Since then I ran my own little business which was too fucking successful and it meant I was working all the daylight hours, and some of the darker ones too.  I gave up the business as it was too like hard work.

Since then I have been living the life I deserve – no fucking work but still collecting the old pension.  Nice.

There is still one little hangover from the employment days though.  I still get that sinking feeling on a Sunday evening.

Thinking back, I suppose Mondays have been a drag since I started school.  So from the age of five, or whatever age it was, I have been dreading Sunday evenings because the next thing to come down the track is Monday Morning.

In school, Sunday evening meant a frantic dash to two days worth of homework and dreaming up excuses why it wasn’t finished.  Then for many years I had to submit timesheets and travel claims which meant a Sunday evening frantically trying to invent mileages and filing in forms.

Even now, I still get that sinking feeling on a Sunday evening where I do a soul search to try to remember forgotten homework or wondering whether I will get away with another week’s grossly exaggerated mileage.

Old habits die hard.

Of course these days I get the lovely glow when I remember that Monday morning now means as long a lie in as I want.  I just wish I could get the glow without the panic.

I shall console myself later by listening to the traffic reports.

Nowadays I just love hearing about traffic chaos as I sit in my cosy chair.

Heh!

Ten years ago – the 24th of August, 2001 – was a Significant Day in my life.

It was on that day that I was sacked left RTE for the very last time.  I have been back in there once since then and that was just to sign something in the Credit Union.  I think that alone indicates how much I miss the place?

It was the last day where I had to spend my time doing what someone else wanted me to do.

It was the last day where I ever had to grovel for a bit of time off that I was fully entitled to.

It was the last day where I ever had to feign a modicum of respect for complete wankers who were under the delusion that they could manage or supervise.

It was the very last day ever where my time was not my own to do whatever the fuck I wanted.

It was like the end of a thirty year sentence in gaol.

It wasn’t however the last time I ever had to sit in a stationary car staring at the car in front on that fucking Stillorgan Road. That particular pleasure happened the day before, as on my last day a friend drove me in.  He reckoned that after the “do” in the Social Club that evening that I wouldn’t be fit to drive home.

It transpired that he was right.

The hospital wouldn’t release me until the following day.

It was the week of the office drinks.

I enjoy a sup as well as the next man, and generally I am not that fussy about where I sup my sup.  I can drink at the bar or in a lounge.  I can enjoy a wee dram by the fire at home.  I can neck a can in the garden or on the beach.  As Herself would say – I would drink drink off a sore leg.  In fact I would go so far as to say I will drink anywhere, with one major exception.

There is one place where the finest whiskey will taste like drain cleaner, or a can of stout will go down like a lead baloon, and that is in an office.

The week before Christmas was traditionally the time when the various departments in my place of employment would open the bottom drawers in their filing cabinets and produce the booze.  We were then expected to go around the various departments and “show our faces”.  I fucking hated that lark, but orders were orders and we had to do it.  I usually fucked off to the pub in the sure and certain knowledge that the various offices would be too pissed to notice whether I was there or not.

There is something very very wrong about drinking in an office.  You can’t slop a pint down anywhere in case you would drench some important memo.  You can’t sit anywhere as there are only enough chairs for the staff of that office and naturally they are always taken.  Worst of all though is the conversation.  The only topic is work, naturally enough.  You are surrounded by computers, phones and filing cabinets so it is impossible to get away from the subject.

This is one week when I am particularly glad I don’t work any more.

I don’t know what the cause was.  It was just one of those things.  For hours, I lay in bed and stared at the darkness, but the brain just refused to sleep.

Eventually, I did nod off, and was woken by the dog a couple of hours later.  Once again, I was wide awake, so I decided to cut my losses and get up.

Yesterday was a shit day.  I like my sleep, and when I don’t get it, I’m like Mary Harney without the HRT.  All day, I wandered around in a bit of a haze, kicking the guinea pigs [they make quite good footballs, incidentally] and generally breaking things.

My one consolation was that I knew I would have a grand sleep last night, because I was knackered.  I didn’t get to bed too early because a certain dimwit had fucked up his site, and he came clamouring to me, late in the evening to fix it.  I told him to fuck off, but he said he’d pay me in pints at the Blog Awards.  That was enough for me, so I set about fixing it.

I quit after a couple of hours, and went to bed.

Do you think I could sleep?  Like fuck, I could.

I lay there for five hours or so staring at my old friend the darkness.  I tossed and turned but Morpheus had fucked off on his holidays.  No sleep.  Not a single fucking wink.

I got up as dawn broke, as I was sick of the tossing and turning.  I went back to Dimwit’s site and eventually fixed his problem.  Three hours in total, it took me.

I did some sums.

I think I am worth around €100 per hour as a consultant.  Three hours?  Three hundred smackers.  Converted to pints, that comes out at somewhere around eighty pints that Dimwit owes me.

Now, I should sleep after that…………

In 1971, I first drove through the gates of Montrose on my Yamaha 80 to start work in RTE.

It was supposed to be a temporary position for a period of six months.  That six months never ended until I left in 2001.  Now, even though I left in 2001, I still actually stayed on the payroll, so technically I have been working there for the last nearly forty years.

Today, I retire.

I am officially a pensioner.

Of course, RTE are throwing a big party for me tonight.  All my old colleagues will be there, and the Director General will make a speech and a presentation.  This will be followed by an open bar and I will finally be poured into a taxi [at RTE’s expense] and brought home.

Like fuck!

I received a letter last week, informing me I was retiring and thanking me for all my years work.  It said that they would be in touch before The Big Day.

That is all I have heard.  They never got in touch.  Fucking bastards.  No party.  No presentation.  No speeches [be grateful for small mercies].  Not even a fucking handshake.  All those years, nay decades of blood sweat and tears and all I get is a fucking letter.  How quickly they forget.  Miserable, tight-fisted, amnesiac cunts.

I suppose I did get something out of all those years in RTE though.

At least I got to ‘know’ Sharon.

Heh!

I fucking hated them.

There was a bimbo in our office who used to fire up her party enthusiasm around July.  The day would come in the middle of summer when she would pipe up that it really was about time we started thinking about booking a venue.  Most of us would still be looking forward to our summer holidays, so this wasn’t well received.  The air would be thick with flying staplers, ashtrays and other assorted heavy objects, but unfortunately Bimbo was quite good at ducking.  And being a Bimbo, she didn’t realise that the missiles aimed in her direction had anything to do with her mention of Christmas.

Over the following months, skirmishes would break out.  On one side there would be the crowd who just wanted a quick meal to line the stomach for a good piss-up.  On the other would be the ones who wanted a leisurely meal followed by a disco or something.  By the time they had sorted their differences, all the venues would be booked up anyway so the whole thing was a bit academic.

Usually we ended up either having the do in some grotty back street restaurant, that no self respecting office party would touch, or we would hold that greatest of nightmares – an office party in the office.

There is nothing worse than holding a party in an office where you spend most of your working day.  There is fuck all festive about a computer monitor with a bit of bedraggled tinsel draped across the top.  There is nothing Christmassy about a twelve inch high plastic tree decorated with floppy disks.

Worst of all was the boss, who for 364 days in the year is an utter bollix and who suddenly decides that for one day we all have to be best friends with him. 

Inevitably at the start of the ‘party’ someone would announce that “this is a party, and no one is to mention work”.  That would lead to dead silence, as we had fuck all in common apart from work.  So the trick then was to consume as much cheap plonk as quickly as possible so that we could get around to the groping stage without the agonies of forced conversation.

The one advantage of holding the ‘party’ in the office was that we had control over the drinks.  Lacing the Bimbo’s fizzy orange with vodka was no problem, and The Boss used to get his beer nicely topped up in the Gents.  With the piss he normally drank, he couldn’t tell the difference.

Of course the party always ended in chaos.  Bimbo would end up staggering all over the place making a holy show of herself and slurring that the orange was tasting funny, and the Boss would usually end up puking his ring up all over the main desk.

The Office Party was not a time for celebration or enjoyment.

Oh no.

It was a time for revenge.

One replied immediately, and I started working there the following Monday.

The week after, I got the sack, but in the meantime another of the six had offered me a job so I walked straight into that.

I was with that company for two years and thoroughly enjoyed it.  However, I had applied for yet another job which I took.

I stuck with my third company for nearly 30 years, but all good things must come to an end, and in 2001, I “took the Package”.

This is where things got very fucking complicated.  You see, the Package meant that I was still paid a salary by the company, even though I no longer worked for them,  But seeing as I get a salary, then technically I do still work for them, even though I am now contractually forbidden from doing any actual work.  They are literally paying me a salary to stay away from the place.  That’s fine by me as I was kind of pissed off with them anyway.

So there I was – sitting on my hole at home, receiving a salary and with nothing to do.

So I started my own business.

The situation now, was that I was technically employed by my old company, but was running my own business as well.

In the course of my business, I landed a contract with yet another company, and for reasons best known to themselves, I had to register there as an employee, even though I only worked for them for a few months a year.  This meant that I now had three employers – my original crowd who were paying me not to work; my new employer who only wanted me for a few months a year and my own business which filled in the gaps.

That was the year my accountant had a nervous breakdown trying to do my tax returns.

I have quit all that now, and have shut down my own business.  I now have only one employer, who is still happily paying me not to work.

So I am now, for the first time in my life unencumbered with work.  My days are my own.  I can do what I like.

Next year, I retire officially.

Presumably, as I then go onto a pension, the clause that stated that I can’t work for them is no longer in force, and they will probably insist that I go back and earn all the money they have paid me since 2001.

The problem in the meantime is what I put down as my occupation.

I’m not retired, as that doesn’t happen until next year.

I’m not working as it is contractually forbidden.

They don’t have a box on the forms that suggests “employed not to work”.

Life is so fucking confusing at times.

I started at eight, yesterday morning.

“No bother,” says I.  “I have all day to copy a couple of sites.  How hard can that be?”

I had not allowed for the extremely weird control panel I had been presented with, for a start.  Whoever designed that did so with a logic that defies gravity.  Nothing is where you would expect it to be.  There is a myriad of menus that all lead around in circles and they all look the same but aren’t.  Have you ever been in Hampton Court Maze?  That’s what it was like.

After an hour or two, I managed to set up a blank area to take this site.  Great!  Now my problem was how to copy the old site across.  You see, you can’t just copy the old site onto a PC and then copy them up to the new one – it just doesn’t work.  The new site will just start looking for bits on the old server or something and will start crying. I hate that.

I had to create a new site from scratch and then just copy the relevant bits across.  But what are the relevant bits?

Then there is the database.  Fuck me, but it’s big.  And when the new site has a file limit of 5 Megathingies, it is too big.  So I had to chop the database into little chunks and copy them all across in little bits, and I had to be very careful to keep them in the right order.  Otherwise you would find your comments coming out your ears.

I managed it in the end.

Even then I had complaints from a few people that they could only see things up to last June, but I could see everything so it that a case of tough shit!

I think it’s all working now.  I don’t think I lost anything and I think everything is in the right order.

It actually seems a bit faster now, but that will doubtless change.

I still have a couple of minor details to fix.

And of course I still have a load of other sites to copy.

Bollox. 

It is now on its new server, but for the life of me, I can’t get it to work right.

It won’t load any fucking images without my manually inserting then again.

The comments look completely different and messy.

I can’t upgrade anything.

I am PISSED OFF with it.

And I have three more sites to go.

Aaaaaaaaagh!!!

All I had to do was give people their little space on the Interweb and I could then sit back and rake in the readies.

Not so.

All those cretins that I euphemistically call ‘clients’ keep phoning me with their problems.

I usually hang up on the ones who are blaming me for their hard disk crashing or for the fact that their dog now has rabies, but one or two manage to sneak through my defences.

A hell of a lot of them seem to have problems with e-mails.

Why the fuck can’t they write a letter like the rest of us?

They phone me and complain that they can’t send e-mails or they can’t receive e-mails.  They complain that their mailbox is full, or that they are getting spam.

The ones who are getting spam give me a laugh.  Who doesn’t get spam?  I usually just laugh at them [and maybe if I’m feeling good, I’ll remove them from some of my mailing lists].

The ones who complain about their mailbox being full are simple.  I just go onto their server and delete all their mail.  For some reason, this annoys them despite the fact that I have solved their problem.  Some people are never satisfied.

The ones who complain they are not receiving mails are usually just sad fuckers who are blaming me for their lack of friends.

Oddly enough, I’m getting a lot of complaints from people who claim they can’t send mails.

I did a bit of investigating here as I was intrigued as to why these mails were so important.

One of my clients has just got married.  The horny fucker has been sending rather graphic mails to his new mother-in-law telling her how he has fallen in love with her [and what he would like to do with her].  I had a moral dilemma here, so I just redirected all his outgoing mails into his wife’s inbox.  They are all on the same server, so he stopped getting error messages and the problem was solved.

There is another bloke who has come up with a new business idea.  I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it has something to do with selling ice-cream on line.  He is trying to promote his idea by mailing every Tom Dick and Harry he can think of.  Fucking idiot.  I redirected his outgoing mail into a null account, so he is now happy.

One persistent bastard did some sleuthing of his own.  He claims that my mail server has been blacklisted on the Interweb for ‘spreading malicious material or spamming’.  He had a fucking nerve.  He should mind his own business, and let me get on with mine.

Anyone want any Viagra or an excellent watch?