Concentration

If you see one around, could you please tell it to come back. I'd need it to finish some work but it's nowhere to be found.

Damn it. Seems like there's at least one Monday each week. Yesterday didn't feel like Monday at all, probably because I had a nice dinner in Teri-Aki to look forward to. And work was OK, too. I managed to get my experiment ready to run, apart from one technical detail. Which I'm now too bored to fix, since Monday's caught me up. I just haven't been able to concentrate on my work properly, and I was really incoherent in supervision earlier. The quality of my thinking was so shoddy that I decided to just do laundry.

In all respects, it feels like a Monday. First of all, the weather is awful; cold, rainy, damp, grey and dark. Second, the construction site next door has been excessively loud, and they have done some work right below my window, as they've dug up the lawn and made some sewer connections or whatever. Seems to require loud, heavy tools and blocking the footpath, anyway.

Third, my college is showing it's incompetent side again, as I've been inundated with false bills. Some of these bills go up to £4500 and are definitely wrong, some are smaller and less obviously wrong. The big bill for four and a half grand was for fees, of which I'm exempted for being a 4th year PhD student. Well, they tried to bill them from me anyway, I guess just in case I had some loose change I would like to part with.

Their previous strike of genious was sending me a bill for £946 for "Sage Balance Transfer", which I of course didn't pay since I didn't understand what it was for. Now they have explained that it's my rent for 3 months plus £10 for key deposit. By adding this "random term" they made the sum unrecognisable, and the name "Sage balance transfer" was still not explained. I've paid my key deposit in 2003 when I moved in to my room, and this is now the third time since then that they've tried to re-charge it from me. I guess some people don't check their bills and just pay anything, so it's worth trying. Sounds like those scams where people sell adspace on their website by sending bills to companies for their appearance in "business directory service".

Finally, today I heard that the college had lost my travel grant application after it was processed half through the system and now I need to do it again. Oops, they say, and you get no confirmation that anything would be changed next time. Just random mistakes that seem to be cropping up a lot lately. Lack of concentration?