Birthdays, challenges and trains

Living on the other side of the world to the family can be frustrating at time. Today is one the birthday of our youngest grandson, and important birthday, he is five years old today. I would love to call and sing him the birthday song. We have a tradition started years ago by my own father, of phoning up and singing the song, never very melodically and often out of tune. On purpose of course. But he will have already gone to school, knowing him he would have been up early so excited to go. Oh well I guess we will have to wait until the morning our time.

I’ve had a very busy day today, not that I was expecting it not to be. Late Friday afternoon my colleague and I discovered that on Monday, today, we were expected to be at an event organised by head office. Not only that the equipment we were expected to be using, that we had never seen or used before wasn’t going to arrive until just before the event was about to start.   Roll forward a little and there we are a the event and having a lot of problems with the equipment and feeling as though the impression we are giving is not one of efficiency, but one of incompetence. By the end of the event, a couple of hours later, we were running well and the clients were very forgiving and understanding. When we repeat the event at a different site tomorrow we will feel a whole lot more confident.

Roll forward even further too home time and I arrive at Canary Wharf Station to discover a fairly large queue on the platform which is down two flights of escalators. Within minutes there is an announcing saying that the entry down to the platform has been temporarily halted for safety reasons to prevent overcrowding.  There is often a bit of a queue which means that two or three trains come and go before the line was reduced enough for me to get on. The man was waiting for me at the next station, Canada Water, but there were significant delays there too. So we set plan b into action. Back down the escalator to the Jubilee Line and get the next rain to London Bridge and just catch, by two minutes, the Southern to Crystal Palace, getting us home only half an hour later than normal. Easy peasy lemon squeasy.