A day in the life…

Time: 07:00

It's too bloody early in the morning. Look, it's not even light outside yet. I think "stuff it" and snooze the alarm a few times. Unfortunately, my E70 has the annoying hard-coded setting of a snooze only lasting 5 minutes, so the job requires at least five snoozes.

Time: 07:26

The irritatingly chirpy alarm tune on my phone gets very loud when left on its own. As a result, it eventually gets me out of bed. Actually, it usually makes me want to stop the alarm, and reset it 15 minutes ahead. Being one of my most favourite things, sleep is a very difficult thing for me to stop doing. Eventually I get out of bed once the news of it being a work day travels through my brain.

Time: 08:28

After a long shower to help wake up, this is the first thing I look at - the only easily visible clock from the door of my bathroom. Yes, I am a geek, and it's in binary. Surprisingly, it's easy to read in the mornings, despite what you may think, although some mornings all it says to me is that I am late. This morning, I probably am.

Time: 08:32

Bugger it, I won't walk to the metro station today, I'll grab the tram. Since I won this iPod Shuffle (I would never actually buy one), I've been using it as my busker protection device. Evil buskers. This thing has the ability to keep me asleep just enough to make public transport a breeze.

Time: 08:34

Okay, the weather is somewhat crappy, so maybe it's a good idea not to walk. You wouldn't be able to see it from the photo, but it's actually a really fine mist. I've found that Belgium is particularly good at drenching you in fine mist rather than torrential rain. Since the weather has been a little unusual this year, and it seems to be continuing: Where is the sleet?

Time: 08:39

Finally! Well, I say that now, but it was only a few minutes of waiting, really. The tram is less than half a minute's walk from home, so it truly is the lazy option. However, there are an awful lot of delays on that tram line of late, even though it's underground. I'm still half asleep, but amusing myself by piquing curiosity from bored tram riders.

Time: 08:40

I'm still asleep. The bloody escalators are closed again. I'm surprised that they can have escalators outside braving the extreme heat from the sun and the cold from the snow and ice, and yet they work flawlessly. What is it about escalators underground? Anyway, more sleep walking. I change at De Brouckère from the tram ("pre-metro") to the metro.

Time: 08:46

Still asleep. Metro arrives, finally. The STIB have had a lot of union related problems lately, again, so they keep threatening to go on strike. Second to that, I think they prefer running metros painfully slow. As per usual, some silly old cow and a bunch of Eurocrats barge their way onto the metro, ignoring the blaring message that plays every 10 minutes in three languages about standing to the side of the door to let people off the metro.

Time: 08:49

The metro at Arts-Loi gets quite full, particularly with Eurocrats and related plebs who can't walk down hill for five minutes to get to Maelbeek, where most of them alight. During the summer, you see Eurocrats get on with those weird fold-up bikes, even after they converted Rue de la Loi from five lanes to four to add huge bike lanes.

Time: 08:56

Uh oh, time to hide. Unfortunately Brussels is more like a village than a city - it's a very small community. Out the window at Montgomery is a former colleague from my previous place of employment, of whom I do not really wish to talk to again. I'm sure the feeling is mutual!

Time: 09:07

The time on the ticket readers at the metro told me I'm late, but I'll walk anyway. Walking to work is my way of getting some "fresh air" to help wake me up (mostly composed of life-giving diesel fumes). Ultimately, it's faster too. There are two busses I could catch to get to work, but the frequency and reliability of both has always been such that it's normally faster just to walk. Subsequently, I don't bother with them anymore.

Time: 09:12

Coming soon to a boulevard near me: The new Chinese embassy. They've been working on this building (previously owned by Hewlett-Packard) seemingly forever. Shame they can't shoot me for taking pictures of their incomplete building.

Time: 09:15

This bloody drive-way leading up to the entrance of our building gets slippery sometimes, and this is no exception. I hate this thing, but I can never be bothered sneaking in the back entrance (it's a whole extra 20 seconds walk, which I'm sure you'll agree is too much effort for the morning).

Time: 09:16

My highest priority in the morning once I arrive is to hit the coffee machine well before I reach my desk as a part of my efforts to fend off morning conversations from co-workers. I'm just not ready for communication beyond mumbling, and the effort is great. Coffee helps though. Perhaps I'm drinking too much of this stuff lately.

Time: 09:17

Umm, my department is missing. Even the boss hasn't arrived yet.

Time: 09:18

Plebs. That means I have to take care of the helpdesk until they arrive. I hate helpdesk. We're hopfully hiring another helpdesk guy early next year. I hate helpdesk. I'm not helpful, especially not in the morning. What do you want? Leave me alone. Did I mention I hate helpdesk?

Time: 09:24

Helpdesk jobs aside for today, the morning routine is generally to see if the geriatrics survived the night, and to check my email. Today the geriatrics were a little grumpy, but apart from an overnight glitch on the WAN, they're fine and just needed a small kick. My so-called geriatrics are a bunch of crappy HP servers that combine in some random semblance to form an ERP system. Because they have to work long hours and interact with dinosaurs in our American offices, they sometimes don't make it through the night.

Time: 09:43

The network guy finally arrives. He mumbles something. I say hello. This usually marks another trip to the coffee machine, and a chance to read the emails that were too difficult to digest during my first round. Technical documents hurt my brain in the morning.

Time: 11:00

Coding and testing. Today is the last day of a few projects, so it's time to get the little fiddly bits out of the way such as coding reports (ooh, how I hate doing them), and testing. This also means that the afternoon is to be filled with paperwork, and the evening filled with rolling-out code.

Time: 12:24

More Christmas presents arrive! Today it's chocolates from Denmark, courtesy of one of our contractors. They came in a much bigger (and much nicer) box than shown here, since we grabbed some for between ourselves and the balance was given to the rest of the company. They weren't too bad.

Time: 13:01

Around 1pm I get dragged off to lunch by the network guy and a mate that works downstairs in the marketing department. Most days we head up to a nearby university campus that's joined with a hospital, and take our pick from the limited number of shops there. We've started to become known as regulars now, to the point where slang names are recognised, and in some places our order is known before we even open the door. It's sad, but true.

Time: 13:09

The conversation we have during lunch is guaranteed to be utter tripe, as you would expect. We've fallen into a habit of taking turns to pay for lunch, and today's mine. I need cash. Normally I don't withdraw money from the bank, opting to use some form of EFT like Bancontact or Proton.

Time: 13:10

I was told to take a picture of this. For some reason, these two paving stones are the only ones with this marking. It's a mystery I don't care to solve.

Time: 13:14

The decision is made to go to the sandwich place. If you care, I ate a dagobert sandwich.

Time: 13:49

For some reason, this stretch of road on the way back to the office has offered us quite a large amount of wonderment. We have not yet, to our knowledge, encountered a day where we have not seen at least one car parked with a rear wheel on the pavement. People in this area have no idea how to park their cars. In the grand scheme of the universe, nobody would care, but when you have an hour to take your lunch break, you wind up switching your brain off to the point where this becomes interesting.

Time: 14:17

The paperwork starts. Nobody thinks about it, but one of the jobs of a corporate software engineer is inevitably paperwork. More paperwork is involved when you're working on a financial system and your company is listed in the USA. This is where sarbox kicks in, and where the pain begins. Compliance paperwork often takes a considerable amount of my project time. Sometimes I wonder how many billions of dollars are wasted because of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Time: 16:47

I start my afternoon slump and start contemplating life as the sun sets. Okay, honestly, I space out for a few minutes after the last bit of paperwork is submitted. I'm sure anyone else would do the same in my place.

Time: 17:57

The end of a long day; The network guy offers me a lift back to the metro station since it's (sort of) on the way to his place out in woop-woop. It's an offer I can never decline!

Time: 18:07

The metro back is normally fairly efficient.

Time: 18:10

The metro back is normally fairly quiet too. There is a major downside to this, in that buskers can easily come and go. It won't be long until one arrives.

Time: 18:12

Told you so. These guys never change their tune (no pun intended), typically playing the same three accordion songs collected between the roughly 15 of them. Each one has their own limited repertoire, and are never capable of starting or finishing a song properly. They just begin playing bits of songs and then ask for money. This works because people feel guilty if they don't give money, so there are a large number of people who always give money, and complain about buskers later.

Time: 18:21

At night when the weather isn't so bad I get off at Gare Centrale and walk back home through side streets, changing my route each time. The only problem is getting past the great unwashed and getting back up to street level, since this is a very busy station.

Time: 18:24

At the top of Place d'Espagne, there's a statue of Béla Bartók, but the tourists are generally too busy eating waffles to care. It's always empty around here.

Time: 18:25

Note to self: Go take pictures of the Christmas display on the Grand Place to keep Mum happy. The spire of the town hall always catches my attention, which is surprising since I see it all the time from my bedroom window - you'd think it would have become just another common sight by now.

Time: 18:26

Cyclocity is an interesting project I'm still yet to try. They basically have set up bike stands where you register and can rent a bike for very little money using their automated kiosks. The concept is great, but why they released it just before winter is beyond me. Maybe our friends at JCDecaux knew it was going to be a warm winter. Still, nobody's using it much at the moment.

Time: 18:29

What's going on? The tourists are usually swarming around the Manneken Pis. I was planning on making a comment about how the tourists seem to spend ages here, but that won't work now.

Time: 18:32

Ever since this property came on the market, I've been tempted to purchase it. However, it's been on the market for many months now, and I'm wondering if that's not because of a problem. If it's still on the market next year, I'm going to try to organise a visit to see what's going on, as I'm trying to see if I can purchase a small building with an existing income from rented apartments to offset a small mortgage.

Time: 18:34

Nearly home!

Time: 18:35

As depressing as it is, I need to check the mailbox for my dose of bills and junk mail. Today it's junk mail. It reads: Oh La La...! Deate uhse pabo. Voor iedereen boven de 18 jaar liggen er 2 sexy surprises klaar! This, of course, is Flemish for I belong in the yellow sack (thanks Louis).

Time: 18:37

Great, my fridge is empty. I forgot I needed to go to the GB. It's easy to forget when you realise how exciting supermarkets are.

Time: 18:45

Oooh, my local night-shop is tempting. I could pick up one of those great Dr. Oetker frozen pizzas (I can understand why they win awards, because for a frozen pizza, they're excellent). It's tempting, but I need to go shopping for real at some point...

Time: 18:47

The new Dexia Tower has been set up with thousands of little tiny multicoloured lights on each level, allowing them to display anything they want on the side of the building. Lately, it's been all stripy, like it's wrapped up or something. I'm hoping they do something good with this for new years. I've been watching it do its swirly plasma-like patterns for months now, so it's still odd to see it displaying something static. I don't think this photo does it justice.

Time: 18:52

The Christmas Market is a part of the wonders I mentioned earlier. It's interesting to note that most people that actually live in Bruxelles-Ville quip that the barriers are to keep the out-of-towners from escaping to the rest of the pentagon. I tend to agree. Bloody suburbanites!

Time: 18:59

Even at the supermarket, I can't seem to avoid bumping into colleagues.

Time: 19:07

There are really only two times to go to the supermarket. Wednesday nights are great because school kids escape education earlier in the afternoon, so all the housewives have already done their rounds. Friday nights are good because of "late night shopping"...

Time: 19:24

Nearly home! (again)

Time: 19:41

With all that unplanned mess over and done with, it's time to roll out new code into the ERP system at work. By now, nobody will be in the system, so it's a safe time to do the work, and it's better than hanging around there waiting for people to go home.

Time: 20:21

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, so my laptop's been pestering me every now and then to reboot. I finally let it.

Time: 20:24

With work dealt with, I decide it's time to continue watching Deadwood to help unwind. I'm starting to believe this is the best western I've ever seen. I'm becoming impressed with the quality of programming coming from HBO lately.

Time: 21:32

The beginning of planning for this post: Uploading the images (so far), along with deciding on a layout and format.

Time: 22:10

Hunger sets in, finally. I have a bad habit of eating late, and this doesn't help. Dishes. Bloody dishes. I've ignored the dishes for too long, time to sort that mess out before eating.

Time: 22:35

Feeling too lazy to cook something properly, the meal of preference defaults to my infamous toasted sandwich. Lazy student style food. Yum.

Time: 22:50

Yum!

Time: 22:58

Blogging while eating is difficult, and I'm addicted to Deadwood, so I start watching another episode. Hey, I couldn't resist! If you're really curious, I was watching episode 8 of season 2.

Time: 23:44

The rest of this entry's organisation gets worked on. By this stage, the realisation that this experiment would not realistically be done by the end of the week strikes me. It's an unfortunate fact that one day's post actually takes quite a long time to put together.

Time: 00:10

The last thing I see for the day. Goodnight!