Well, my job may well be provisionally safe, but the same cannot be said for everyone in what was my team. One of the guys, who has been on holiday for the last three weeks, came into work and then left again with a letter saying that he was unlikely to be keeping his job. Though there are appeals procedures, I have severe doubts that things in this company are so flexible that he'll be reborn like some sort of coding Phoenix. Whatever one's opinion of a work-colleague, it's never good to see someone lose their job. It's weird. It's almost like the person has, in some ways, died... but they're still out there living and breathing... but you'll probably never see them again... but burying them is not an option.

It brings home the fact that real people's jobs have been cut in this organisation. Most of the other people, who are now finding work elsewhere, are just names to me. I don't think I know a single one of them. In this case, though, I've spent many hours collaborating with this colleague and it makes it clear that it wouldn't have been more than a couple of different choices in the judging criteria to make it my job that was cut. That's how these things work.

A few of the people in the office are clearly leaving for good at the moment. There are hugs and brave faces all round. One of the characters who appears to be leaving is a lady who looks like my ex-girlfriend of a few years ago might have looked if she'd gained weight steadily for 5 years and grown her hair very long. It is she whom I've made a joke about on stage a few times where I've suggested that she looks like a sofa... in some ways, she does. Bye bye sofa lady.

Motivation
It's quite hard to be motivated at the moment. This is partly because there's no specific set of requirements to fulfil, so doing nothing seems equally as successful as doing something. I've been messing about with a programme to convert some data from one format to another, and I've been getting some sort of success, but the extent to which it can possibly succeed, and the extent to which it would be really useful are still unknown to me. I've lost a bit of my mojo with this and my head feels a bit woozy.

I think I may have drunk too much coffee/fizzy drinks.

I could quite reasonably try to train myself out of such behaviour.

Googling Oneself
In moments while I've been waiting for things to get processed on the computer, I've set about a variety of tasks of a distracting nature. One of these is Googling myself. I wouldn't advise doing this. Though it's useful to see what's written about you on the net (most of which I appear to have written myself), it's really really sad to Google yourself. However, I reached new depths of stupidity today when I googled misspellings of my name. I found a very generous review of my 2005 Fringe performance under such a misspelling. I was, apparently, in the camp of guitar comedians who "aren't completely shit". Nice.

Comedic Ideas
I couldn't get to sleep easily last night. I don't know why this is. Maybe I had had too much coffee. Maybe my head was buzzing with ideas from the programming. Maybe the first two episodes ever of Family Guy left me feeling empty and in need of a proper episode of The Simpsons rather than this lesser clone (cue rant from Family Guy fans who will tell me that it's much better and that I've missed the point). As I was falling to sleep, I had ideas for what I would do if I used a piano in my stand-up. Given that I spent a few gigs in Edinburgh learning to live without the guitar, it seems a bit odd to be heading in the direction of an even larger and more difficult to attach instrument. However, there's method in my madness. There are a couple of gigs I'm either doing, or might be doing, where there's a house-piano. Perhaps on these occasions, it would be nice to have a few party tricks that can only be done on the piano.

My "Imagine" spoof - "Imagine no piano" might be quite amusing, but I'm not sure how to end it. Quickly, is probably the best answer. "Imagine all the people, sharing all the glue - yooo-hooo-ooo-oooh"... oh dear!

I also have a new song which I'm chewing over in my head. There are some songs which simply don't work. There are some which have merits. There are some which are instant classics... and then there are those where I'm just not sure. The text-based Love Song was one of these latter cases. I practiced it for a while and wondered and wondered. It pretty much worked from the off, though I had to come to learn how to play it with the right pressure points to keep it funny. This current song has a neat joke leading into it, and it could be one of the more technically complicated songs to perform - lending what I do an edge of advanced competence, currently missing. However, I'm not sure about whether there are enough hard-hitting lines... and I don't quite have an ending. Grrr.