A Question of Balance

If anyone dares to claim that the work of a courier is not seasonal, don't listen to him!  This is the week I usually take as a winter holiday - see this earlier blog, and often during the week I've wished I had done so after all.  Apart from the working part of the week consisting of only four 'proper' days, my financial rewards have to show the lowest weekly total on record - holidays excepted.  The proceeds will total between one and two days' normal earnings.  Fortunately, I was able to find other satisfactions than financial ones with which to measure the success of the week.

Monday was, of course, the New Year Bank Holiday, and the office was closed.  I had elected to be available for work, but I decided that I wouldn't phone in first thing to let whoever was manning the phones know I was still alive.  This might have been favourable, but the pseudo-Quaker in me said that if I did so, I should be making a complete irrelevance of the list upon which I had declared my availability in the first place.  Consequently, perhaps, and certainly without causing me great surprise, my phone was silent and the van remained unused.

Instead, my Bank Holiday was apportioned between two tasks.  I spent the afternoon and early evening playing an audio tape through the USB converter I bought last year, and storing the product on the computer.  This was the first of a 'double tape' product, and its fellow was similarly dealt with later in the week.  The other task on Monday was to identify an internet mailing list for Co Fermanagh, and subscribe to it with a view to finding out something more about the great family I'd located for my great-uncle George, who had been discharged from the army in 1876, and settled in Enniskillen (sorry if I've mentioned this before, but it has rather overshadowed my thoughts recently, since I'd long since decided that I would never know what had happened to him.)

Tuesday began with a number of necessary phone calls, made while waiting for my van to be serviced.  I needed to order a new inhaler, and also to make an appointment for an eye test.  Just as I was beginning to feel cold and rescued my coat from the van, I noticed the rain sheeting down outside and was glad I didn't have to be out in it.  At that point the van was almost finished, but when he took it for a road test, the engineer decided there was a problem with the tracking.  By the time this had been put right, the sun was out, and it was something of a pleasure soon afterwards to be sent to Leicester and see a magnificent double rainbow as I drove up the motorway.  I'd just finished my evening meal when a phone call sent me off to Shoeburyness, so I was out until 10.40pm, and late on parade the next day.

Wednesday brought no work at all, and by 2.30 I decided to be realistic and come home.  I discovered that someone else had usurped my post to the Fermanagh mailing list and answered with what was, in effect, a completely new enquiry about something totally different, with the result that, out of eight messages headed 'Evans - Enniskillen', one was a not-very-helpful reply to me, and the others totally irrelevant.  I hastily responded caustically to this 'identity theft' as I described it, but the following day realised the error of such an action, and apologised.  I think this was much more effective, for as a result I then received lots of encouragement and some very helpful general advice and details of websites that have opened my eyes to the intricacies of Irish research.

Yesterday I did a single job to a charming village in the west of Bedfordshire, delivering hygiene materials to a 'college' which seemed to cater solely for disabled students.  Once more I took the afternoon off, since it seemed pointless to sit there at the bottom of a long list,  when the phones were hardly ringing, and the few jobs coming in were for the big vans.  Once more family history and the tape conversion took centre stage.

Numerically, today has been more productive, but the first of the two jobs was only a very local one, and the other only 50 miles away, so the excitement was little.  I returned to find that one of my colleagues was researching a job he'd just been given to deliver tomorrow morning in Falkirk.  This is the sort of job I'd normally have given my eye teeth for, but somehow I just didn't have the energy to get excited about it.  I had departed and was just returning home from my shopping expedition when I realised that, even if I had been offered it, I should have had to turn it down anyway, because of the optician's appointment tomorrow morning.

So my week has been a true balance, and has felt all the better for it, with this evening spent exploring some of those fascinating Irish websites!