This duck is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker!

My weekend has started at last! I slept for about 10 hours last night which is really unlike me. I must have been very tired. Work went ok, although I was slightly frustrated at some of the stuff that I did. If I was writing my own school report it would have said “Could do better”, which strangely enough was what it often said.

Last week was really busy for a variety of reasons. One of the people in my team was at the gym at work on Wednesday and slipped over and fractured her shoulder. She went home and has now been signed off sick for a couple of weeks to recover. So we had to cover all of her work. She did phone a couple of times to say she was bored and ask if she could come in, to which I said “no”. Then because we were all working this weekend, as the week progressed people had to go off to set things up, so there were less and less people in the office, but still lots of work to do.

I was also on call last week and seemed to get an awful lot of phone calls. Only one of the calls was in the middle of the night though, so that was a relief. I did also get paged on Friday night, which was actually after I had stopped being on call. I was slightly concerned when I looked at my pager and saw who had paged me, particularly as I thought it might take quite a long to time to deal with and I was really busy because of the weekend work. However, when I called back to find out what they wanted, the chap said “Sorry to disturb you. I know you’re not the person on call and this has absolutely nothing to do with you, but I couldn’t think of who else to call.” My brain was wondering what he was going to say and whatever I considered, it wasn’t this… “I’ve found a dead duck and I don’t know what to do with it”. “A dead duck?” I replied, thinking that I also had no idea what to do with deceased avians. “Right…” I said “Would you like me to see if I can find out who to tell?” “Yes please. Sorry.” So I had a quick look on the internet and came up with DEFRA’s emergency dead bird finding telephone number (08459 33 55 77)and gave it to him. He went away happy, as did I as I just sat there and laughed.