Time off for good behaviour

Left work two hours early today, not because of any special occasion, strike or communist revolution, but because the flipping accountancy software package has blown a fuse and we weren't able to use it all day. It's one thing after another there - ever since I started working there two months ago there's been an endless series of computer problems getting in the way of work. And going home early isn't much of a treat, because I know I'll have to make up the time and more over the next few days to get everything done.

In fact, I'm going to have to work quite excessively hard over the next couple of weeks, because having told my boss that her deadline to get the monthly accounts completed was too short and got an extra day to do it, I now feel obliged to get everything finished well before the original deadline, to confirm my reputation as a miracle worker. That's something I've missed at this new job - my strategy is normally to come into a new workplace and do the job much more quickly and accurately than whoever was doing it before, and have everyone think I'm great. But because everyone is new at Nord Anglia, they haven't got anything to compare me to, and so just assume that all the brilliant things I'm doing are normal. I tell you, it's tough being a genius. And having such an inflated opinion of my own abilities is a real handicap, too.

Still, it's not all bad. Getting home early gave me a chance to do something I was too lazy to do all this time I've been off work - practice hour numbers. It went really well, too, I got a score of 1940, a personal best and 9 digits short of Gunther's world record. I'm really feeling confident about the world championships at the moment, if I can keep up the training. It's a while since I've gone into a competition knowing that I've achieved really big scores in practice in lots of the disciplines.

It's funny really how I've snapped back into hard-working, dedicated, super-accountant, super-memory-guy mode after a week and a half of unmitigated accidie. All it took was being forced to get out of bed at half past seven after not nearly enough sleep, and now I'm all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (I'm a squirrel when I'm not a dragon, did you know?) and looking around for more useful, productive things to do with my time. It's great.