Prof Henry Higgins was a closet homosexual

Next week is gong to be somewhat unusual for me, since it is very likely I’m not going to be going in to The Hive at all. Then again – this week has been a little unusual as well, with some comedy timing thrown in as well.

Before you start to worry – because I know you are now worrying – I haven’t been fired. If that was the case, this entry would be far more full of swearing and abuse.

I am on holiday at the end of next week – my girlfriend is coming down for her birthday (I have bought her a really cool present and for once I didn’t need any help or suggestions for it. I’ve also bought her a less cool present that is really cute – that was when I thought the main present was going to be delivered two days after her birthday, but I’m going to give her both!) and we are having a little three day holiday.

But for the first two days, I am going on an "excellent adventure". One of the stores in The Hive ("Board Silly" – they sell specialist board games, rpgs and so on) are opening another branch in a shopping centre in Liverpool and they’ve asked if I can see about installing a local version of our system in there.

It’s not something we do a lot, but we have done it in the past for certain customers (ones we have been in business with for a while) because – well, for three main reasons.

First – it makes us more money in the long run. 

Second – the more we can get our software out in the world, the more people will learn about us and want us to write software for them.

Third – the more we can get our software out in the world, the less we have to rely on everything being invested in The Hive.  Because you never know when there’ll be a catastrophically bad turtle stampede that takes out the entire building.

So I am working out of the Board Silly store in Liverpool for two days, investigating what it would take to set up the system and to support it – if we can set up a VPN or remote management system, then it will be a lot easier than having to send someone to Liverpool to do upgrades and deal with support issues. (My guess is – yes, since it is going to be linked with the sister shop in The Hive, but we’ll see). 

I won’t have to drive to work, but I will have to drive to Liverpool. Not sure which is worse! (Don’t get me wrong – I love Liverpool, but driving in to a big city first thing in the morning is not going to be fun – it’s why I never looked for jobs in Manchester or Lancaster. Both my previous jobs have been in small villages and towns. I did work for the civil service in the city centre, but I tended to get the bus in, rather than driving). 

This last week – well, it just proves that I either need someone to run my life for me, or I need to finally get off my ass and start writing everything down rather than just trying to remember it.

Around six, seven weeks ago I got a letter saying my cable was being upgraded in the first Wednesday in October. I read it, but mostly I dismissed it because I thought I’d be in work, and the upgrade was taking place between 9am and 5pm, so it wouldn’t affect me.

This week (the first week in October – can you guess what is coming next?) I’ve been splitting my time between the DRS and CSS. There is a presentation to customers next week, so on Wednesday I arranged to work from home so that I could spend the whole day on the CSS without getting interrupted by customers and other such things. Various staff members do it at various points, usually when they are coming up to important milestones in the projects. 

Anyway – I get up on the Wednesday, plug in my laptop to start work, and blarp – no internet access. I check the computer upstairs, that has no access either. Switch my mobile phone to purely wireless access – no internet on that.

I could not figure it out. By this point I have tried restarting the modem, rebooting all the computers – no change.

Then something flashed in to my head about my cable being upgraded. So I had a look through all my emails (due to my obsessive nature and brilliance with computer systems, I have nearly every email I’ve received dating back to around 2001 – which reminds me I really should back them all up to disc somewhere) but there was nothing there. 

So then I looked through my "this might be important" file of letters – I’ve started filing them so I can find them later, instead of just sticking them in a plastic bag like I used to – and yup, there it was. A letter telling me that the one day I had decided to work from home, I would have no access to the internet, and no way to contact the servers at The Hive.

I phoned up work, and after Jane laughed at me for ten minutes, we figured out a way that I could do all the work I needed to do, and that she would e-mail the files to my phone (which was still able to connect to the 3G network) and I can download them to the computer until my internet is back up.

All in all, it ended up being quite a successful day – the internet came up around 3pm ish and I ended up finishing everything I needed to do plus a bit more besides.

But it has prompted me to write more stuff down and ensure that I don’t ignore stuff just because "it won’t affect me"

Professor Henry Higgins thinks men are the ultimate in human society – the perfect paragon of humanity, and he wants women to be more like men. He even says he wants women to be like his friend Pickering ("Why can’t a woman be like you?")

Surely I can’t be the only to whom this screams "closet case of the worst order"?