With a little help from Eric (the guy is a star) I had arranged an appointment for this morning. This turned out to be a double bonus, as the snow from last evening had continued throughout the night, resulting in a complete whiteout. My appointment was late morning, and by the time I had set off, the main roads were pretty clear, but every roundabout had a broken car hanging off it, most of which were barely, if at all, pushed to the side of the road. I was glad I hadn't been involved in this at rush hour.
The dentist seemed to be operating from her own house, and very nice it seemed. She spoke little English, but had a very detailed model of the various things that can go wrong in the mouth. With surprising ease the problem was described by pointing at the model and then inside my mouth, plenty of laughing and a concerned frown on her part occassionally. She said she'd have a look, and this would involve removing the temporary filling I was sporting from my home dentist. I wanted a bit more than a look if she was going to open up what had been a relatively well behaved tooth of late, but I didn't have the words to make this clear, so I resigned myself to a gamble. I needn't have worried though. She had no reservations about tackling a triple root canal, and while I thought she was still taking bits out, she had actually been filling it in and finishing off, and the whole thing was over in well under half an hour. She showed me the before and after x-rays (the afters showing 3 bright white lines where the roots once were) and said she had left another temporary filling in "just in case". Then we talked money; less than 37 euros to be precise. I don't think you can even get an NHS filling for that in England! I had just had a filling, 2 xrays and a triple root canal purging, and the private cost, in what seemed like the living room of an eminently capable dentist was less than the cost of one bloody NHS subsidised filling. I want to know where my NI contributions are going, because between this and other medical events I've paid for around the world, I'm starting to smell a rat.
I got to Freescale, very pleased with the morning's work, and just in time for lunch. I went straight to the canteen, heeded the dentist's advice not to tackle anything too heavy for an hour, and went for a light fish lunch.
Afternoon in the office was again spent fettling my PC in between reading documentation. No one was particulary industrious today, as there was another piece of luck coming my way. The Audio team had not had time for their Xmas party before Xmas, so they were having it tonight instead. This meant two things: (1) I got to leave work early (2) I was going to use the Metro for the first time.
The most noticable thing about this night is that when people arrived at the bar in the restaurant, there was no immediate rush to hang upside down under a gallon of lager. In fact no drinks were even ordered
until we were all present and sat down. Now this is not my territory at all, but I played along to see how it went, and in fact it went very well indeed. The usual array of madmen and perverts exist within the team, but 8 pints isn't required to coax them out. The sangria and wine did arrive, but the party was well under way well before any alcohol had had any effect. It was quite illuminating to see people having a good old craic without needing to be comatose to loose their inhibitions. Perhaps they just never had any... We were entertained by an in-team magician too. I still can't believe what I saw him do with his colleagues less than a foot away, but no one had clue how he was making things disappear, reappear and pass ghostlike through each other. It was awesome to see it so close.I had a great time, feeling lucky to get in an early bonding session, and left about 1:30AM. It took a while to flag a taxi afterwards, but having found one, it had me back home in about 10 minutes. About half of the time the Metro had taken to get me the other way. Hmm...
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