Once again....

- I had a totally unexpected email from an old schoolfriend yesterday - she'd tracked me down through friendsreunited.com. I didn't recognise her name at first, because I always knew her as Sarah B___, and this email was from Mrs Sarah W___. I knew she was married - heck, I even attended her wedding reception back in 2000! - but it's still odd to see your childhood friends with different names (and titles).

She's now at University doing a PhD, which I really admire her for because she dropped out of school when we were 17-18 to have a baby. She later married her daughter's father. However, it seems (from her email) that they're no longer getting along. She says she's going to try and keep the marriage together for her daughter's sake until the kid is 18 (she's 7 now), which I think is terribly sad - but then I have no idea how bearable her situation is. But I do know that that's what my ex's parents did - his Dad waited until their youngest son was at University, then announced that he'd been having affairs for years and was now leaving his wife. That tore my ex and his brother to pieces because they were mortified that their Dad had been "living a lie" for so long.

I remember when my friend told me she was getting married her main reason for it seemed to be that she wanted to have the same name as her daughter when her daughter started school, which I thought was a slightly weird reason for getting married. Well, there you go. She'd read my blog, which has a bit about my mother and her "hat?" questions, and told me in her email that I'm right not to want to get hitched. She says that if she could do it all over again, she would have still had her baby but would never have got married at all.

Depressing news, all in all.

And it's really scary to think that someone I went to school with, and who the same age as me, has a kid who'll turn 8 this year. Yikes!

- Work have, startlingly, offered me overtime if I have to work any weekends this month. That'll be me working all of them, then...

- I had the sort of meeting yesterday that makes me glad I'm leaving. 3 members of senior management having a go at each other, while 3 more junior staff sit around fidgeting awkwardly not knowing where to look. It seems that the business people have been really successful and have secured a glut of work for the company. Unfortunately, they've secured more than we can possibly do, and they've promised it to all the clients with unworkable deadlines. So we got the head of the French office yelling at Cunty Boss^TM that he couldn't understand why the work can't be done because we have "all these developers sitting upstairs", while CB yelled back saying that yes, we have quite a few people but they're not interchangeable and they don't do the same job. The sort of work they're secured is work on myself and two of my colleagues really know how to do (being front-end developers, while the rest of the staff are more back-end people). We've been trying to train a couple more guys in what we do, but to be frank, they're just not willing to learn. Anyhow, that's not really my problem any more (!)

Then the CTO opened the door to the meeting room and yelled at my line manager because something had been verbally promised to a client and wasn't going to be delivered on time. My line manager had no idea about this verbal promise.

Meanwhile, I tried not to smirk too obviously and wrote "I'm so glad I'm leaving!!" repeatedly in my notebook.

- I am going to see Anthrax in March, apparently. A friend from University is going with his band and wants me to come along as well. I have no idea if I even like Anthrax...