Five Things I'll Miss... No really, I am sure there must be five things I'll miss

I'm not actually leaving until next Friday, but tonight we are out straight after work for my leaving do.  A dress-down day has been decreed in honour of the event, and, as the clock winds down towards 5:07PM first-drinks-order time, an atmosphere of heady conviviality, bordering in some quarters on mutinious hysteria, reigns across the desks.  Let's admit it: I will miss these laid-back Friday afternoons on the flange team. And over the last nine years in this place (for all that I occasionally compare my working routine unfavourably to that of a New York Grill Guy)  I have built up a certain fondness for certain other aspects of my workaday experience.  Time to gaze out of the window at the Mancunian Way traffic making its early weekend escape for the suburbs, and try to reflect on what exactly it is that I'll miss.....

1/ working in the town centre.  My new work sees me stationed in a dormitory suburb towards the far western reaches of the Metropolis.  I'll need to catch two trains to get there (one into town, and one out again).  Where currently a five-minute wander might take me to the edge of Manchester's thriving Chinatown and its array of roast pork buns and £6.00 all-you-can-eat businessman's lunches, a similar peregrination from my new office will take me, I imagine, to a newsagents.   

2/ The screens.  Putting your cursor in the action field and pressing 'z' then 'enter' will take you to the screen showing lead times against orders.  Move the cursor down to one of the orders, press F24, and you're in the enquiry screen- from there it's just a short hop (via F10) to a further screen giving full invoicing detail.  After nine years of daily navigation (I've designed flowcharts and everything), the plan of the flange order management screens is as imprinted on my memory as the map of the streets where I spent my childhood.  I suspect that, long after I have forgotten how a cut down Convent Lane would take you to the Fenham Library, I will still regale fellow inmates of a south Manchester resthome on how 's' for select then F11 took you to the shipment screen. 

3/the bike ride here.  I've got it all worked out- you dive off the A6 at the earliest opportunity, cut through leafy West Point, and within a minute you are floating diagonally across wide-open Birchfields Park on the way towards the university district.  Every morning in the park I take the bend after the brook just a little bit too fast and very nearly avoid decapitating a Yorkshire terrier belonging to one of two Miss Jean Brodie-esque old ladies taking their regular morning constitutional.  They never seem to mind.

4/ the erudite football conversation.  On the morning after a big game (an international, say, or a big European tie involving United) the unwritten rule on our (male-dominated) desk is that no work can be undertaken until a thorough post-mortem of the previous night's televised action has been completed.  On close-season afternoons (such as this one) the onset of work can be similarly delayed by a review of the latest transfer movements, segueing into an in-depth and knowledgeable dissection of the career to date of former Newcastle United striker Carl Cort.  If there was any justice in the world we wouldn't have to put on orders for flanges at all, as Radio Five Live would have signed us up by now for an hour-long sportstalk each working day. Come to think of it, has anyone got their number?

5/ the customers.  No, not really.  Not most of them anyway.  But I did say I'd give you five things I'd miss, and as the last-minute Friday afternoon orders are starting to pile up, I'd better get on with a couple of them before they start to threaten delaying the first drink beyond 5:07 prompt (or the second one beyond 5:21).  Now then.... command 'order' takes me to order entry, override the notes screen (you always override the notes screen), and F13 to search for a non-standard aluminium four inch gasket with a reinforced inner girder.   Hopscotching round the screens here, with the carefree ease of a child in their backyard, as the Mancunian Way traffic sails by.  I'll say it once more then never again, folks: I will miss these laidback Friday afternoons on the flange team.

Comments

[abby]

I hope they'll have new screens where you're going! Maybe you could just try F24 and see what happens.

[jonathan]

Hold your horses now our Abby- your F24 isn't a key to be taken lightly, and I'm really not sure a man would be well advised to swan in on his first day of employment and start pawing away at it willy-nilly with gay abandon (I'm currently training up a new fresh from University girl to do my job and eyebrows have been raised at her precocious, not to say risque, use of control/alt and other pointedly flashy key combinations). I might build up to the tricky moves with a couple of honest-to-goodness F14s and see where that gets me. Let's not run before we can walk here.

[looby]

The very best wishes for tonmorrow J. I can hardly beleive you're moving out of the world of flange but I'm sure your talents will be put to much better use in Housing.