Takeover

I came into the office this morning to have my boss tell me in an ominous tone: "you'd better check your mail". My first thought was "oh shit, what have the Egyptians done now?", but then I see the following:

"We are delighted to announce that early this morning CAPE became part 
of the largest non-financial company in Portugal.

Specifically CAPE has been purchased by our most respected competitor, 
WeDo Consulting."

So, they're calling it a merger, but is like the HP/Compaq "merger" - WeDo and Cape are being merged into a company called: "WeDo". So now I'm working for a Portugese company. Is going to take a good while to merge the two, but that is going to be the end result. So, my first buyout!

According to the 2hr meeting we just had on it, our jobs are all safe - in fact the new company has so many unfilled jobs on the books that they'll be hiring a lot more ppl! Will be a big change in the way we do business here in dublin anwyay - definitely in terms of my group. Instead of supporting customers all over the world, we're just going to be handling Northern Europe. Am not a happy camper over that.

When I started this job I was told I'd be spending at least 1/3 of the time on the road, possibly up to 2/3 - was pretty much the reason I took the job in the first place! I've been a bit pissed off with the whole travel thing for a while actually. I've only had one trip to one shithole of a place, and in the last 2 months I've had trips to Reading, Ecuador and Cairo dangled in front of me and then cancelled, which sucks (well, maybe not the Reading one). Now we've been told that the Dublin office will be responsible for Ireland, England and Scandinavia. No more pissing off to Asia or South America for me! I joined this job to go off to foreign places, I didn't join to spend my days rooting through server log files and poking through database tables or answering questions/fixing problems from some customer who didn't read the manual before he started hitting buttons, which is what I'm doing now.

We have a meting later on this afternoon with the boss to see what exactly this is going to mean for our team in particular. Will be pondering my options after that.

At least it may mean trips to Lisbon for "orientation meetings" maybe..... :-)

Fucking DHL.........

Well, after my recent fun and games with UPS, I said I'd never order using them again. Now it seems I'm having fun with DHL as well. Got a letter in the post yesterday dated 10th September from some debt collection agency saying I owed DHL €15.13 and I needed to pay it straight away. Today, I get a letter dated 21st sep saying if I failed to pay up within 72hrs they were going to possibly take me to court over it. Take me to fucking court? Over €15? Reminds me somewhat of the time the cops were investigating me for illegal dumping in wicklow 'cos they found some letter addressed to me in one of the illegal landfills!

I paid off the "crippling debt" anyway, but am getting them to send me out an invoice stating what the charge is for - I reckon this is from the time the guys at work had to send me over some DVDs to Indonesia 'cos the FTP transfers weren't really up to sending 2GB of stuff. If it is, this is definitely being charged back to the company! Am also tempted to ring DHL and ask them do they send their packages the same way they send their demand notices - got my "final warning" letter (dated the 21st) the day after I got my first notice (dated the 10th).

Last time I had problems with DHL it was over a package they lost. I ordered something from the US which was supposed to take "up to 3 weeks" to deliver, and had no sign of it after 4 weeks. Rang up the company, they said they'd sent it via DHL, rang DHL and they said they had no idea where it was. After a few days of ringing around different depts in DHL, discovered that it had reached Ireland 3 days after I'd ordered it, but then it has disappeared somewhere in Dublin airport..... Company sent out a replacement but DHL couldn't deliver to the house out of business hours, and wouldn't for some reason change the delivery address to my work one, so I had to walk down to the DHL office to pick it up myself.

So who's left to use for deliveries now?

Birthdays

I seem to be going to a lot of birthdays recently. Was the g/f's birthday yesterday (is still strange to be able to say that - "the g/f") so we're going out for dinner tonight. Was another friend's b'day celebrations on sat night, another last mon, another last sat (well, same one as this sat - 2 countries, 2 parties!), another the weds before - and another this weekend coming! Reckon I've been to about 7 birthdays in the last 5 weeks, seems a lot of my friends were "xmas pressies" so to speak..... :-) Is fecking expensive going out for all these meals tho! Bad for the wallet, bad for the waistline!

One other thing that hit me as well is that apart from Michelle's (the g/f), all of the birthdays have been 30ths or over. When the hell did everyone I know start hitting 30? Last think I noticed, I was going to 25ths - Where did it all go wrong? :-(

If this is global warming........

.....then I want my money back! God damn you Al Gore!

I walked out of the house yesterday morning on my way to the DART station, and rather quickly noticed two things. One was that the tip of my nose was starting to go a bit chilly, the other was that I could see my breath. Cold? Where the hell did that come from! Where was the indian summer we were promised! The kids have barely been back in school a few weeks yet, after that shite wet summer you'd think we were owed a few more days at least of warmth! :-(

Global warming, pah!

Gold Teeth

I was just out at the shop, and it had the usual old Romanian woman sitting there selling the Big Issue. The second thing I noticed about her (after the moustache) was that she had 3 gold teeth. The last time I saw this was again on a Romanian, this one a guy selling the Big Issue outside of Waterstones. This guy had a full set of gold caps on all his teeth.

Maybe it's a cultural thing or something, but to my mind, if you can afford to bling up your teeth with a set of 24-carat grills, why the hell are you in my country selling the Big Issue?

UPS can go screw themselves

Well, I seem to have gone a bit mad on the auld internet ordering in the last while - got a ton of books from amazon.co.uk, a DVD or two and a few toys from thinkgeek.com (was getting a gift token for a friend and sort of forgot to stop shopping). I don't think I'll be ordering from thinkgeek all that much any more tho - or using UPS.

I got my order delivered today, and the total from the thinkgeek side came to $75 including shipping (or about €55). That was ok, was expecting that, but then the charges came to €48 - or nearly the same worth as the order! They charged me €20.89 on VAT, €10.65 on Duty, which I can accept 'cos it's all govt charges, but then what pisses me off is that they charged me €13.50 on "other charges" whatever the hell they are, and then on top of that they charged me another €2.84 on VAT on my charges! So, they charged me VAT on the goods and then VAT on the fecking VAT! I thought that Ticketmaster were good at ass-raping you when you order stuff, but jesus!

So, if I order from thinkgeek again (which is doubtful looking at these charges), I'm not sending it by UPS!

Ag caint as gaeilge on the DART.

Had a very unusual experience on the DART this evening. Was taking the train home as I normally do, minding my own business and with my brain pretty much in neutral, when I notice something rather unexpected. There were two girls standing beside me chatting away, in irish! This is not something you ever really hear in real life, as apart form TG4 and the few Gaeltachts scattered around he country, most ppl can't speak Irish worth a damn! Granted it wasn't 100% pure Irish, was maybe 3/4 irish with 1/4 english words thrown in, but still way more than you'd normally hear.

The funniest part tho was looking at the reactions of all the other people on the DART. You could straight away spot the foreigners, as they were ignoring all this, being unaware really that hearing someone speaking Irish was not a normal thing - or even not recognizing it as Irish (you hear so many languages around these days). The other Irish ppl tho were equally easy to spot, with their ears pricked up and looks of concentration on their faces as they recognized someone speaking irish and tried to unobtrusively eavesdrop and try to figure out what they were saying! And looks of puzzlement as well as they tried to remember a language they hadn't spoken or used since leaving school!

The conversation as far as I could make it out was about some house party at the weekend where one of their friends had been going stuff with some guy that they thought she shouldn't have. Or something like that. More proof that no matter what language, most female conversations are full of crap that we guys don't really care about listening to anyway :-P

God doesn't want me to do touristy stuff.

Somehow I think God doesn't like me doing touristy things any more. On my last trip, it rained in Bandung, it rained in Singapore and it rained in Bali. I haven't really done anything touristy since, until now. And now, when I did? Rain!

For the last week, I've been playing tour guide to my Israeli friend Sharon who came over for a visit. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take time off so she was doing most of the tourist stuff by herself during the day, but this weekend, I decided that she's seen enough of Dublin and it was time to actually see Ireland :-) So, we hopped on the train and headed off to the West for the weekend, destination: Galway!

Yesterday, we took a bus tour around the Burren - the Burren, Ailwee caves, Doolin, the Cliffs of Moher, and some castle (can't remember the name, no place I'd ever heard of). Up til then she'd had good weather on the trip, but now what did we get? Rain! Pissed rain all the way though the Burren and only stopped when we got near the cliffs of Moher (least the Ailwee caves were inside I guess - a few ppl on the bus were doing a hill-walking tour!). When we got to the Cliffs though, I was reminded of the volcano in Bandung. The cliffs were, well, invisible, low cloud covered them, you could tell where the cliff in front of you stopped but that was about it. Reckon it cleared for about 2mins while we were there. Then, as we were heading back to Galway after all the touristy stiff was done, the weather cleared and we got blue sky! At least there was a nice view of Galway bay out the bus window as we were coming back...... :-(