Another day testing, another day of Lee and Herring in my ears. It's not a terrible thing to do for money. I was ripping through the sections of the test plan - this was something to do with the fact that I was on the really short bits that one can rip through. I felt like I was motoring. Still, there seem to be many barriers to rip through next week.

Towards the end of the day I had a very frustrating technical support phone call. I tried to diagnose the problem and fix it, but the guy on the other end was totally IT literate, exceedingly helpful and largely unhelpable. We couldn't get any of the diagnostics I wanted to run because some bloody idiot has taken them out of the program. I used to work on this part of our software and I always made sure that there was something by way of error message or output file to explain why things weren't working, but some plonker, in their (lack of) wisdom had simplified the error message to "Er... it's not bloody working... sorry!". Useless (I'm paraphrasing the actual message - it's more polite, but still as pointless).

A last minute diagnostic tool of my own devising failed miserably at the customer's end when I sent it to him, so I must start the week with that and a bunch of other stuff hanging over me. Grrr. This is meant to be an important week too. I guess hard work will have to be undertaken.

After work, I drove (fairly early) to the gig I had in Newcastle. I did my soundcheck, everything was fine, and then I went outside to give my farewell phonecall to my girlfriend, who was jetting off to New York at a ridiculously early hour the following morning. We chatted for a while and she made me laugh. She's naturally very funny and should probably write jokes for me or something. Her description of the internal monologue of seagulls was inspiring! We said our farewells and I left her to go off and actually pack. Apparently, everything was ready, but just not in the bag.

The gig was a disappointment for me. I did ok. In fact, I think I did pretty well under the circumstances, but I don't like to be treated that way by an audience. They were chattery and generally unimpressed. I got a couple of heckles, which were easily dispatched (I think I got a round of applause for one of my responses, which wasn't even particularly harsh or witty). Overall, I felt like I had to really work the room very hard. This sort of situation shouldn't arise. However, I think I know where I'm going wrong and I think I know why that gig was hard. The other comedians seemed to continue to treat me with respect after I'd performed, so I shouldn't feel too ashamed.

I didn't go out for a meal with the other acts after the show as I'm trying to stop myself from eating shit. So far, I'm doing ok, but I am still probably eating too much. However, it's better that I should be eating too much healthy stuff than too much rubbish. Probably.

I had to get a reasonably early night as there was a busy day ahead.