Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

So many meetings today. I had to run a focus group, I had to talk to my manager about something stressful (it turned out fine), I had to have a meeting that felt important but probably wasn't, about a task I totally overlooked somehow (very erikphobic of the DfT to launch a consultation with a deadline right after my own big deadline!!), which was supposed to last half an hour after the usual end of my work day and actually overran even that tomorrow...

Also today, in other Boo Meetings news, I realized I have the other focus group tomorrow evening, which means I can't go to any of the Transgender Day of Remembrance events that my friends are going to (though me being unable to go does free up D for another thing that's more "fight like hell for the living" than "mourn the dead" and I think that's fine too).

The good part of my meetings today is the one where a colleague and I were in an external meeting which was arranged by the other organization so it was held on Google Meet rather than Teams as we are used to. This is only relevant because on Teams I have my background blurred and in this thing I never used before (I could barely even unmute myself or hang up at the end of the call, never mind such niceties as adjust my background!).

In the debrief with my colleague, after the normal stuff, she said "off topic but I spotted the distinctive design of a pits and perverts power in your background. Dope, love it." I had noticed my background was clearer and sharper than I was used to, but I didn't think anyone else would notice that! And indeed I didn't really notice the poster, as distinct from the mirror or the door covered with coats (they hang on hooks over the door) that are also visible behind me. It was very sweet that it was one of my queerest colleagues in this meeting and I'm glad she noticed.

She asked where I'd gotten it from and I explained about this event the others had gone to, put on by one of V's friends, and that I'd been brought the poster as I hadn't been able to go (I think I was in London for a work thing actually, or something like that). My colleague explained that she'd been wanting one of these posters for years but always wanted the money to actually go to a queer person or something. She decided a museum would be close enough, some good cause. I checked and they're still selling the poster, and at a very reasonable price too! So much so that I feared the shipping would ruin the good deal and offered to pick her up one and get it to the London office the next time I'm there for work, but she ended up finding other stuff in the shop that'd make good Christmas presents for her friends so she didn't need to take me up on that offer.

The shop listing does a good job of explaining the poster:

Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) is an activist group that formed in solidarity with the striking miners in 1984. Mark Ashton, one of the founders, saw the struggle of the miners as the same faced by gay people fighting for their rights against a government that would not listen.

LGSM organised fundraising events like the one depicted in this poster from a concert from 1984 featuring Bronski Beat at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. Designed by LGSM member Kevin Franklin.

"Well that meeting has been productive on several levels" she said after all this. And that was a nice way to go into my last meeting of the day (the one that took until what I thought was dinnertime if not bedtime!).

I was an hour late for the away day, thanks to a combination of my own doofusness and regular transport hell. And this was so stressful for me because I knew an hour in that I was gonna be involved in the agenda item.

But of course it turned out not to matter because nothing ever gets done on an away day. I mostly think I'm pretty extroverted and neurotypical in this regard but since covid I'm like "...does any of this justify the increased chances of contracting a deadly and disabling illness?" and of course few things are.

One thing that would feel worth it for me is to have someone here to rub my feet. I just got back to my hotel room after wandering around, sometimes with my colleagues, finding food and trying to be normal enough.

The planned afternoon session couldn't happen and so we just carried on with more of my topic from the morning. It was hard work and stressful, and I'm not sure if much good came out of it.

I don't want to sound miserable; I did have a nice evening because I spent it with my favorite team member K, her support worker who's great company and who's also very kindly willing to help me out if I tag along with the two of them, and her friend W who I hadn't met in person before.

I kinda wish I had a support worker, not for every day but for trips like this. But I don't know anyone feasible and I don't want to deal with Access to Work so. This is the lesser evil. But it is nice to be able to borrow K's support worker on team events. And I met W's support worker today too who's also great.

I had a long day, full of meetings and people talking too much. The last was a focus group that went on too long because of one person talking too much and not following the very specifically stated brief: I said we're here to give recommendations to decision-makers and service providers, and this guy did what he always does which is "here's how I get around that by being Resilient and taking individual responsibility for this systemic problem! Cool story, bro.

After a day like that, with an ending like that, it was very sweet to get a message from my favorite person on my favorite team (mine). Our manager has asked her to work with me on the latest report, so this morning I asked if we could arrange a meeting and it'll be tomorrow morning. So at the very end of the day today, she sends me this:

Hi, this is just a message to tell you that I have reread [the last report, 2 of 3]. I now have an overwhelming urge to tell you that you are such a smart cookie. The report is brilliant and incredibly comprehensive. I'm quite intimidated in supporting you with [report 3 of 3]. Anyway this is me belatedly telling you that you are an awesome [our job title] and maybe you could eat a celebratory chocolate biscuit and pat yourself on the back.

A few sentences like that go a long way!

Welp. Remember when you told me I shouldn't need to chair a work meeting while I'm on vacation?

The good news is, I'm not going to.

The bad news is, it's because I can't. The plan was that we'd be at our Airbnb by tonight and D and I would both work from there tomorrow while V started to recover from the journey.

And we're not at the Airbnb because our ferry to the island we're actually planning to visit, where V's son lives, was canceled. So last-minute that when we got to the port we saw vehicles driving off of it that had already boarded.

We couldn't stay anywhere in the small town where the ferry port is. It has hotels and B&Bs but not enough for an extra ferryload of people at short notice. Poor D had to drive forty minutes back the way we came just for us to get a room at all.

And our ferry crossing has been re-booked, for Saturday. No ferries until then. Allegedly; apparently this can change at short notice. But even if it does, it's hard to plan accommodation or anything else.

And in the meantime we're grateful just to have a roof over our heads (we're staying in the attic, so the slanted roof is only just over my head on this side of the room!). And we'll figure out what happens tomorrow.

But in the meantime, checkout is at 11, and so is this precious meeting. I already told my boss, when we didn't know where if anywhere we'd be tonight to explain, and he wrote back that he was sorry to hear this and to message him in the morning if he's needed to sit in. If! I'm not impressed that even I don't know where I'll sleep tonight and I won't have WiFi tomorrow lunchtime isn't enough to get him to understand that he has to chair this meeting.

Except for this massive snag and the possibility of V not being able to see their kid at all this year, which is a real "other than that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play," we've actually had a lovely day. We all were up and at 'em in good time to leave the nice place in Stirling where we broke the journey last night. We had time to visit the Highland Folk Museum on the way, which D picked up a brochure about when he was in a long queue to buy sandwiches for lunch at the café with the highland coo (Scottish for "cow") statue everyone gets their photo taken next to, including me now, and we were delighted at the serendipity. It was lovely to see an example of the blackhouses that I'd heard V talk about, and a loom shed for weaving the famous Harris tweed.

I am with my two humans and we are going to wait for more decision-making information and capacity after a night's sleep and maybe some updates from the much-cursed ferry operator.

I stayed in London last night, an extremely good idea after a ten-hour work day full of travel, the last thing I wanted was almost three more hours' travel to get home.

So I worked from the London office (gosh I sound like a wanker saying things like this) for most of today -- my manager suggested yesterday that I sleep in or leave early but I couldn't do much of either because of long-planned engagement with campaigners where I'd have really been letting my team down if I wasn't around.

So when I booked this train ticket I calculated that if I left right as that meeting finished this afternoon I'd be able to get the last train before afternoon peak time (which rendered my ticket unusable) would start.

And I would've been right but of course the meeting overran. Campaigners!

I got to Euston like six minutes before my train, so I didn't have time to go ask for passenger assistance. But since they have display screens I can actually read now, I could try to run and get the train myself.

Platform 3. So far so good. I rushed there, fishing out my work phone as I did because I have an e-ticket.

I have an e-ticket because I've had problems collecting paper tickets from the inaccessible machine or the office that's staffed for two hours early in the morning...except when it's not.

Neither paper tickets nor e-tickets are actually accessible.

Normally this is better (although I couldn't charge my phone today because Apple chargers suck and also my work laptop sucks but whatever).

But the app logged me out!

It never logs me out! It was fine yesterday! There was no warning or anything.

I was at the ticket barrier freaking out, shaking so I couldn't type my email address or password.

Even when I did finally manage it, it demanded a code sent to the email address. Which Outlook hid from me (all the other many many emails I get from this benighted institution go to the Focused inbox but for some reason these went to Other, which I don't get notifications of and which are more difficult to locate. Especially when you're freaking out because your train is visible and you can't get to it yet.)

I had to ask for another code and then I had to pay attention to which was the newer one so I didn't use the older one. This website has been known to lock me out for twenty minutes when I got my password wrong twice, so I was terrified of that happening too.

I copied the code and pasted it accordingly. Only at this point did I remember that my work phone doesn't let me paste anything. Because it lets me copy things as normal, oh yeah, no problem there. But when I try to paste them, my phone instead spits out a sentence something like "Your organisation does not allow data to be copied" or something like that. It tells you off. For expecting that you might ever want to copy something even when you have logged in with the same account to Teams and Outlook and Word and SharePoint... Surely no one ever needs to copy things right? Especially not a blind person who now has to memorize a string of random numbers...

My session timed out.

I had to start over again from the beginning. The shaky typing of my email address, the concentration it took to make sure my password was right when it's just showing up as a row of black dots... Getting a new email and knowing at least to check the Other inbox for it now. Trying to paste the six digits because my panicky brain had already forgotten that I couldn't. I had to do that three times before I got it to work.

I was almost in tears by that point.

I had also gone from hoping that the staff member standing just the other side of the ticket gates would help me, to worrying that he was seeing me about to cry or scream or more obviously have a panic attack, to wondering how Euston finds its staff because they really are an extraordinarily unhelpful bunch. I tried to imagine being as physically close as he was to any living being in such obvious distress as I was and just not reacting in any way.

When I finally got logged in and could access the lovely magical QR code, I tried to line up my phone and the scanner -- which is ridiculously hard to do, two smooth featureless panes of glass, and I find it ridiculously difficult not to accidentally touch any part of my phone screen in the process of trying to hold the phone there because if I do it'll select something, close the app, do something to ensure that the QR code isn't available for the scanner...

Turns out I was trying to use the outbound part of the ticket and not the return part.

This whole time the staff member stayed so exactly on the other side of the ticket barrier from me that when it finally opened for me I almost had to shove him out of the way.

Nothing but empty space in either direction and he still didn't move.

I can't help but think he didn't expect me to actually get through and get on my fucking train. I know that kind of stuff sounds paranoid but, it's not like it'd be the first time someone was waiting to laugh at a disabled person being prevented from doing something ordinary that everyone else is managing to do.

But: fuck that guy and fuck the app and fuck Microsoft and Apple because despite them all I did get my train and now I'm happily back home.

Despite the misery of getting there, the conference was worth attending. Thanks to D's help I got the bus I needed, I wandered in the direction I thought I was supposed to go from the bus stop and immediately was spotted by someone calling my name; it was one of two event organizers who'd recognize me. That felt very lucky.

My keynote speech was the second of three, which meant I didn't have to deal with all the technical failures of the first one and I wasn't the last thing in the day so I could decide after little sleep and long days in hot rooms and trains that I could leave early. My travel home was much smoother (if sweatier) and being home at dinnertime instead of bedtime did wonders for me.

The conference only had a couple dozen in-person attendees but apparently seven hundred online. I forgot the whole introductory section I had worked so hard on, but it went fine without it. There was still good discussion in the room during the Q&A bit, people are saying nice things on LinkedIn, and I was able to make friends with the first keynote speaker over lunch and she's a very useful work contact for me.

Yesterday at work was rough. I slept through my alarm -- something I never do -- and when I turned on my laptop an hour late I already had missed a call from my manager who'd had to route around me not being available when his manager tagged me to do something. So that was stressful but I was able to complete the task in a reasonably timely fashion, and while it is not my best work I think it ended up being one of those things that we didn't end up needing anyway. It was a slow day at work otherwise.

Unusually for a Thursday, there was no Doof so D and I decided to go to a queer social that we usually miss because it's every Thursday. He'd also invited a person new to the local discord and it was great to meet them too. We stayed out late (for us: he had to do his last-minute before-midnight duolingo lesson while we were waiting at the bus stop to go home!) and had a great time.

Today, the editing process my report has to go through was finished unexpectedly early, so I had to decide whether to accept or reject thousands of track changes. The editing was a weird process last time which we tried to streamline this time because we're up against a tight deadline. I tried to write to the style guide (now that I've laid eyes on it! I didn't know there was one before), but the style guide sucks and the editor I have to work with isn't good at using it. He also thinks all his own opinions and foibles are "just general grammar" and twice lately he mentioned "not using the passive voice" as if that was a) desirable or b) well understood by people who claim to care about it. I cannot cope with someone who doesn't know the difference between what's "correct" by even the widest interpretation of that word, what's a matter of register, and what's stylistics.

After work I had two startling and unsettling things happen in the space of about 15 minutes, the first of which I won't talk about here but the second of which is that I'd forgotten about my mom mentioning that some family friends were traveling to England on vacation and "are going to be somewhere near you." Of course I asked where and of course she didn't remember. She wanted to know if she should tell T to call me when they got here, "...if their phones even work there..." FFS. She should know their phones won't work here because hers and my dad's phones never work when they are here but of course she hadn't thought about it that deeply. She just is a boomer so would call. Well we're millennials so we can email!

I forgot immediately about this of course, in the sea of parental nonsense. T is an anglophile and a history teacher so tends to come to London and Canterbury and whatnot with school trips of teenagers. At least one other time, before covid, we vaguely arranged to meet up when she was here on a vacation but she was in London then and I think it was around Christmas so the trains were all fucked up and I was too poor to go to London on short notice anyway.

My mom might think they're "close to me" when they're in Ireland or something so I wasn't worried about it. But it turns out they are close to me! D and I now have plans to go see them on Sunday!

This does bring up the awkward point of how, if at all, I'll hide my life from them. My parents exhibit untold levels of oblivousness but surely other people might think my beard and voice and everything are surprising enough to be remarked upon when they get home!

I made the plan like normal but am not sure how to approach it now.

Yesterday I had a nauseating headache all day. It kept me from getting anything done at work which was rough when this latest project is bearing down on me, deadlines looming. I knew it'd put me under more pressure today (which it did). I wanted to go lift weights after work. I realized I need a haircut but I didn't go do that. I was stressed about still not having booked my travel and accommodation for this conference I'm keynote-speaking at next week. I hadn't started the keynote speech of course (and should I be worried that I'm not more worried about that?).

There's just too many things I need to fit in to not-enough days this week. And the only one I managed yesterday was booking a hotel and train tickets (and finding out that an online pal who lives nearby will not even be around that day to get dinner with, boo!). Which is a pretty big deal because I find that so stressful, but it's so little for a whole day.

Today I did okay with the work project and have a little more time than I thought -- end of tomorrow instead of midday today makes a big difference. And I did go to the gym -- angelofthenorth was going swimming this evening so I did too. It was okay at first but people dicking around in the one lane that there was for swimming laps meant I had enough collisions and disruption that my lizard brain noped out before my body would have.

Cardio is so difficult -- not the activity itself, but everything else. It's much more anxiety-inducing to go swimming or cycling on my own, it's not always easy to line schedules up with other people's... (indeed today I almost regretted when helping D do garden chores at his girlfriend's house took longer than expected). There are Reasons that I have avoided it in recent years...

Exeter was great. I saw an old friend C who I'd forgotten had moved there years ago! Lovely to see his new life: his partner and how cozily entangled their lives are, carving out queer space in a city that otherwise doesn't have much; his drag queen persona (I love trans men as drag queens so much); his new and very different career.

The meeting this morning that I was actually in Exeter for seemed to go as well as it could have.

I made good friends with my Guide Dogs counterpart for the day. He covers the southwest and we don't currently have a person to cover the southwest which is why I was there. But he lives so far from Exeter he had also traveled up last night -- we got Told that our meeting was at 10am, even that clearly wasn't ideal for either of us! -- staying in the same Premier Inn as me (it's perfect, you come out of the train station and it's right there ahead of you with a giant sign, most accessible hotel ever). We ran in to each other waiting to board the same bus to the Bad Bus Stops we were here to look at: him with his guide dog and me with my cane, both wondering if the other one was who we thought it was.

We made a good double act, backing each other up on our less well-received points. I'm sad he's so far away! But he's in the part of the southwest I'm more often visiting and I'm super tempted to invite him for a drink if I get the chance!

I had a long journey back, not as crowded or overheated as yesterday's until Birmingham, but with delays it was still two hours after that before I got home.

I stumbled in, drank a lot of ice water, had a shower, ate some dinner (lovely angelofthenorth had made mushroom risotto!), drank some more water, and now I'm lying in front of a fan.

I'm glad to be back home, where there are fans and ice. I bought an iced coffee this morning and there was no ice in it. It wasn't even cold! It was, like, I forgot about this cup of coffee cold, not iced-coffee cold. Ugh. I drank it anyway, but I pined for ice all day. It was 84°F in Exeter, and the first half of our meeting did involve walking up and down a road to look at its terrible bus stops (they really were terrible too -- really did have to be seen to be believed).

I've agreed to go camping this weekend, so I'm enjoying the ice and fans while I can!

At least for camping I won't have to wear my work clothes! I wore a proper shirt for the meeting this morning but immediately afterward took it off of course. I considered jettisoning the binder as well, but the t-shirt I had grabbed to change in to is a tank top and I didn't like that. The binder, my new white one, was extremely visible under the black tank top as it has a higher neckline and wider straps, but I decided that I did not care at all. It was much more comfy and it just looked like I'd layered two different tank tops. The train staff who provided my assistance and checked my tickets didn't misgender me or act weird about it or anything.

I have to write a bio to advertise a keynote speech I've agreed to deliver later in the summer.

I'm finding that coming up with more than one sentence to describe myself/my job is probably a lot harder than the speech will be itself!

I didn't write here yesterday, but what I said on fedi last night was 'Tomorrow is going to be an absolutely disgusting day at work: stressful meetings, grim topics to dwell on..."

The stressful meetings weren't as bad as I expected. Though they were tiring. Lots to think about.

Then some other stuff happened that inspired a household conversation about logistics. All fine, very glad we can do the things we can do. But, more to think about.

Then I got a letter inviting me to my first in-person PIP (UK welfare benefits for disabled people) assessment in a decade.

It's next week, on the day of an important work thing.

At 9 in the morning.

In a part of the city I don't know at all. I don't want D to drive me but I'll have to do a practice run myself if I want to get the bus there. They always pick weird buildings that look like all the other buildings, or some industrial park miles from anywhere, or something inaccessible.

Anyway, back to work: I now have to spend the afternoon paying close attention to the Government's spending review, which is bound to make me angry and frustrated.