Oh joy of joys. Today was stocktake day in the shop. For the past few days the shop has been cut up into sections with a number assigned to each section. There’s no secret art to doing this, just put some tape around a shelf or part of a shelf and write a number on it.

Once complete, each member of staff who wasn’t pretending to staff the shop floor was given a handheld barcode scanner to play with and the great stocktake of October began.

Find a section that hasn’t been done, type the number into the scanner, blip blip blip blip until all the barcodes are scanned in your chosen area. Now count the number of items scanned and check the scanner has recorded that many items. If not, start again. If so, sign your name on the tape that marks off the section and do another.

It’s simple nobrain work and 10,000 times more interesting than standing in an empty shop counting floor tiles or watching the Buff promo video on loop. Sometimes you find an item with no code on it and have to take it off to get coded.

Soon though, the incessant bleeping of eight handheld scanners starts to make you go a bit strange. Blip! blip! beeblip! blip! wibble! blip!

Seeing how we finished early (last year this went on till midnight apparently. It had ended by half eight this time) and that I am now off until Tuesday, planning to go home I set off to do the drive home afterwards.

Quite cold and icy, but despite that and encroaching tiredness I made it home in one piece and am now attempting to squeeze both Linux and Windows on my laptop without breaking Windows. If I do I’m a little stuck as the recovery CDs I ordered haven’t arrived yet.