Too busy to blog ...

Oooh - I feel all bereft when I don't get the opportunity to have a quick catch up with all my on-line cyber friends and bloggers. But I have had a lovely day off today and thought it only polite and prudent to ask "How are you all"?

A day off what, you may ask? Well, a few days off my usual habits of sitting on my arse surfing the net and pondering what cuisine delight to muster up from the depths of my newly tiled kitchen, while lamenting at the lack of bank balance with which to buy said supper. I have momentarily entered the world of employment! Drum roll please. But just a little one.

Well - it is rather a shock to the system, I must admit, but I have been working for the past couple of weeks. I know - scary - dirty word, work! The temping agency that I signed up with a few weeks ago have been throwing days of employment at me, here and there. I am flitting in and out of the corporate world. And it feels weird. But nice weird, in a kind of "useful" way.

So I have been holding the admin fort at several companies these past three weeks, as the secretaries and receptionists of Calgary are dropping like proverbial H1N1 infected flies.

Da na! Me, to the rescue!

I have both hated and loved the early mornings. The 6am alarm call is a mighty rude awakening, but at the opposite end of each day, I am sleeping like a very dead log. As I have travelled from home each early morning, eastwards towards the city, I have been witness to some of the most amazing and breath-taking sun rises. And each day, of course, I forget to take a camera with me. D'oh! So just take my word for it that oranges, purples and reds are currently doing the rounds beautifully in Alberta these days.

Ah - commuting. I had forgotten about the masses of people that rush from one end of the city to the other in the pursuit of careers and remuneration. I had forgotten about the millions of vehicles clogging up the arteries of the city, and of the trains and buses filled to bursting point as human beings commence their ant-like coverage of the streets and pour out into little bustling lines of go-to attitudes. And I had forgotten all about stilettos. Yep - those pointy and ridiculously thin-heeled shoes that young females totter about offices wearing. I am sooooo out of fashion. May Trinny & Susannah, Stacey & Clinton smite me down.

And gadgets. C'mon people! What happened to a good old fashioned paperback as your commuting companion? You know the thing - you start on page one on a Monday morning, and you read it on and off all week, and then go and buy, borrow or steal another one?

(That's what I am reading at the moment)

I felt positively ancient, pathetic and invisible as I had neither white ipod earplugs stuffing up my hearing, nor was I able to text/email/surf on my Blackberry/funky phone/laptop for the 14 minutes that I sat upon the C-train. How did I cope? Well, actually, it was quite fun to just people watch and sky watch and traffic watch. I always was a nosey bugger.

It's a strange thing to walk into a new office and slip into someone else's space for a day or three. Sometimes people have a "Temps" crib sheet - what to do, what buttons to press and where the nearest coffee is located. Other offices - and bosses especially - are pretty clueless about what the absent employee actually does or where and how they do it. But I don't mind at all, in fact I think this could be a new career for me. A temp career being a temp! I'm good at assessing situations and needs quickly and I'm dead polite on a phone. What else do you need?

Anyway - so that is why I have been somewhat absent and lacking in uploading pretty pictures to my blog. I am currently studying the internal workings of some large establishments and employers with a view to getting me one of them thar jobs, after which I will be careful to leave a crib sheet for the temp for when I go off sick with H2N2 next year.