Monday 31st March 2008

It was tempting as I called my colleague at 17.25 to bail out and head home. I have to admit, while blasting back on the M4 from Newbury, the thought did cross my mind. However, I made up my mind quite quickly that I had to get down there. I had to get on with it on my own, as my colleague had gone in and started without me. It took me thirty minutes or so to get to the gym and as I got changed and walked out of the changing rooms, my colleague met me in the corridor. He had finished and was heading home and warned me it was quite busy. Let me take you back to Sunday morning, the day of my induction. For some reason I was nervous, I am not sure why because this was not my first ever gym induction. I got to Castle Royle early and waited for my colleague. He was late and when I called him, he was in his car but heading back to his house to pick up his credit card. We eventually went through, changed and went up to the gym to meet Matt. We had to fill in a health questionnaire before being given our personal Techno Gym Wellness Key (more on that shortly). I then had my weight and body fat index taken before sitting down with Matt and setting up my programme. Nothing too drastic, just four machines and a total work out of 46 minutes. Something quite gentle to ease me in, after all remember I have done very little exercise since leaving school (nearly ten years ago) aside from the fitness course last year. Being a Sunday afternoon, the gym was relatively quiet and we had relatively free roam of the machines. We completed our program and Matt showed us how to “checkout” our workout. There are some great features on the computer, you can check your performance, not just visually in graphs and indexes but also your progress on the New York Marathon and Tour de France. A long long way to go for me but it is a nice touch to be able to compare your progress with a tangible sporting event! After our induction, I bid goodbye to my colleague and headed over to Thame for my piano lesson (#18) and promised myself that I would get down to some practice this week. So far, I have not had a chance to get on the keyboard but will do by the end of the week and definitely over the weekend. Never tempt fate. Although for someone like me, it is a just downright impossible. This links into my comments about my internet addiction from my previous post. I was listening to the Arsenal match on Saturday and when we went 2-0 down, I decided to switch off the radio and concentrate on whatever I was doing (could not have been that interesting as I cannot recall exactly what). Around 4.30pm, I decided to try and refresh my BBC Sport Premiership Live Scores page online but it was taking ages to respond before timing out. The internet was down, my MSN had signed out. I had problems, serious problems. I went on a crazy rampage trying to reboot my router, refresh my router. As these failed, I went over to the lounge and inspected the router and made reset it a few times. Still no luck, so I text Pav an SOS to get the support number for Sky broadband. Before calling them, I did a little hunting online (yes I had internet access, thanks to my sister’s dedicated line in her room and work laptop). However, there was no luck, I had to call Sky and spoken to a technician in India. He was very helpful but quite perplexed as to my problem. It was only when he recommended that I swap microfliters that it clicked. I headed upstairs. In my sister’s room was the reason for my drop off from the grid. The old analogue phone had been plugged into the phone line but naked in the sense there was no micro filter. So I unplugged the phone, headed downstairs and the i light flashed on the router. I was back online. What had I missed? The greatest comeback in Premier League history? Typical!

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