M.I.A

I have not blogged for a while. Except for my post about what kind of lover I am. I apologise for my absence. This said, I am likely to be absent for another while. I have five weeks of not being in York planned, beginning soon. Poor Dom will be on his lonesome for three of those five weeks. As part of the migration project at work…

First, lets have some history.
Back in November you may remember my posting about judgement day where we discovered that our equivalent team in Norwich was being shipped up to York. This meant that we were going to have to learn the work.
It’s fairly pants really, closing down a team in one place just to make another team bigger somewhere else.
So anyway, this launched the Migration Project. The aim of the project is to bring up all of the work, knowledge, skills, software and documentation which currently resides in Norwich, to York. Unfortunately only two of the team in Norwich are willing to relocate to York. This creates a specific problem – how can us York people learn what the Norwich people have been doing for years (decades in some cases) and run our own systems to the usual standard? Well, the answer seems to be that it is irrelevant. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen before July 1.

So, the next event in this joyful chain was the creation of the project. We were informed in early January that it was likely that we would have to do some shadowing of our colleagues in the south. Having announced this, the project began to plan who would go to Norwich and when. With only three day’s notice, I shipped off for my first tour of shadowing. Three of my York colleagues also went.
So, there we were. I’ve never been to Norwich before, and it was not as I was expecting. Much raving had been done about the cathedral there. Hm. I’m afraid that having lived in or near the cities which are home to two of the three most important ecclesiastical sites in the country (1) I was expecting more. In fairness, I have not been into the cathedral. It is probably glorious. I didn’t actually realise that it was the cathedral I was walking past until one of my colleagues said so.
Much raving had also been done about the castle, which is unusual looking, and is on my list of places to visit. I wish that we had more free time while we were down there, but still – it is work!

Anyway, my general impressions of the place were good. I enjoyed some good food (Thanks Jimbobjo for that Italian!) and didn’t go over my food budget at all! There is also a Subway and a Pretzel place – which sells the city for me – and also there is Primark! Woo! Cheap clothes! So anyway, that’s good.
I’m particularly looking forward to the week when I am the only person from York down there. Fan-blinking-tastic.
Oh well, could be worse…

(1) The three most important ecclesiastical sites in the country are:

1. Canterbury
2. York
3. Lincoln