Fun in the City - Part 1

Yesterday was my team's monthly meeting, so I got to travel to Microsoft's fab new Cardinal Place offices for the day, and then pop out in the night to celebrate my manager's manager's leaving for India for his new job.

The day didn't exactly start auspiciously with me turning up to the whole shindig an hour late...unfortunately Sod's law was in effect that morning. Everything that could go wrong, did, and there's a surprising amount of things that can go wrong in such a short journey:

• Train arriving at Reading - delayed


• Train due to arrive at Reading before the delayed train's new arrival time - delayed


• Train I finally managed to get on - delayed coming into London


• Tube - delayed


• Tube - managed to go one stop too far on the district line, so had to double back on myself before getting on the circle line


• Tube - missed a circle line train by 10 seconds, had to wait a fair while for the next


• Walking - walked straight past the MS building, and then carried on walking for 10 minutes before realising I was no longer 'right by the station', which were the directions I got given.


• Having to wait quite a bit for a security badge when I finally got to Microsoft offices

You might think, if you're being a bit generous to me, that 'right by the station' isn't much of a direction, so just to counter that, I should point out that I knew it was in Cardinal Place, clearly marked on maps in the station, and also it's not that hard to miss:



The meeting itself was actually pretty fun when I got there though - I finally got to spend some real time with my team so now I'm pretty sure I know which name lines up with which face, and that they're actually all real people, not just email addresses. What was more fun however, was the parts of the day outside of the meeting room...