This is a story of an average day in my life. It was today, in fact. Not all days are like this, but this is what happened today….
6:20am – the alarm goes off, and I hit the snooze button. It’s a 9-minute snooze, so I doze off again, hitting the snooze every now and again before getting up around –
6:40am – throw the covers off, stretching lazily on the bed. Stretching’s good for my back. You know, I realised something just the other day. Without Deidre (or anyone!) in the bed, I have a much more relaxing sleep, and I haven’t woken up with a sore back in quite a while. I think it’s because with another person in the bed I was forced to sleep in accommodating ways – which weren’t accommodating for my back. I guess it’s time to consider a King Size bed for future relationships, as Queen Size just doesn’t cut it.
6:44am – climb out of bed, throwing some trackpants and a dressing gown on. Ducted heating keeps the house around 17c overnight (it’s usually about -2c outside!), but it still feels cold… better than without the heating though! Grab the laptop from the floor next to the bed, where I’d put it the night before when I settled in to sleep, and wander out to the lounge room, putting the laptop on the couch.
6:45am – after going to the toilet, pour some cereal and milk for breakfast then sit down with the laptop, eating breakfast while browsing the email that came in overnight, and catching up on the past 8 hours of Twitter. Inspired to comment on Twitter, but decide it can wait until later. Start browsing Google Reader’s RSS feeds.
7:20am – by this time Ken’s finished his breakfast and ironed his shirt for work, and Deidre’s out of the shower and starting breakfast. My turn to iron my shirt.
7:30am – Ken’s gone to work, and I jump in the shower.
7:42am – showered, dressed, tie on, ready to go to work. Back the car out of the garage and down the driveway. Deidre’s waiting for me in her own car, parked on the street outside the house. She likes ‘driving to work together’. We usually try to beat each other on the drive, to be the first to get through peak hour traffic and into the carpark at work.
8:10am – after a nice drive to work, I end up getting there first, after having lost her due to traffic about 4 traffic lights back… She catches up quickly though, and we park together. I wasn’t happy with my tie, so I redo it in my reflection in the car window, and then join Deidre to walk across the road to work.
8:13am – about to enter the building, I remember that I forgot my security card. Redoing my tie broke my routine! I wish Deidre a good day, and go back to the car, getting the card, and then returning.
8:20am – I finally sit at my desk, log into the computer, and check email that’s come in overnight. (I have gmail forward copies of all email to my work address, so that I stay up to date with personal email even from work.) I delete all the gmail that came in overnight, and browse work email, responding to whatever needs responding. I start Twhirl, my Twitter application, and quickly check the messages that came in since I left home. I check my calendar for today’s meetings, and then start completing some Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) I’ve been working on.
9:30am – I take a break and go for a walk to the cafeteria, getting a carton of iced coffee, my favourite drink.
9:40am – I remember what I was inspired to write on Twitter, and send it: ‘if you miss something important and never know about it and life goes on regardless, was it really that important?’ I get a few replies from people who talk about how if it’s really important, it’ll come around again until I see it. No one seems to get that I’m talking about the tree falling in the forest….
11am – I’ve completed the OLA stuff I was working on, and start looking at how to improve the online discussion and information storage of my Saturday night D&D game. I decide that creating a wiki is the way to go, so I investigate a good wiki provider. Find one, and start playing around with it.
11:45am – lunch time. I go to the nearby cafe / restaurant (different to the internal cafe) and get some pasta with dried tomatos, chicken and bacon in a nice creamy sauce. Wasn’t very hungry, so I asked the counter lady to only put half in the small container. She looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I am, but unlike most people who try to get as much as they possibly can for the money they’re spending, I just knew how much I wanted to eat. Eat lunch at my desk while reading Twitter, finishing off my RSS feeds in Google Reader, and playing around a bit more with the wiki.
1pm – have a meeting with a consultant who’s been brought in for an ITSM (IT Service Management) audit. I’ll be working with him over the next couple of weeks to learn from him and to assist him in what he’s doing, which is discovering what the organisation needs to do to become ITIL compliant. He’s a nice guy, with a lot of service management experience, so I’m looking forward to what I can learn from him.
2:40pm – head off to another meeting at another building, about 10 minutes away. Along the way a guy in a Ford Force 6 is behind me, so I play with him by accelerating hard away from him. He’s in a playful mood, I see, as he accelerates to catch up. All good fun, then I turn off into another street and pull up outside the building I need to be at.
2:55pm – i call the Director I’m having a meeting with and discover he’s the one standing outside having a coffee. He lets me in, as I don’t have my own security pass for that building, and we go up to his office. I ask him all the questions I need to know to understand the service his section provides within the organisation, so that I can write it up into a Service Catalogue for the OLA I’m working on. Meeting finishes and I head back to my own work place.
3:40am – grab another iced coffee from the internal cafe as I head to my desk. I start writing up the notes I took into a formatted Service Catalogue, and then I start working on putting all the Service Catalogues together into an OLA.
4:45pm – I fill out a credit card authorisation form and fax it off to the hotel I’ll be staying at in a couple of weeks in Sydney. I’ll be catching up with my friend Amanda for the first time since 2005. She’s an old love interest of mine, and I think there might still be something there, so we’re going to see where we’re at. At the very least, it’ll be good catching up with an old friend.
5pm – I revisit the wiki and tidy up some of the information I’d put there. Discover that one of the players of my game has joined as a member, which is good.
5:30pm – Ken and Deidre are going out with Peter for dinner and red wine tasting. I can’t stand red wine, so I’m not going. Organised with my friend Nick to catch up with him for dinner instead.
5:40pm – home time. I head home for the day.
6:10pm – arrive home, chill out on the laptop at home. Watch a bit of Foxtel (cable TV) with Ken and Deidre.
7pm – Peter arrives, they all head out for their evening. I watch a bit more Foxtel.
7:15pm – I head out to pick up Nick, and we head into town to go to an asian noodle house. They do good food.
7:40pm – we get a seat. It’s noisy, busy. I think I ordered the wrong food, but I couldn’t remember if they screwed up my order or I just ordered the wrong thing. Meh. It was ok, but I won’t be getting it again (battered and honeyed prawns on crispy noodles). The fried rice was good though.
8:40pm – wandered over to Cream, a trendy cafe where we ordered some hot chocolates and continued our conversation.
9:30pm – took Nick home, then went home myself. Had a quick phone conversation with Amanda on the way, who requested some Reiki healing. (Did you know I’m a Level 2 Reiki practitioner? Now you do.)
10:30pm – phoned Alex in the UK, just to surprise him. I think it worked. And it had nothing to do with the fact that we agreed to write a blog post about our day.
11:25pm – finished writing up this day in the life of me. I hope you enjoyed it. You can read here the last time I wrote about a day in the life of me. Maybe it’ll be another 5 years before I do another one….
Have a great day!
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