First day at my new job

Yesterday was my first day at my new work.  It went well from the point of view of settling in... but was a complete disaster from the point of view of getting anything done—after installing a whole load of software on my new machine, I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3 and it trashed the entire OS: I had to reinstall Windows completely from scratch!  Bloody Micros~1! And then when I turned up this morning, I discovered that my monitor was no longer talking to the computer, and I had to get a spare monitor.

The cycle ride in on the first day took me three quarters of an hour, including getting lost and having to consult my map a few times—quite a bit more than the thirty minutes I was used to in the old place. The journey home again took me 43 minutes, again involving a little getting lost, as against up to 37 from Shepherd's Bush. Today to my astonishment I managed to get here in just 36 minutes (with no more than a minute lost due to wrong turns); let's see how well I manage to do going home.

(It was also a lot quieter, both in terms of road traffic and in terms of pedestrians spewing from Farringdon station turning up today at quarter past eight than yesterday at nine o'clock.)

When I discovered my new workplace here in Clerkenwell has the postcode EC1, I said "Is this the City, then?  I feel like I must have sold my soul, to be working here!"  Fortunately, I've not turned into a banker. Unfortunately, my salary hasn't turned into a banker's salary either. :-S

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I've just discovered there's a forty-eight hour Tube strike starting. This severely pisses me off, because I had no idea there was one pending. If I had, I wouldn't have cycled to work the last two days. I'd intended to spend Friday cycling around the Northumbrian countryside; instead of which, I'm going to be so tired after having to cycle sixty miles in four days that I don't know where I'm going to get the energy to cycle home from on Thursday.

Grrr! :-(

[ETA: Though a glance at the TfL Journeyplanner suggests I could do the journey as fast by bus and train anyway as by Tube... assuming I can get on the train, what with the thousands of other commuters displaced off the Tube...]