If there's one thing that really drives me nuts these days, it's that my mail keeps going missing. As I said before, I live in a fine old, somewhat dilapidated Victorian tenement building in Glasgow, with a controlled door entry system. Unfortunately, that also means if nobody is in the building when the postman finally turns up, nobody gets their mail. I'm particularly cranky about this at the moment because I just got an email from my publishers telling me they tried to send a cheque for not a huge amount (towards the cost of my hotel bill at a recent convention), and had it returned ... saying I was no longer at this address. Excuse me for shouting, BUT YOU COULD HAVE FOOLED ME.
Granted, it doesn't help there isn't actually a hole in the door for the mail to be shoved through, and that's a problem I hope I might not have to deal with for too much longer, fates willing, but still ... it's not just that. It's other things. Like - a couple of weeks ago Mandy came into the flat and found the mail for the entire close - that's about six flats - bundled up with an elastic band and shoved through our door. Gee, lucky we're not the kind of people who revel in looking through other people's mail, eh? What the hell else got shoved through somebody else's door that was addressed to me that I don't know about?
Ach.
At work, we finally got a new Mac in for doing work. I have discovered new levels of disrespect for the man I work for. It has come to my attention that even after fifteen years in the business, his understanding of computer technology has come to this:
Part-time employer: those files you were working on yesterday. Look at this. They've all been deleted from the folder. Where are they? (Points abruptly at folder on old G3 desktop computer running OS9).
Me: (leaning over employer's shoulder). You have to scroll up.
Employer: Scroll what?
Me: Scroll up. You've scrolled all the way down. The files are at the top. (move mouse over scroll bar, and scroll up. Files magically reappear).
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years.
Ok, yes, he doesn't need to be a whiz with computers, he's a businessman. However, he has the ego of an emperor and the attention span of a gnat. This isn't idle boss-slagging, it's a serious problem. Now, I'm not exactly a member of the Green Party, but I'm at least environmentally conscious enough to at least feel guilty about my lifestyle, and I know just how much of a no-no it is pouring absolutely toxic waste chemicals down the sink in the kitchen as opposed to phoning the people who are supposed to come and take it away and dispose of it appropriately. Now, I could go and work for someone else, but the last printers I worked at turned out to be a bunch of notorious ex-forgers who'd been sent up for twenty years each and got out after six months on a technicality, and whom I ceased working for when I realised that, although they weren't printing money any more, at least two people who dropped round on a regular basis got named in a local newspaper's 'name your heroin dealer' campaign a couple of years back.
Hang on ... isn't this blog supposed to be about writing?
Well ... nothing very exciting at the moment, I'm afraid. I'm in the middle of a long, hard type-editing slog, which will take a minimum of at least another month, by which time - hopefully - Angel Stations will be in a finished, publishable state, all ready for the printing presses next year.
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