Friday I go mad

Normally I drop Alicia at school on Mondays and Fridays and she gets the bus from her mum's in the mornings the rest of the week when I'm working in Dudley.

These are not normal times.

This morning we tried to work out where the bus that she travels back on in the afternoons leaves from in the mornings. We got there just after half past seven, but it was obviously too much to hope for that it would follow the same route through the estate. We gave up at ten to eight and I dropped her at the stop on the other route nearer school and headed back for the motorway.

I would have been reasonably on time, except for the queue of traffic back up from the roundabout in the centre of Chapeltown. Ok, so I get past that and onto the motorway, now running about half an hour late. It could be worse, I think. It's not really a surprise when it does get worse. The A38 is blocked by an accident so traffic is diverting onto the M1 at junction 28, which has one lane blocked by a broken down lorry at junction 26.

Great.

Another half hour delay, sat stationary just past Chesterfield and I am now seriously late for the document imaging training that I have been asked politely by my boss to attend (where polite is roughly equivalent to "You vill obey ze orderz!!!").

I gave Eileen a call, and they have now cut the training down from a full day to a half day overview starting a little later, so I am not going to miss all that much. I eventually got to the office at a quarter to eleven and snuck into the training room.

They had covered the process details and were now actually going to do some actual document scanning and indexing to demonstrate the procedure for scanning a document in Dudley and sending it to the image server at our Leeds office. Click the button to index and ... nothing happens, apart from a cryptic xml error message.

Terrific.

It's Jeanette's birthday, so we took an early lunch break in the pub whilst the techies in Leeds fixed the problem, and by the time we got back it was working so we could cover the rest of the training. Not a complete waste of time and it was useful for me to see the system, if only to get a feel for the sort of speed it is going to run at over the wan (slowly it seems) plus I got a very nice bit of cake with my afternoon coffee.

Still, the best bit of day goes almost without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway :

14!!!!