gym, and seeing as I don&#8217;t get my car back until tomorrow evening, I have undressed and donned my dressing gown for a night of pure relaxation. I shall phone all the friends that I have been neglecting in my late evenings of working, and I shall watch a DVD from my pile of films that I bought under the mistaken impression that I would have time to watch them all.<\/p>\n<p>I shall eat stupid food too. The pathetically small amount of time that I have been spending at home has left the need to buy food nonexistent, so it looks like I shall be eating onion rings, potato wedges and battered mushrooms. Certainly I have had no fruit for weeks.<\/p>\n<p>And then I shall pick up my guitar and play. I shall play my little heart out. And the next time that I am home at such a reasonable hour, I shall dedicate the entire evening to songwriting, and record a little ditty and make it available on this very site. How does that sound?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m currently onsite at a client&#8217;s buildings, and I&#8217;m sharing an office with a crazy lady of Italian (or Sicilian, I&#8217;m not sure) origin. She&#8217;s great fun, and swears at her computer a lot. But once you get over the swearing, she&#8217;s got a heart of gold underneath.<\/p>\n<p>At 5:30, as we were turning off our computers, I mentioned that I was off back to the office to do a bit more work. You see, she has the sort of job where she works pretty much the same number of hours every week, and given my current situation (the words &#8220;compulsory unpaid overtime&#8221; spring to mind), I find that an appealing prospect.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoy my job, don&#8217;t get me wrong. But sometimes I wish that it bore some resemblance to the words that I was fed in my interview. I made it quite clear at my job interview that I was a social person, and that I needed plenty of human contact, and I didn&#8217;t want to work absurd hours. So what happens? The number of employees halves, and I find myself working every evening for a fortnight. My only consolation is that things should be a bit better for the next two months while I am onsite.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe it&#8217;s rose-tinted glasses time, but when I compare my life now to my life two years ago at University, I feel like I&#8217;m losing the things that kept me going back then. I used to be able to put time into my interests &#8211; a lot of time. I played in two bands and had a weekly show on student radio. Nowadays it feels like they are just things that I use to pad out my CV. I get so little free time that I have to use it all just to catch up with my friends.<\/p>\n<p>It would be nice if time could be reallocated. There are people who are begging for tomorrow to come a little bit sooner, and here am I, wishing that I just had 28 hours in the day. I don&#8217;t even dare look at analogue clocks anymore, simply because it is too easy to tell how close to the end of the day it is.<\/p>\n<p>All I can say is thank goodness for &#8216;bel and her daily e-tea breaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>7:30! Yes, tonight I was back in the flat for 7:30pm. I dropped my keys, I was so eager to get in. I&#8217;ve got my whites in the machine, a Pulp CD on the music making compact disc player machine apparatus (the volume control creeping a little bit further clockwise with every track), and a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-me","category-meander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}