Oops

One of the perks of work is that I get a TasteCard. Not only does it provide 2-for-1 offers on a range of restaurants, it also provides discounted cinema tickets.

So, when my friend Boris suggested we go to Vue Cinema on Sunday afternoon to see the new gay film Firebird, I naturally thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to use the card.

I logged on to the TasteCard website on Sunday, just before I left the house, to see how to get the offer. Unfortunately you cannot simply flash the card at the ticket desk. I needed to purchase a voucher code, which I would then redeem at the cinema.

So, I went through the purchase process and bought a code.

“Your code has been sent to your registered email address.”

Ah. There is a problem here: because I got the TasteCard through work, it is registered to my work email address. And our company email is locked down so the only way to access it is on my work laptop — which was in the office.

(I will add at this point that company policy is that employees should take their laptop home with them every night, but… meh)

Now, a lesser person would have just written off the £13 cost of the voucher codes. But not I! My security fob gives 24/7 access to the office building, and I had a twenty minute window between getting off the train and getting the bus to Cheshire Oaks. Would that be enough time to get from the station to the office, then to the bus stop?

As it turns out — yes! A quick speed-mince across town and I was in and out of the office in less than five minutes. It would have been even less time, had I not had to wait for the laser printer to warm up.

So, if the security guards at the office were watching the CCTV on Sunday and saw someone dash in, leg it up three flights of stairs, dash into the office, turn on his laptop and the laser printer, quickly print off a voucher, and leg it back down the stairs, they don’t need to worry – it was just me.

What is the point of this blog? Nothing really, except to illustrate the lengths I will go to in order to save a few quid.

I then got rinsed for £3.99 for a Coke Zero at the cinema refreshment stand. BAH.

(Firebird itself was excellent, look out for a separate post about that soon)

The Shrine on Lord Street

I was rightly told off for posting this on Twitter, because it contained spoilers for Killing Eve. It was an honest mistake – I thought the series had finished, but it actually has one episode to go if you are watching weekly on linear TV.

So, if you have NOT finished watching the series, or are waiting for the final episode to be shown on BBC One rather than binging on iPlayer, STOP READING NOW!

Continue reading “The Shrine on Lord Street”

Two years

Will it ever get any easier?

As someone who couldn’t see my mother in hospital until the very final hours of her life, and then could only attend her funeral with six other people, I am naturally enjoying the “well actually the rules were silly and everyone broke them anyway” discourse in Toryland over the past few days. Shitheads, the lot of them.