Well, today marks the fifth anniversary of me last working for Argos. Yup, the Tuesday after the catalogue came out (and I think it was the 21st then as well). The months of put-downs, lack of supprt, insults, general morale-sapping and personal attacks finally took their toll. I'm not going to go into the full, gory details here and now (I expect I'll write them up on here at some point as eventually I want to backtrack over the entire 30+ years of me) but suffice it to say the way I was five years ago today resulted in one of the staff at Stowmarket phoning Joan worried and Joan making me an appointment for the Doctor on the Wednesday. He signed me off sick for a fortnight and I then ended up being off 12 weeks or so before starting here. Which was a change to say the least!

And that all ties in reasonably well with the fact that Joan spoke not to her new boss as I had thought, but to the Area Manager instead. She did so representing the entire store not just her own views, and he promised to get it sorted out. Gill was at a meeting yesterday afternoon when the conversation took place and another all day one today so hopefully he will be able to sort her out during those and things will be better from tomorrow. Certainly they have plans for a full store meeting on Thursday so if that doesn't clear the air I am going to get involved, whether they like it or not. After all, I am not about to let what happened to me happen to Joan. And not just because we need the money (although she did also have a look in the Job Centre yesterday too)!

Today all in the office has once again descended into pre-big move, furniture shifting chaos. There are desks and filing cabinets and stuff going everywhere as I write. Mostly I'm staying out of it but lending a hand when needed so as not to look too lazy. There have also been verbal fireworks with Chris really letting fly at Charles. First time I've ever seen him get worked up like that and, truth be told, rather wonderful to watch. In a schadenfreude kind of way of course.