Last night was strange, for quite a few reasons, and it's all a bit of a blur in some places so I'll try and get everything down before my brain melts. As I said, I’d arranged to go out with some of the guys from work – Trev, Gary, Michael, Steve and Steve’s friend Craig – and I thought we were just going for a few beers at The Engineer (good guest beers on there, and not too studenty) and then maybe a curry at the Kashmir on the High Street. That was the plan, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

For starters, Michael was late. He texted Gary and left a weirdly cryptic message about meeting him in Scandals where it was a bit noisier. The reason that Scandals is noisier is because it is the dive of choice for the teeny bopper alcopop crowd and it really isn’t the place to go for a quiet drink. So, we all necked our beers and headed off for the walk back towards the precinct. No sign of Michael, so we ended up standing around looking foolish for an hour drinking fizzy overpriced beer. I had the toe curlingly embarrassing experience of being approached some eighteen year old bit of totty in a miniscule denim micro skirt. She was alright, in a ‘girl next door on the supermarket checkout with a bit too much makeup’ sort of way, but not the sort I would ever dream of approaching. However, it wasn’t her, it was “me mate, who fancies you, innit”, and the mate turned out to be a monosyllabic stick insect with the personality of, to be brutally honest, a stick insect.

“Where do you work?”

“Supermarket”

“What do you do exactly?”

“Checkout”

“Errm, that must be interesting?”

“Naah, s’boring”

I was looking over her shoulder, watching the guys laughing at my predicament, and trying to think of a reason to get away when I saw Michael coming in through the other door, so in the words of the tabloid journalist in a brothel I made my excuses and left.

Michael looked worried, so I asked him what was going on. He said that he had been working late, finishing up some documentation on the source code, when he had seen some strange characters coming into the office. Dark grey suits, identical brief cases, serious expressions and they had gone straight into a meeting with the boss. It was his opinion they were either old bill, or some major league financial types, but either way it looked like trouble. Perhaps there was some fraud going on, or maybe the company had a cash crisis and we were all going to get made redundant? Hmmm, what a great way to make the evening go with a swing.

We stayed in there for one more drink, and then we couldn’t find Craig who it transpired was busy throwing up outside. We left Steve to clean him up and put him in a taxi, and made a break for the side door, avoiding all of the stick insect clones hanging round the main entrance. From there it wasn’t too much further to the curry house, where we able to grab a table without any problems.

While eating we discussed the situation at work. We write low level software for communications and digital encoding – telecoms, networks and stuff – and I’m the specialist for on-the-fly quantum encryption techniques. It’s challenging cutting edge stuff, and in theory there should be a huge market for it, but thinking about it we all realized that new projects have practically dried up in the last couple of months. One of our big clients had cancelled a big contract for no obvious reason and gone with one of our rivals who were offering an inferior product (he said modestly) at a hugely inflated price. The general consensus was that it was time to start brushing up cvs and working on interview techniques just in case. I think that everybody there had been through at least one or two redundancies during the dot com crash, so nobody was too concerned about their chances of picking up a new job fairly quickly.

By the time we’d finished with the food (the baltis there are excellent, and pretty cheap I reckon, the lime pickle is evil though – very tasty, but put the bog roll in the freezer in advance), I had sobered up and was starting to think about what I was going to do. I’d thought about going freelance before, but I knew I’d have to do something about that legal trouble I mentioned yesterday.

It was late by the time I got home, and I noticed that the light on the top floor flat was still on. Guess I’m not the only night owl. When I let myself in through the kitchen door, I noticed a new cat prowling round by the bins so I said hello and gave it a stroke. It had a collar on, and it didn’t look like a stray, but judging by some of rubbish on the ground by the bins it had been scavenging for food. It followed me into the house and I got a look at the name tag – Wesley – and a mobile number which was engaged. I made myself a coffee and tried the number again, and strangely enough it turned out to belong to the girl upstairs.

I returned the cat to its grateful owner – apparently it wasn’t supposed to be let out, but he’d escaped through the window onto the fire escape earlier in the day whilst she’d been out at work. I didn’t out stay my welcome and came back down to get some sleep whilst there was still some of the night left.