Minor Accommodation Success and Chinese Food

Posted on 2009/01/29 21:34:29 (January 2009).

[Thursday 29th January]
A thankfully much quieter day at work than has been the norm for most of this week. Had a "postmortem" meeting for yesterday's fire, which I think helped to bury hatchets etc quite effectively. I have to admit I had got quite wound up by the whole incident yesterday - it's never nice to feel like you're taking the blame for something which is clearly someone else's fault - but I think I'm over it now.

In other news, I finally got round to phoning back about our accommodation situation (having last week been left somewhat undecided after they'd tried to slip in unwelcome clauses to the renewal contract). I managed to persuade them to abandon this silly notion of a fixed 12 month contract with no break clause, and still accept a drop in the rent. Of course, you never really get the upper hand with these sorts of people - they're probably only being so accommodating (if you'll pardon the pun) in the first place because they're struggling to find tenants at the moment, but still I feel a minor sense of achievement in having successfully negotiated a reduction in our current rent. Especially as they'd initially sent us a letter saying they wanted to increase it "in line with market conditions". Cheeky blighters!

This time last year I'd received a pay rise which was almost entirely swallowed up by the increase in rent (see here). As you can imagine that had left me feeling somewhat crestfallen. By contrast, at the start of this year I received a similar pay rise, but the rent has actually gone down, so I feel rather pleased with myself.

In the evening I fancied Chinese food, so met Chie near my office and we went to a Chinese restaurant we'd been to a couple of times before, which does a surprisingly good range of interesting vegetarian dishes (of the "mock meat" variety). That was all rather nice.

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