The Meerkat Muse: 29th of January, 2025
Greetings one and all, and welcome back to the Meerkat Muse! Let us begin with a milestone.
Five Years
A few days ago, I noted my fifth anniversary with my present employers. Have I really been with them for so long? Sometimes it feels like I’ve blinked, and time has zipped by. When I first joined them, I was doing training at another branch, because the local store was not yet ready to open. After a brief period of training, we moved to helping clean the showroom, and then we opened up, right before covid turned the world into something of a dystopian nightmare. It was a case of ‘easy come, easy go’ in those early days, with lockdowns and furlough schemes entering the equation, and it would not be until September that I was able to get back into the regular flow of work. Well, for a while.
You see, in January 2021, we all went back into lockdown, only this time I was helping to man the store, to handle phone calls and queries. My manager (at the time) and I would work together, but we’d also have days where we’d be on our own, which were long, lonely occasions, especially as this was over the winter period. You can probably gather that it was something of a slog. We were finally back to some vague semblance of normality in April 2021, and since then it’s been a case of doing what I can. It hasn’t always been easy, and I could issue a long list of gripes, but considering my experiences at my previous employer, I am generally speaking happier where I am.
Of course, there’s no telling what the next five years will yield. I don’t know if my future remains in this industry, or even in retail. It is always prudent to keep one eye on the jobs market, and you never know, maybe my book sales will surge, and I can retire. Hah!
The Forest Blooms
Progress is developing nicely with this story, but I’ll admit to a major recent distraction, one I alluded to in my previous Muse. You see, there has been an announcement…
The Nintendo Switch 2
It’s the worst-kept secret in the video game industry, but following weeks of increasingly detailed leaks, Nintendo themselves have finally released the first official look at their next console. In an expected-yet-rare move, Nintendo’s latest hardware is an evolution of their existing concept, as the trailer makes abundantly clear. The Switch 2 is bigger, the console has more connections, and it seems the controllers can operate a bit like a wireless computer mouse. Quite how this works with games is beyond me.
Precious little else was revealed, save for confirmation of what Nintendo had previously revealed, namely that the new console will play Switch 1 games. The docking station appears bigger, it looks like the controllers will connect in a different, cleaner manner, and that’s about it. Maddeningly, the next time we’ll learn more will be on the 2nd of April, at a Nintendo Direct. Given how much has already leaked, it seems faintly absurd to expect fans to wait another two months for more news. This also rules out a release date prior to then.
Still, there is now, at long last, something official, and dare I say it, the hardware looks good. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak, and until there’s more information, we’re still largely left with speculation.
There’s a new Mario Kart on the way, at least, it appears that way, from the very brief footage of the console apparently running the game. Some original Switch games will not work on the new hardware, but Nintendo have been coy as to which ones. All that remains for us to do is wait till the 2nd of April.
The Apple
This is the ‘fart apple’. My daughter, in her infinite wisdom, carved the word ‘fart’ into the apple with her teeth. What motivated her to do this is a mystery only the fates themselves can hope to unravel.
The Curious Case of the Cracker
We currently have a lot of crackers in our house, as in crackers for cheese. This is the result of my brother-in-law providing them to my wife, so we’ve all been gradually getting through them. I will gladly have them with cheese, but sometimes I’ll have them with a little bit of butter, and even plain. This proved my undoing the other night, in quite spectacular fashion. The crumbs of the dry cracker got caught up in my throat, triggering a coughing fit. This became so bad that it became a vomiting experience a few moments later. What made it worse is that I couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time, and ended up hurling my guts up on the front porch.
At least this was over porcelain, rather than carpet.
It was quite the unexpected moment, and not a particularly pleasant one.
The Return
It’s impossible to escape the return to the White House of Donald Trump. The man who refused to attend the inauguration of Joe Biden last time around, having previously incited an insurgency, and the man who has delivered a host of failures, moral, political and business-wise, is hardly fit to be president, yet somehow he has returned, and there’s no telling what this means for the USA, and the world. All we can do is watch this space.
What I can say is, who had a Musk Nazi salute on their inauguration bingo card?
A Day of Difficulty
Gah. Do you ever feel that the working day starts out on the wrong foot, and it only serves to aggravate you from there? I arrived at work last Tuesday (following a day off) to that which I despise: a list. A lot of it isn’t actually difficult stuff, it’s just time-consuming, laborious stuff that irritates me. Some of it could actually be conducive to making money, though other elements are fiddly, faffy things, and those are the elements that really annoy me.
Self-loathing
You might think of me as being a broadly happy, optimistic ‘kat, but believe me, I my moments of intense doubt. The other morning, as I was taking my daughter to school, I inexplicably conveyed us both onto the wrong bus. I did not realise my error till the bus was moving in the opposite direction. Cue a mad dash to get off, call a taxi, and go back whence we came. I was mightily pissed off with myself. I am certainly far from perfect, and like any other human being I make mistakes, but this one really aggravated me.
There are times when I lack confidence, irrespective of whether I project it or not. There are times when I desperately wish I was not me, that I had a better mind, and better body to boot. I imagine most people go through moments when they hold such wishes, and I will stop kicking myself, sooner or later, but I really wish I was beyond such silly errors.
Pre-emptively Irritated
Last Thursday, following a morning that involved a lot of tidying up, I listened as my manager booked a design appointment for me, for the following day. Annoyingly, maddeningly, this was for first thing in the morning. I hate early birds. I get it, for some people it’s the only option, but that first hour at work is what I deem my ‘wake up time’, and I am not usually in the mood for much human interaction. I will grant that this is a ‘me’ problem, but it does grate on my nerves!
Lately, owing to the cost of some of our services, I have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get customers over the line, only to wind up never hearing from them again. As I hit five years here, I am growing increasingly dissatisfied. I am beginning to believe my heart is no longer in retail sales. On the other hand, the location is near-perfect from a journey-to-work-perspective, something I have to factor into my thinking.
The Strange Email Sign-up
I got two emails through on Saturday, which utterly perplexed me. They were to do with Bloomingdales, which is a luxury US retailer. I have never, ever had any interest in Bloomingdales, and have certainly not signed up to their site! Twice I did the password reset, trying to see if I could fathom what was going on. Twice I received no email. I tried using their online live chat service, and was told to phone up a US number, which would cost me a small fortune.
It’s all a bit weird, and something to keep an eye on…
I’ve had quite a bit of spam lately, and quite a few people contacting me on social media to try and convince me to spend money on book marketing services. Some of the spam has been via Facebook, with people messaging me – under the false guise of being Facebook themselves – to tell me my author page is violating the rules. Within their messages, emails and whatnot are links where I can sort this problem out, only I wasn’t born yesterday. These accounts are obviously not official, and the links have nothing to do with Facebook. Unfortunately, these con artists will succeed from time to time, and they only need say, one in a hundred people to fall for their cruel, cowardly antics.
I have considered sharing the email addresses of the ones who directly email me with these scams, but then again, I don’t know if these emails are being bounced off accounts. The email addresses look very random, throwaways if you will, so it’s probably pointless to share them.
Downpours
It has been quite damp these past few days, and we even had a single burst of thunder on Monday. It’s certainly the time of year for the rain, and on Tuesday it rained so hard that the showroom suffered a small leak. Since rain is the default scenario in the UK, I suspect further leaks are likely. Still, we are finally staring at the end of January, a month that seems to last 64 years.
Still, it’s not been totally unproductive. I have cracked 60,000 words on The Forest, and have moved into the final act of the story. With luck, I’ll hear more on the progress of The Schism soon. As we move into February, we shall have a few things to weigh up, and hopefully some further news on my books for you all. Until then, take care!
