A Lucid Moment

A busy day yesterday. I got up bright and early to borrow a car from the lovely sjkasabi so that I could go shopping for my own. It turned out that the model that showed itself to be value for money at the price range was the late 90ish Holden Astra. I was looking at other things as well but in the end, party due to time constraints, test drove only two cars. The first was rather nice at first glance. A pleasing green and with a few extra bells and whistles. Once I started driving it though I immediately had a bad feeling about it - it really didn't quite feel right. I said non-committal things and continued on my way. At another car yard I found another Astra that was very nearly identical, albeit with few extra features. The main difference though was that it drove so very differently that I realised just how decrepit the first one had been and how mechanically good this second one felt. I did the usual round of driving tests and checked carefully for rust and accident damage (also remarkably clean in that regard) and promptly decided that this one was mine.

So I'm now very nearly the happy owner of a 1999 dark blue Holden Astra. I couldn't quite get a bank cheque on the day so my current plan is to get one tomorrow and then take that out to Mum's place (she lives just around the corner from the car yard) and see if she can't pick up the car on Tuesday. I can then drop by on the Tuesday evening and pick it up and still be on time for derby training as that doesn't start until 9pm.

It's been a long time since I've been car shopping, either for myself or anyone else. I don't think there's been anything that's come close to pointing up the differences in how I get treated these days. Secondhand car salesmen are generally not the most sophisticated of beasties and I was thoroughly bemused by just how remarkably different the experience was. It was occasionally hilarious...the first car didn't want to start and he tried to excuse it by saying that he'd accidentally flooded it. I pointed out that this was unlikely given that it's fuel injected and so has no throttle pump and delivers no fuel when the engine isn't running. The mixture of confusion and slight panic on his face was remarkable and I had to try awfully hard not to smirk at him. So there was a strange blend of solicitousness and condescension threaded through the whole experience. I realise that this is par for the course but there's still a great deal of novelty and validation in this for me so fascination still usually wins out over annoyance. I'm sure this will change and there were a couple of points when I didn't look half as closely at the contents of a car yard as I might have because the salesman seriously put me off.

Pleased with myself I headed off to derby. We didn't have training as such as it was fresh meat induction. 23 women turned up to have a go and I saw some real promise there, both amongst those who clearly already had some skating skills and the utter novices. A couple of them picked up suggestions that I made and integrated them really well despite being very uncertain on skates. I had some good chats with a few of them during the afternoon as well so I think Northside is going to gain some fantastic new members out of this group. After a couple of drinks at the Raccoon Club I headed home in a thoroughly good mood.

Today was spent servicing my sleep debt (which sounds so much better than "sleeping in" and does actually have an element of truth in it) and doing laundry. I have cooked very little lately so I went shopping and now have a bubbling pot of noms on the stove that I'm just about to have a bowlful of. I had an odd moment at the supermarket when the woman behind me at the checkout starting physically picking through my shopping on the conveyer belt at the checkout making comments about imported produce. Weird but in the end not worth getting invested in so I paid for my shopping and just left.

This week marks the end of my secondment at work. I have Monday and Tuesday as my final days in that department and then back down to the contact centre on Wednesday. I really don't want to go back to the phones. The couple of short stints i did last week have reinforced this. Still, I get the impression that it's only a matter of time until I go back to business support. There was a departmental meeting on Friday and several people said really nice things about me and my work so if there's another opening up there I suspect that any expression of interest from me will be viewed favourably. Also, if things go to usual form, I'm also likely to get a degree of priority for other alternative duties. I may not like the work in the contact centre overmuch but I like the people and the company so for now I think it's time to suck it up and bide my time. The security and stability that this employer provides means that I'd have to be offered something an great deal better even to consider changing.