I feel pretty chipper right now, having just whacked the corp-provided LAN connection into Toy and gotten ‘100Mbps’ back, on top of an evening of beer and pizza down by the pool, this could be harsher.

Of course, the harsh is in the form of ‘all my posessions bar some clothes and deoderant are in customs limbo’ and ‘my coworkers have politics’ and ‘the water can keeeel’ but frankly if it was easy then there would be no bragging rights. This is the utter, sine-wave opposite of my thought pattern at ~3pm which was “$%^ing why should I carry both my colleague and my boss? Why am I here? If I quit now, can I get my stuff shipped back out of customs?” but then, I have to remember that… um… that… well actually I’m still a little fuzzy on the ‘why’ and ‘what *is* the point’. Its sort of a race of attrition against ‘my patience’ versus ‘my mortgage’ and one or the other is going to wear down first.

The Super Plus Bonus Case scenario is that I get to work/take a six day week which doubles my holidays and pushes me into a quasi-rotation work pattern with four return flights and 4 weeks off a quarter - or if my boss is twitchy as reputed, he won’t like month long absenses (sp?) so it’ll have to be five sets of 3 week vacations. Which, while grim, would be survivable.

My coworkers are .. interesting. The French are sworn adherents of ‘misery loves company’ and delight in detailing the various horrors and futility of work at the corp. While personable and otherwise very nice and welcoming, were I not the iron willed individual you all know and put-up-with then I’d be very disheartened. Thankfully, once I can take a step back I become happier - the ‘truth’ as it is being revealed is close enough to the ‘low case’ scenario that I’d reckoned was quite probable. This is ok.

Hell, if I can stream The Dead Flags frankly, I don’t have great problems.

So, really the ’sprint’ started last weekend and frankly, I fucked it up. I left my phone charger in the flat, I’m sending letters to cancel/redirect credit card statements back to Europe in other peoples luggage, I have a dire lack of cleansing agents beyond soap which is more tiresome than you’d think. I did manage the macros - flat is emptied of major furniture bits and has been leased, I’ve landed, corpus intactus. Customs was less of an ordeal than I feared, positive attitude and willingness not to be buffaloed will get you through with all your stuff and without bribery.

My bug spray appears to be superfluous, I haven’t seen a single winged insect since arriving. DDT, its magic. I need to source more anti-malarials just in case.

Entertaining detail to trap the amateurs - Nigeria uses UK standard sockets - but the compound of course uses continental plugs. Had I not been a paranoid soul and checked during my look-see, god knows I’d be here now with 4 hrs battery time on my laptop from now to November. As it is my phone is a paper weight, but never mind, I’ll have skype once my headset clears customs.

I was gruesomely sick on the way down here - something I ate in Aberdeen, I didn’t even have a super pish up leaving spree - which has, oddly, put kind of a shine on things here - “hey, maybe everything else is crowsfeet, but at least I can hold food down”. Ill wind and all that :)

I’ve had one brave soul call me out on ‘mi casa su casa’ Port Harcourt. Many threatened, few arrived for Aberdeen, I wait to see what happens here :)

Oddly - without listening to my iPod for a couple of days, my mental playlist has become ‘74-75′ by the Connells, ‘Blue Heaven is a place on Earth’ by someone, I don’t know, and one other that I’m not picking up right now. Odd - a full early 90’s playlist. Obviously all those years listening to NWR FM ground in deeper than all hope of removal…

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