Apologies to anyone who's waiting for the next instalment of 'On Her Own Petard' but I've been mired in office politics of my own, and just haven't felt like writing.

We've had new call logging software imposed on us that allows 'users' to assign support requests to analysts personally, and to set the priority. Of course everyone thinks theirs is highly important, and needs to go to person in charge... me. It's not been helped by another department being closed due to vacations that would normally deflect a lot of the work, but some of the stuff flying my way has been plain vindictive - work for the same company for almost twenty years and you pick up enemies. People who don't know me very well find me abrupt, even arrogant, but friends will tell you it's because at times I'm painfully shy. I try to avoid confrontations, but won't back down if an issue's forced, so a few days have been quite a struggle - and I can't help reflecting on how I could have handled things better. Worse still I've fallen over a couple of times in the office and HR are on my back about not using my cane during work... not that a big stick wouldn't have been useful lately.

By the time I've been getting home in the evenings I've been too washed out to write anything, and have just been losing myself in music - mostly stuff like the Who, Beatles and Rolling Stones... so there may be a story set in the sixties somewhere over the horizon. The vacationers start trickling back tomorrow so hopefully I should be back to Stevie's saga in the next day or so.