My boss decided that he wanted a "robo-raptor", having seen this year's candidate for "the toy that all kids will be wanting for Christmas"in Debenhams. On Friday he was worrying that he would be unable to get there after work, so I offered to get it for him and wait for him in the car park behind Debenhams. He gave me £100 to pay for it, it turned out to cost only £90, so he very generously gave let me keep the change. His partner, a teacher was horrified that he'd bought it, and his cat was rather freaked out by the plastic dinosaur.

I've not done this much lathe work and soldering in a long time, the mainspring barrel for a fusee clock (the biggest, most powerful range of mainspring) was rather poorly assembled, it split apart when Trevor tried to improve the lousy joins! I've had to make a bush for the first time in ages for the same clock. Another chiming clock needed 35 holes bushes, including 6 (mainspring) barrels, and 15 of then required me to use two bushes because the last repairer had used a weird set of bushes. I normally don't need to spend over a week on just two clock, but these two defied belief.

I got a bit of a surprise when David told me someone would be coming in on Friday morning who would start working with us on Thursdays, then a second surprise when David asked me to consolidate my half-days and take Thursday off to give the new chap, called Chris, a bit more working room. I didn't mind too much, but a little more warning would be nice. Chris is a temporary worker, helping to reduce our ever-growing backlog of work, (now if we could only get our customers to deal with the backlog of stuff to be collected and paid for.) Chris has been working from home and wants to get a bit more experience from the variety of clocks we service.