Friday morning, and I am alone in the office - the clients are down the hall in their smoke-filled individual offices, they think we are weird to have one large smoke-free room for all of us! I think it's a status thing here to have an individual office, like having a great big car.

I am trying hard to stay awake, I went out with David for dinner last night, got home at 9pm, started stitching and doing sudoku, then realised it was after midnight, went to bed and couldn't sleep! At all! Really this is terrible, it's because of lawyer problems again. She was supposed to call me and make arrangements to go to the work permit office on Monday. Has she done so? No, no, of course not!

Poor David, he needed dinner bought for him last night, he had a bad experience yesterday. Leo sent him a text message, so David used the reply function on his phone, just to reply "yes", which is one of the automatic choices. Trouble is, it wouldn't stop and the message "yes" got sent to Leo about 500 times! So Leo calls, couldn't get David, rings Alec and there is a long conversation in Hebrew - which I don't understand, but I knew what this one was about. So David tries to call Leo back and can't get through. Whereupon one of the Cypriot boys, who is only about 23 and normally never says a word, says "David, why don't you send him a text?" At which we all collapse with laughter and David starts muttering in a paranoid fashion. I think they had to turn both phones off for quite some time in order to solve the problem. Which must have been torture for Leo, as he is permanently attached to his and calls all the 5000 people he knows intimately each day.

I also need to speak to HR today, the Hologram's replacement (yes, he had enough!), about all these issues with work permit, insurance, tax, fusion etc etc. I found out why there were problems with the election in Paris, too, while I was there - I knew I would get the whole story. It seems that the ones who sit around the office all the time are miffed because the HR person for Europe is no longer located in Paris. Worse still, they think an actual person who is employed in Paris currently should have been given the job, so they are deliberately being uncooperative. They all knew perfectly well that the election was not being organised correctly, and sat back and said nothing until it was nearly over. I told them they were childish and unprofessional, of course that went down a treat. Clearly they all have way too much spare time.

All in all, I will be happy when I can go home, get some sleep and go on with my stitching! That is the sum of my plans for the weekend.