Hasta La Vista

Those who know me in Real Life may be aware of my boss. He is Swiss German and I absolutely adore him in a way that is completely and utterly platonic. We both have varying levels of OCD and I find working for him about as pleasant as I could expect working for any human to be. Far and away my favourite thing about him is his accent, which is identical to Arnold Schwarzenegger's in both tone and vocabulary. Like Arnie, my boss seems to prefer to use as few words as possible when communicating with others. To this end, we have developed a series of acronyms to help us label the people who come to visit him - he was calling everyone a 'pain in the ass'; eventually this became shortened to PITA and, inevitably, super PITAs became SPITAs. A personal highlight was when he walked into my office after a meeting, handed me a pile of papers and said only, 'Shred.' It was like The Terminator meets David Brent.

But today was an absolute gem. I went into his office to ask him something, and he was emailing. There was an open jar of macadamia nuts on his desk.
'Can I have one of these, please?' I asked. He didn't respond. 'I'll take that as a yes then,' I said, taking a nut and popping it in my mouth. A few seconds later, he pressed send on his email and his attention refocused.
'What was that you asked me?' he said.
'Whether I could have a nut,' I said. And in classic Arnie voice, he drawled,
'You have already taken one. Obsolete question. Inefficient use of resources.'
Honestly, it's moments like those that make me want to work for him forever.

I had to do an internal online training course about money laundering today. Like you, I wouldn't have expected that to be filled with interesting anecdotes, but I read that money laundering is so prevalent that, if it were an economy, it would be the tenth biggest in the world. Makes you think, innit.

Sad news from me is that I know someone who is genuinely lost looking for fish: my cat, Dennis. Well, he's my parents' cat really - and he ran away this afternoon when my Dad was picking him up from the cattery. We don't know where he is, he's in a strange area and it's all very scary. Fingers crossed, his greedy stomach will drive him to make contact with some humans very soon.