Back to normal programming

I've been on course the past two weeks -- which was really rather nice. No work responsibilities. And you get to slack off at the back of the room, and in between you're fed fried snacks at morning and afternoon breaks (breakfast and tea) and get let off for long lunch breaks that stretch up to almost two hours.

Actually, lunch was also provided but there was a poor response on the first and second days and we asked HR to dispense with it entirely. They ordered food from the Malay stall in the canteen and it came cold and greasy and we didn't think we could stomach two weeks of it. I think HR automatically ordered halal food so as to cover all grounds but this is fasting month and nobody who needs to eat halal would be eating lunch. The course convenor requested for the lunch budget to go towards a bigger tea time budget, for pastries and baked goods from Spinelli's instead of the cheap fried pastries we'd been getting but HR said they couldn't/wouldn't make any exceptions. Fine if we didn't want lunch but we're not getting any extras. And not a word of thanks for the money we saved them -- which probably wasn't much, someone said their lunch budget was $1 a head. Eww. That explains the bad food. The first day, we had cold, greasy mee goreng and the protein item was fish cake. No real meat and processed food. I'm not a fussy eater but I couldn't put that down my throat. The second day, they'd already known that it was to be the final lunch, we got something slightly better -- nasi lemak with all the condiments including freshly fried crispy ikan bilis. After that, we were let loose on our own for lunch -- which I preferred. I'd rather not be forced to eat lunch with strangers on the course. As it is, the lunch idea was probably to get us to network but two weeks would have been too much to force a group of people to eat together. I don't know why people need to go for lunch/dinner breaks with other people. I actually enjoyed being alone and on some of the longer breaks, managed to go shopping at Toa Payoh and Bishan.

It was such a nice change from being chained to my desk and gulping a packed dinner there. I go back to all this tomorrow and shall miss being on course. I don't know why people complain about going on course. It was like a mini-holiday to me. Oh yeah, you have to sit and listen to someone and in between, they throw worksheet exercises at you but that's not real work.

I thought I'd have a problem with getting up in the morning. Well, it was punishing for someone who's been working nights but I was quite surprised that I was rather good at getting up. In fact, most mornings, I woke up before the alarm went off. Getting up was not the problem. It was staying awake later in the day.

Still, I was home most days by 5.30pm, which meant I had long, leisurely evenings to enjoy home-cooked dinners, walk poopy dogs and watch prime-time TV. And tomorrow, life goes back to "normal" -- dinner out of a microwavable container at my desk, home past midnight when the only thing on TV are reruns. But the dogs would still be poopy, I'm sure.