On the road with a man named Duncan

“Now, this is where the fun starts – there’s a French lady on reception, and she’s a bit temperamental.”
2 or 3 days a week, my job involves visiting customer sites and fixing their scientific computer-based issues. Three days into the job and I’m still expectedly clueness, so Thursday was a shadowing day. I had driven up to Bicester at the crack of dawn, to be confronted with the blasted M25. Ten miles of its time was all I asked – and I got 8 miles of queues for my trouble. My company car – albeit a hired one until I decide on a real one – was built for traffic jams. The Vauxhall Vectra is a big slab of a car, more functional than fanciful, but it got me to Bicester in some style and an hour early.
Once Duncan the engineer had been located, we set off for Oxford University, where two cries for help needed to be answered. The aforementioned Frenchwoman turned out to be having a good day, and we sailed through the two jobs in a couple of hours. And that appeared to be it for the day. We chowed down on sandwiches, after which I wended my way home, throughly pleased with the early finish. Something tells me the days won’t always be like this…