Movement
I got my new HSBC card this morning. It was rather complicated. I don't know what it is about the banks in this country, but they seem to have a lot of trouble dealing with the most basic requests. For a business that deals with keeping people's money and then giving it back to them, they were very flummoxed on Friday by the concept of me making a withdrawal. It took 20 minutes and a long consultation with her manager before the cashier finally agreed to give me some money from my account. I don't think I was being at all unreasonable - I had my account details and my passport - she just seemed bewildered by the idea of giving me money instead of taking it from me. It was a similar problem this morning with the bank card, and then they told me the PIN number would have been sent to my house, despite the fact that they refuse to send anything to my house while I'm on a passport account. Of course, as it turns out after half an hour or so, they never changed my PIN anyway when I cancelled the card, and my old one worked just fine with the new card.....
argh.
Work was strange today, I was very busy most of the day with just one case (normally they take less than an hour each) and I've a feeling that despite my best efforts it's still going to come back and bite me in the ass. I'm not sure if, being new, I just haven't quite got the hang of how things work, or if, me being new, the people who are sending me stuff are being lazy and dumping more work on me than they really should. I'm not at the point yet where I can really complain about it, so I'm just doing my best for the moment. If it all goes pear-shaped, I'm not going to be too hard on myself, anyway.
J visited for the weekend, which was great. We stayed in a cheap little hostel just behind Piccadilly Circus, and had a great time just hanging around. We went back to Genki's house on Sunday afternoon and I had my first attempt at making chicken maki, and I have to say I was pretty pleased with the result. J reckoned that apart from being a bit softer, it was just like the ones we used to get at Aya, which is high praise indeed from him, since he's very fussy about his food and doesn't mince his words!
I'm definitely feeling recharged after the weekend; odd but nice. On the one hand, part of me disapproves of feeling more 'whole' after the time we spent together, but on the other hand the overall feeling of wellbeing is hard to ignore, and is undeniably pleasant. We assured each other that we had each missed the other immensely, and pre-reminisced about the great time we're going to have over the next few weeks, since we're both going to be staying in the Generator, and will be together 4 days out of 7.
Wow, I must really be in a good mood, every time I tried to type 'cut' (for lj-cut) it came out 'cute'. This is a definite improvement on my normal typos, which tend to turn 'regards' into 'retards' and 'rate' into 'rage' ;)