So, as of the end of August, my job at the East Midlands Deanery has ended. I was looking forward to getting out of there - there is basically nobody at the job whom I particularly enjoy talking to, and those I do, I don't get to talk to much, which leaves me sitting lonely in front a computer screen in the middle of an office full of women discussing The Apprentice, while I glumly doodle and investigate array notation. The fact that the amount of work I had to do was rapidly approaching zero was also a major factor in my announcing my desire to depart. Inevitably, work began to pick up again in the final week as I was called upon to suddenly arrange a whole new bunch of courses and then leave all the ropes hanging for my successor - I left the best notes I could, bless him or her!

But seriously, there's no future in surfing the internet forever.

I was asked to come back for one more week at the last minute on Friday because suddenly a new pile of work had arrived, and I had to grit my teeth and say no, since I'd already agreed I was leaving on that day, and received goodwill and stuff from everybody, so to turn up again on Monday would just be excrutiatingly awkward.

I had a week's break and then I was at work again, this time at... well, the exact same building, but in a different office on the upstairs floor. This time I was on the University of Nottingham's Information Services helpline. For the first three weeks I was just answering email which was fairly tedious, extremely easy to pick up and didn't consume much time, so the rest of the time I was surfing the internet and having inexplicable nosebleeds (deeply embarrassing way to make a first impression, mmm?). The UoN's backend is a work of horror. The number of different systems I have to use to look up and sort out just one particular username and password - the students' main one, there are several ancillary ones - boggles the mind. The sheer amount of stuff that can go wrong, likewise. Since I had been brought on temporarily to deal with the increased workload of the start of term, the intense complexity of the student registration system leaves just as much to be desired. It's insanely complicated, and you can't skip any steps - if you do, you end up in a situation where you think you've registered and haven't.

Hooking up one's computer to the student network, however, is very smart. The UoN has a system which requires you to pass certain spyware and virus protection benchmarks before it'll let you connect. Superb! Even if it requires more tech support from us.

Since I'm now actually manning the phones I correct about 30 very simple problems per day, which gives a kind of dull background radiation of fuzzy helpfulness, but this is negated by the large number of calls I can't help with and end up passing on to my colleagues - who are a geeky bunch I'm growing to like. I'm improving my skill at deciphering insane accents and people who don't speak very good English and people who inexplicably choose to call from, e.g., the Himalayas.

Of course...

It recently occurred to me that the job I am doing, manning an IT helpline, is exactly the same job I was doing in summer 2004. Three years and no career progression and my brother (5 years younger) just started temping himself. Boy, am I doing badly.

HTDTE fans, the book is inching closer to publication. I won't say more now, but stay tuned, it IS coming.