My dogged determination

Today I had a presentation to make to about fifty people across the region. Unfortunately in typical dog-ate-my-homework style, all the data I was depending on was incomplete, wrong, or just plain unavailable. And what I did have left to show people seemed to have become invisible, so my nicely formatted ten slide Powerpoint presentation ended up as a sloppily formatted five slide presentation, which made me look like a halfwit. I did notice afterwards that the person controlling the slideshow had managed to skip past at least one slide without me noticing, which only added to the idiocy I felt.

However, I did salvage some pride by putting this picture of a Spitz at the end of my presentation, at which point people seemed to overlook the preceding pages of bilge, and start asking me why I'd chosen a dog rather than a cat.



If they ever found out it wasn't my dog, I'd probably catch it, but I think this canine misappropriation will go undiscovered.

It is, of course, disheartening to feel that people value your work less highly than a picture of a dog, but then life is harsh, bleak, and unremittingly cruel.

Perhaps the gloominess of that last paragraph is because I haven't had any coffee today. I've had no coffee all week. Usually this is the sort of crackpot borderline imbecile task that I'll attempt as a New Year's Resolution, and thus be welcoming in January slumped over my desk for a fortnight, when I should be bellowing down the phone at people, telling them how Important I Am and What They Should Do. But this week it's been because I arrived at the end of the month a good week before my salary did, and in a desperate attempt to save money, tore myself away from the Starbucks coffee-nipple.

On reflection, the metaphor I chose there, of an enormous franchised American breast, lactating grande lattes, may not have been the best. And since the emblem of Starbucks is a mermaid, somewhat fishy.

I could, of course, use the office coffee machine for free. But that's one of those Nespresso machines, and after three years of constant abuse, it produces either: detergent flavoured espresso (in the week after it's been professionally cleaned and serviced) or what tastes like coffee-flavoured microbial broth (during all other times in the year). Thus I haven't plucked up the courage/bravado/wherewithal/inappropriate noun to go and make myself a coffee.

There are other alternatives, of course, like Fuse (a ten minute walk away) or Caffe Habitu (but the closest that gets is a MTR ride away) and besides, they aren't free either. And curiously, this week I seem to be surviving without coffee. So perhaps my month of abstinence started on Monday.

It is my dream to become a celebrity one day, and as a result of this be offered a lucrative endorsement deal by Nestle for their Nespresso machines, and to then be denied all that delicious third-world-formula-baby-milk-funded cash when somebody reads this post and takes umbrage at the suggestion that our coffee machine spurts out coffee-flavoured bacterial soup. But it's only a suggestion.

Another suggestion would be that we cleaned the damn thing a bit more thoroughly, but I'm too tired to think that one through. Maybe if I had a cup of coffee ... No, that's not going to work either.