h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After two days of working late, decided not to do more than half an hour of overtime tonight, which meant leaving the office even though it was raining. Looked out, wondered whether to hang on a bit longer, then decided to risk it. Rain came on harder as I was cycling home - autumn is definitely here.

BBC 5-day weather forecast is ridiculous - changes every five minutes, so how on earth can it be reliable 5 days ahead? Yesterday it was forecasting sunshine for Saturday (when J is coming to Cambridge for the day), now it says "light rain" . Oh well, we'll just have to force ourselves to go into bookshops and cafes!

The pressure is piling up in the office - increased by the fact that my boss is due back from her maternity leave on 13 November and I want to have everything under control for her return. Today the database was misbehaving - did one mailmerge late afternoon, tried to do another one about 10 minutes later and the database wouldn't talk to the word processor - !! Hope it will be better after a rest overnight - that's what happened last time we had this problem. I think it may be because everyone who uses the database closes it down overnight.

Have finished the initial processing of all the applications. Spent a lot of time emailing/phoning applicants and/or their schools asking for missing information. I always think "If I were applying to Cambridge, at the very least I would read through the form and see that I hadn't left any blank spaces" (e.g. A-levels they are taking this year!) If only we could just discard all the forms where they haven't read the instructions, it would make life a lot easier!