Ho hum. It's always depressing to have a cold at the weekend.

Partly this is because, well, no matter how much I enjoy my job, it's still stuff I'm doing because other people want it done rather than stuff I'm doing because I want it done, so it's understandable that I should feel less happy about missing a chance to do the latter. But also, it's a rest thing: the tiringness of sitting at home with a cold trying to rest but not really managing it properly is vaguely comparable to the tiringness of being at work, so replacing a day or two of work with a cold leaves me about as tired as I'd otherwise have been, whereas replacing a weekend with a cold is liable to leave me at the end of the next week feeling as if I've worked twelve days non-stop.

Which will be great fun, given the rather silly number of parties next weekend. (I count four that I know of. One is the other of lzz's matched pair, which I can reasonably miss given that I went to the first of them two days ago, and by dint of extreme effort I hope to make it to two of the other three…)

One of my colleagues has just quoted the phrase ‘proactively on demand’ at me from some other company's marketing presentation. It says something about modern business that it took me several moments to work out what was wrong with that phrase – I seem to have become so accustomed to assuming ‘proactive’ is a content-free buzzword when I hear it in a marketing context that it honestly didn't occur to me to think about its real meaning in that phrase! That would be worrying if I didn't think it was probably a good defence mechanism against marketroids…