Yesterday It occurred To Me……

…..that I don’t seem to exist any more.

You may wonder that I have rather to much too much time on my hands – this may be true, but the circumstances of this revelation were rather unfortunate, which I guess leads to unfortunate thinking.

I was laying in bed at roughly 3.30 am this morning, listening to the Emiratie door slamming contest that was going on in my particular part of the hotel.  This in itself was rather difficult to focus on over the noise of the large group who had arrived in the room next door to me and decided to conduct a “who could laugh and shout loudest” competition.  Whilst the sound of the phone ringing and the hotel’s Duty Manager banging on their door added only a little to the proceedings, it did bring about relative calm.  Unfortunately this calm simply led to a period of introspection fuelled by being as wide awake as a very wide a wake thing at 3.35 in the morning.

This introspection led to a number of conclusions – firstly, that I have no friends in the whole wide world.  This dramatic conclusion was reached in one of those roundabout use of bent facts to support even more spurious rumours and allegations – for instance, the fact that not one single person (apart from my favourite Aunt and a couple of brief Facebook exchanges, as well as some old people who don’t have a computer and I have been told by my wife that “so and so asked after you in church recently”) has bothered to open up any form of conversation with me in the last 2 months.  Not one e-mail, not one Skype message, no personal Facebook messages, nothing……..of course this is probably not strictly true and I can already hear the howls of indignation from all of those people who have been taking an “active” interest in my wellbeing, but just haven’t had enough time to actually do anything about it……but would have done, but have definitely been regularly asking about me.......etc.

I have had nearly 1,500 hits on my blog, so I know that someone is reading it…….I have no idea who, but then I’m not that fussed as long as someone is (I know my favourite Aunt is, because she sends me little messages every now and then) but last night it did occur to me that apart from my immediate family, nobody in the whole world cares whether I exist or not !  I can hear the sarcastic amongst you all going “aaaaahhhhhh” but I don’t care.

I think I’ll tell Mrs G not to tell anyone when I’m coming home unless they ask and then count up how many friends I actually have – it should be an interesting exercise in statistics !

Moving away from my early morning machinations, and back to some sort of reality, work is currently moving into a sort of nether world dominated by getting Arabic signatures on bits of paper.  Generally I haven’t had a problem up to now although we are stalled over a formal signature required to complete a phase.  Up to now there has been a requirement to “soft sign” things, which essentially means my client scribbling his signature across the bottom of a flow-chart, or a spreadsheet etc.  Last week I presented him with an official form and the whole thing has stalled – first he wanted the form in Arabic, then he wanted all of the attachments in Arabic and then he stopped answering the phone and returning e-mails.  The whole thing has been escalated up the chain of command (at which point I discover that the whole chain of command is clogged with the same problems across all sectors – we are starting to smell a “consolidated attempt to stall payment” rat……which isn’t my problem really, so I’m not going to expend any energy on something that’s not my problem or that I can’t affect !).  It remains to be seen whether this issue can be unblocked in time for me to actually carry out the 6 training sessions I have pencilled in for next week, or whether I can actually bring myself to care (although I suspect I already know the answer to that one………).

On the up-side, at least it’s quiet enough at work for me to write this when I’ve thought of something to write !

I think, as usual, I will sign off with an inventory summary –

Money – not much;

Food – same old same old;

Alcohol – the best part of a bottle of red last night as the crowds gathered on the terrace at about 10 for farewell drinks with a couple of well liked colleagues who are leaving us today/tomorrow;

Weather – hot (48deg yesterday) and getting hotter, and stickier;

Cigars – One big fat nice expensive one, last night, donated by one of the departing colleagues – I didn’t feel I could refuse……….

Gym – an hours circuit training in the park last night, which followed a 7.5k run through the desert on Tuesday.  In both cases with a rather subdued Psycho (she’d been all the way to Jersey for her brothers wedding, and back, in a weekend and, apparently, survived on an average of 2 hours sleep a night.  Either way, my running performance was spectacular (for me at least) and I matched here step for step doing circuits (right up to the very last exercise – Bastards, where I did the same number but couldn’t keep with her all the way to the end.  I hope she cheers up a bit……..I don’t like a grumpy Psycho, it’s like having  grumpy playschool teacher….it’s just not right !