Me

I'm showing off my shiny new haircut, purchased this very day for the princely sum of eight of your English pounds. You see a man who has crunched some technical problems, dealt with a student query, written a few well thought out words, booked to go and see a car on Friday and had a chat with a bloke claiming to be from BT Technical Support. 

He was my favourite because he came out of a clear blue sky to give me a jolly giggle on what was otherwise a bit of a lumpy morning. He was charming and equipped with a lexicon of IT jargon, it was all smashing stuff but the way in which he was deploying it made no sense whatsoever. His claim seemed based on the notion that someone was using rouge IP addresses to hijack my router and that the way to defeat this for me to sit at my keyboard and we'd do something - I didn't get as far as the something. Much as it was entertaining it was taking up time so I invited him to email me details of what needed doing and at that point we drew it to a close because it was all far too complex to be laid out in an email, perhaps it would have caused me mad brain fever or something if I been allowed to glimpse the whole thing rather than being talked through it by my new friend.

I've also been wrangling some spreadsheets. It's not my first rodeo when it comes to spreadsheets and the OU loves them with a passion that would leave Shakespeare speechless. As with any large organisation there are pockets of people who spend every waking hour using esoteric conditional formats and 582 lookup tables on what might otherwise be straightforward stuff. These files are then rolled out to people like me who spend ages stripping out the pretty and shiny stuff so that we can then distribute the files to people who don't have time to faff around trying to work out what the problem is if the cell background changes to puce and the text colour becomes taupe. I'm not complaining - this little dance with Excel is keeping us all employed.....