An unwelcome return home

I arrived at Gare du Nord last night at about 22:30 after a very long week of travelling and working.

London is always long days and nights as after doing a full day of work at the office there’s always at least a half-day of work waiting for me when I get back to the hotel.

To make things worse on Wednesday night I had to turn off Norton while I was programming as it was interfering with my database server connection.  I stupidly turned it off forgetting that I was working on a hotel Internet connection and not my safe home/office network.  Within a half-hour my computer had two pretty nasty viruses (spyware) and within an hour it was a nightmare.  I lost hours and hours of time trying to get Norton re-installed (never succeeded), trying to work with a different anti-virus software package (AVG which did work) and trying to get my computer to be able to do at least a minimum of productive work.  I couldn’t print, I couldn’t send and receive e-mails, I couldn’t program, I was useless.  It was very frustrating.

I made the best out of the situation by trying to work on everyone else’s computers in the office while I was there.  There was an awful lot to do in the London office during this trip and therefore I was never without work and my personal computer problems didn’t impede that work.  However it meant that I couldn’t help other clients or work on other projects or even properly communicate and it was truly a nightmare.

To top everything off I arrive at Gare du Nord last night at about 22:30 and I go to pick up my car from the Gare du Nord parking lot.  There’s the car… always a tiny sigh of relief in comparison to that scary feeling when I can’t find the car and I don’t know if it’s because I stupidly lost it or it’s gone.  I had noted the emplacement on the parking ticket so the first scenario was eliminated.  However I get to the car and notice there’s broken glass all across the back seat.  My heart sank.  They had broken the small window in the rear right-hand side and had broken in to the car.  They were kind enough to leave the car papers and the car insurance in the car, on the front seat, but they emptied out the glove compartment stealing at least a half-dozen of empty CD jackets as all the CDs are in the CD changer in the car.  Of course they stole my TomTom Go 510 which meant I was going to have to find my way home all by myself.

I made a declaration at the parking lot office and finally headed home at about 23:00 and got home at about 23:30.  My wife proceeded to blame it on me, of course, and the fact that I left the car in the parking lot.  I thought to myself… I was on the fifth floor of this seven floor parking lot.  When I arrived it was almost completely full.  There must have been at least 5,000 cars parked in that lot.  Of course ALL of them, unlike myself, were aware of the fact that their cars were going to be broken in to, as must happen in all parking lots apparently, but I was stupidly ignorant of this obvious fact and was therefore entirely at fault.  Crime victims are entirely at fault in the eyes of their spouses.

I have hundreds of e-mail messages to go through.  I have projects that have to be completed this weekend (before Monday) and which should have been done yesterday.  We have to go out to a friends’ place for dinner this evening.  I therefore have to spend this afternoon, in thirty-one degree (Celsius) heat, to get the back seat cleaned up, the window space boarded up (they don’t have the window in stock at the moment) and replace the GPS so I can tell where I’m going.

Bad karma?