A Good Omen

21 December - Woke up to the rain again this morning which is never very nice but one thing the rainclouds do seem to do is insulate. It was about ten degrees when I first went outside and by the time I got to town it was around twelve. In fact, it was so warm that I had to take off my tights before I even started working (overstuffing my bag before I even started but the fact was that it was not uncomfortably cold at all. This unexpectedly pleasant climate (it was still raining admittedly, and pretty hard at times) may have been indicated by the white cat that ran across my way when I was riding in to work. I'm not a suspicious man, I don't believe in evil omens but I do like to indulge in good ones (maybe that’s why i'm such an upbeat guy) - if it's bad luck for a black cat to cross your path then it must be good luck for a white one to. Very busy and weighed down a few times during the day. According to the dispatcher the worst thing the company ever did was let customers place their own orders over the internet, rather than via a caller - customers, through laziness or malice, are always put things down as weighing a pound no matter whether it is an envelope, a horse-sized gift basket or a bag of cement (which one of our guys actually had to move today). Quite a few times when I turned up to a pickup I would have to decline it because it was too big or I’d have to get very creative in getting it on the bike with me (i've tied bags to my bag, balanced boxes on the handlebars, thrown out excess packaging and today I got a woman to quite deftly shave two inches off the height of a box and then remake it while I waited - still too big in the end though). I wrote up a little tutorial on programming the radios to give to the other bikers. THe radios we have only have the dispatch number set up by default and all communication between the bikers has to go through the dispatch. It's not often that we do need to speak to each other but sometimes we do (for rendesvous, queries about sites etc) and we can't. Not wanting to write the thing up eight times I thought, in the spirit of the season, i'd abuse one of the photocopiers of a regular client - it's hardly a huge ask, and I asd very nicely. I went to one that I go to regularly, thinking I could leave it with them and i'd get it back later in the day because I knew i'd be back at that site within the hour. The receiptionst seemed a bit perplexed by my request but said it would be no problem. I came back half an hour later to drop something - not done; I came back two hours later to pick something up - still not done. Two hours after that - oh, I have to give it to someone from the printing department in order to get it photocopied. Well, if it was going to be any trouble you could have just told me at the beginning, couldn't you??? There's no shortage of buxome receptionists in this town who'd be happy to do it on the spot or angrily tell me where to go I could find one who could do it on the spot. Anyway, hopinh to be able to pick it up tomorrow for distribution to my colleagues. Poured down later in the afternoon, my feet were n pools of water in my shoes. Still, pretty good day regardless - the white cat never fails.