Did someone say shrink?

As was pointed out to me in the Fitz at their End of Month tourney I haven't blogged for a while. I think the main reason is there hasn't been too much to report on the poker front above the tournament reports I put into my weekly Irish Eyes letter.

In a past life, or the mid 90s to be more factual, I found myself working in Germany on a lucrative IT project with my friend John who had wandered into IT circuitously after spells working in a snooker ball factory in England, as a lab chemist in Japan and a barrister's devil in Ireland. John had led a pretty interesting life to say the least. Having moved from Tranmere to Derry with his family at the height of the Troubles at age 12, he'd never lost his English accent, which can't have been a lot of fun during his teenage years living in Free Derry surrounded by the people who kept blowing up his father's insurance office. The reason for the family move was that head office in England thought if they sent over their only Irish employee and put him in charge of the Derry office, the locals might stop blowing it up. Well, it was worth a try, but the locals were made of sterner stuff.

The project was lucrative and John was always good company. The only real drawback was that there actually was no project. There had been at one point but then the EU changed some minor regulation and the whole thing became redundant. Rather than accept this and inform their bosses the middle managers who headed up the project decided to stay mum until the budget ran out so as to avoid awkward questions such as "Could you not have foreseen this before we blew the GDP of a small country on it?", "Who is to blame here?" and "Who gets sacked?" Which meant long days of sitting at a desk for me and John pretending to work but mostly just staring at the wall. John noted ruefully on more than one occasion that the sheer pointlessness of it all was causing his personality to shrink.

Much as I love what I do for a living there are times when I feel the routine nature of sitting at a desk ten hours a day clicking buttons is causing similar shrinkage. Were the automatons I fully expect to see again this year in Vegas plugged into their Ipods wearing their Beats by Dr Dre over a bandana or a baseball cap describing their deepest emotions only in cliched acronyms like LOL, FML and FTW born that way? Or did they turn into personalityless drones after clicking the Fold button online for the ten millionth time?

They say it's good to get out of the house now and then, and I suppose I believe them.  So this weekend I'm heading to Mullingar for the new monthly game in Jokers Casino.

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