The Silly Season

The Christmas/New Year period is traditionally known as the Silly Season. This year, the entire month of December has been not just silly but crazy. Not only have I been very busy at work with my normal doing-two-jobs-for-one-pay duty, but on top of it all we've moved offices.

Consequently my rostered day off went down the toilet. I've put in a lot of late nights, up to and including after midnight, in the period just before we moved, and Mrs. Impala and I spent most of a weekend painting the new office, thanks to the old tenants who decided that "make good" actually means "oh, nobody will notice that we haven't sanded down the repairs to the plaster, or repainted, or actually cleaned the carpet".

At least, the real estate agent didn't.

In no particular order, some things I have learnt:

• Catching a taxi in the city at 1am on a Friday night is not easy. There's a chronic shortage of taxis, and a chronic oversupply of drunks and clubbers.


• People (and by people I actually mean a group of five drunken twenty-something baboons men) will actually step out into the middle of the road and try to stare down on-coming traffic, forcing the taxi to come to a complete stop. Eventually, due to some variety of random Brownian motion, they eventually staggered around enough to leave a car-sized gap between them, otherwise I'm sure I'd still be there two weeks later.


• Having even a mildly sprained back really, really sucks. My heart goes out to those with serious back problems.


• My room in the new office is the one room that isn't detectably air conditioned, so while everyone else is complaining of frost bite and wearing woolly hats and gloves, I'm melting into a puddle. Why am I not surprised?


• After stripping the server room of all unessential servers and equipment, we were left with no fewer than thirteen servers. Thirteen. For a company of about a dozen staff.


• When Melbourne has rain in December, it REALLY rains. And when it does, traffic slows to a complete stop.

I'm hoping that with Christmas just around the corner, things will settle back down to normal soon.