One is from Sutton Coldfield, *not* Birmingham

Staying in one place is rather boring, wouldn't you agree? I'm in London at the moment, as I didn't get to go to TechEd in Barcelona, but I still owe you a blog post about the rest of my time in Birmingham before I can move on to what's been happening in Reading.

Just kidding, nothing ever happens in Reading.

So after a Friday night rediscovering the joys of Mah-Jong with the old team (Tim, Terra & Julie-oh) I popped online to make my cryptic post about: Vodka espressos, broken bones, job offers and inappropriate clothing.... I've elaborated on three of those by now, and I'm afraid the last, broken bones, isn't that dramatic to be honest.

Julie-oh had something big fall on her hand whilst at work, and ended up in a bunch of pain. She then (probably) put some eye-make up on her hand to simulate bruising and claimed breakage, in order to get tea brought to her in the morning.

We popped along to A&E in Sutton Coldfield, where I got to see a bunch of the NHS software I've been working on in practical use, which was actually extremely interesting and pretty useful for me. Julie was in and out of the entire place within an hour, with an X-Ray giving her the all-clear. The lesson here is; if you want prompt, efficient and friendly medical service, go to the posh part of town.

I was also quite amused by the fact that she was admitted to the Minor Ailments ward as a non-priority, and even within there had a pink folder, which I presume means less serious than blue folders - carried by those who were bleeding. Other amusement came from the bullying leaflet, which put 'being left out' on a par with 'being attacked because of ethnic origin'.

We also found an open-air market in Sutton which was awesome, and full of great little handmade trinkets. Highly recommended if you can find it again, some of you'll be having your birthday presents coming from there :)

Anyhow, back to this meeting.

Xx

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Vaguely related picture of the day (I mentioned drama) - Microsoft's internal tools are apparently designed by someone with a bit of a flair for the theatrical. If ever anything goes wrong with this particular tool (in this case, a group wasn't found), you get an amusingly hyperbolic error message:


_{I dread to think what message comes up if a server goes down}