At home for the second time this week. On Tuesday I worked from home on purpose, as things in the office were quiet and I needed to do some stuff on a side-project web site.

Today however, Isaac woke up with a whopping 39.5 temperature. This managed to coincide with the work computer system being very ill indeed (database refusing connections: “No. I’m not going to connect you. I don’t like you. Go away.”) Thanks to some medicine the temperature has gone down somewhat, and thanks to some DBA magic the database is being nice again, but I’m home for the day.

Thanks to the miracle of computer networks and modern telephony, I am able to do a large proportion of my work from home. Sometimes it’s a curse, sometimes it’s a blessing.

Ah, the joys of working from home. Last night 9pm deployment, then conference call until (yawn) 1am as things on a related system went a little askew.

This morning, more of the same. Monitoring systems on one screen, blogging on another, listening to conference call on speakerphone/mute. If things calm down a bit later, maybe I can catch up on sleep. And the washing-up.

The ATO isn’t playing nice anymore. Okay, so I admit I haven’t been sending in their infuriatingly frequent monthly forms on time.

(When the government introduced GST, they trumpeted it would be a simpler tax system. What they meant was simpler for them. Not so simple if you’re one of the Cursed who now has to fill in a form every month.)

So far I’ve got away with the late forms, the only result being a terse note along the lines of “This time we’ve decided not to fine your arse. This time.”

But now they have cracked it and… well, fined my arse. $220 no less. $110 per 28 day period (or part thereof).

This month’s damn form is going in a week early.

Over the years, I’ve grown to like tea immensely. I’ve moved from not liking tea, to liking bog standard teabags, to preferring particular types of teabags such as Irish Breakfast, to being in a state of distress when there’s no leaf tea in the house.

The tea at work has generally been a few steps behind, with corporate policy apparently favouring the coffee drinkers (who, to be fair, are probably in the majority). But a couple of weeks ago, someone in a position of power brought a blessed gift to the tea drinkers in the office: a whole range of different teabags in little jars: the standard Liptons, a green tea, a couple of herbals, and miracle of miracles, my old former favourite, Irish Breakfast tea.

(Herbals aren’t actually tea, of course. No, they go by the official name “Herbal Infusions”, a phrase that reminds me of Kryten in Red Dwarf describing eggs as “boiled chicken ovulations.”)

Within days, the Irish Breakfast jar was empty, and a chat with a fellow tea-drinker revealed I was not the only Irish Breakfast tea fan present. No wonder the dozen or bags had gone so quickly. We bemoaned the lack of strength in the other teabags.

But last week, seeking my morning cuppa and resigning myself to having to have one of the Liptons, what should I find? A brand spanking new box of 250 100 Twinings Irish Breakfast teabags.

From all the tea drinkers, all praise to whoever is responsible.

Yesterday I took the day off to organise my taxes. Apart from the long trip down to see the accountant (out in the wilds of suburbia), it was also worthy of a day off because of the time required to find all the little bits of paper involved. Having found them all, it slowly dawned on me that I’d made a massive mistake on the monthly ATO forms I’d been sending in (yeah that’s the kind of stuff you’re lumbered with when you have a business, even if it’s just a shelf-company for contracting through).

Fortunately my very jovial accountant just chuckled at my stuff-up and said he’d fix it all up for me. And I promised to fill them in correctly this year.

Was so busy at work today that my tea got cold.

Thank goodness the weekend has arrived.

I’ve got the day off.

I’ve got the day off.

I’ve got the day off.

And you probably haven’t.

Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.

A couple of the blokes in the office today dared to try what I wouldn’t yesterday: to re-load the photocopier toner. I knew if I tried it I’d end up struggling with it for half an hour before scattering that lovely black toner all over the carpet. So I went and did my photocopying on the fax machine instead.

Whereas these two… well, they only struggled for about ten minutes, before scattering lovely black toner all over the carpet. Oops. But at least the photocopier works again now.