This is our ‘new’ car. As Mark said, it’s not going to win any prizes for dream car, but it has ticks in all the boxes and will do the job - hopefully for many years to come.
I’m a bit nervous about having jumped the gun by buying the car before I leave the monolith, but it fits our requirements too well to leave it. It would have been auctioned tomorrow.
And now I’ll have a white car, like everybody else in my family…
According to this page it was 27.3 degrees at Laverton at 11.05pm (about 10 minutes ago), which is also what the thermometer says the temperature outside the study window is. The temperature inside the study is 27.5. It got to 41.1 here today.
Generally, in an effort not to fuck the world up any more than we have to, we turn the aircon off as soon as the temperature outside appears to be dropping. We did that tonight when it started to rain and it was a bad, bad idea. We’ve turned it back on but it’s not making much of an impression yet.
I’m sure it’s just old age, but I really don’t remember the hot weather being this bad when I was younger. Sure, we got very hot days, but I don’t recall them being this unpleasant. It probably is just old age.
Well now it’s time to go and make a sweaty imprint on my mattress. Ugh!
On a stinking hot day and with your 40th birthday looming, what else do you do but scan a whole heap of photos of yourself and post them on your blog?
Here’s a romp through the last 40 years:
Let’s start from the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start:
I still look very much like this when I first wake up.
Then there’s the first school photo at 5 years of age:
I don’t think I ever wore that blazer again.
I was 10 years old when my first nephew was born:
I remember that I loved that frog tshirt.
Another school photo at 16:
I made my mother get the large version of the photo retouched to hide the acne.
The acne was still there at 20 and I had a mullet to add to the horror:
I’d forgotten just how bad my skin was until I got this photo out today. It took another 3 years to clear.
24 (I think) at Albert Park with Bundy:
He was a fantastic dog. He’d be 17 if he was still around.
31 and holding a very little Cosmo:
At 34 I was about to become a home owner:
39 with a bullet:
At the zoo with Finn.
My eldest brother rang to wish me a happy birthday this morning, four days early. Normally I might be mildly miffed that my brother got my birthday wrong, but at the moment he has good reason.
B1 lives just the other side of Ballarat and is a member of his local CFA. He’s been pretty busy over the last few days and expects to be very busy for the next few.
My sister-in-law’s sister lives near the Grampians. I think she & her husband grow wildflowers commercially. B1 and SIL were there yesterday helping them clean up. Their house was fine, but apparently there was a lot of other damage.
B1 is self-employed. He’s facing a lean month because he can’t focus enough to do any work at the moment. He’s constantly waiting for a call.
SIL works for DSE. She’s on call too.
It all feels a bit more real.
My last blog entry was supposed to be about how my attitude to work has shifted fundementally in recent weeks, as evidenced by my attitude to the approval of my leave, but I got sidetracked by the issue. Once I wouldn’t have contemplated the possibility that my manager might not approve my leave (particularly since I’m always careful to ensure my work is covered while I’m away before I put in the request). This time, though, it felt very possible. He has, by the way, just approved it so we’re all systems go.
Once I would only have turned up in jeans on a ‘casual’ day. Now I only wear my ‘work’ clothes when I can’t find anything else.
Once I would have organised appointments for the beginning or end of the day to minimise the disruption to work and to enable me to start early or finish late to ensure stuff go done. Now I go and do whatever I want/need to do at whatever time suits me.
A little thing like being surplus to requirements makes a world of difference to a girl.
It’s a much quieter day today, which is kinda good, but when it’s quiet I find it more difficult to be here. I find myself wondering why they don’t just make me redundant already.
My leave next week is not assured. My boss hasn’t approved it yet. When I reminded him about it yesterday he was very cagey and said something about how it might affect my finish date with HR. I think he’s concerned that, if they can survive without me for a week, HR might decide that they don’t need me for the extra time after all. This, of course, falls under the category of his problem, not mine, except that I may not get my week off. He has until tomorrow to work it out.
If he doesn’t approve the leave I’m going to take Friday & Monday off anyway so that I get at least some of what I wanted and I’ll come back to work on the Tuesday. This would mean that we won’t get to go away, but I want to avoid getting myself in a situation where they could terminate my employment without the redundancy. I’ve heard stories, which have made me a tad nervous, about people being defined as ‘refusing to work’ after they’ve been told they’re going to be made redundant and their employment being terminated on this basis without a payout. I’m sure there’s more to the stories (if they’re true) than I’ve been told, but I would prefer not to add any angst to the situation that doesn’t need to be there.
Our production problem has been fixed. It was a simple data issue that had an horrendous snowballing effect. Fortunately it should only take a day or so for things to return to normal.
With that done the next matter of dropdead urgency has come to the fore. A deployment into production first thing tomorrow morning to support a product launch, which I only found out about on Friday. The change is still in test and the production support team leader I need to speak to hasn’t returned my calls yet.
This is a large part of what I don’t like about this job. There is no end to this kind of stuff. It’s rush, rush, panic, panic to get something resolved and then rush, rush, panic, panic again.
But it’ll be fine. I’ll make my boss approve my leave for next week and after that I only have 2 or 3 more weeks to go. I’ll be walking like the hunchback of Notre Dame by then, but it’ll be fine.
I am dealing with people who couldn’t find their bums with both hands if they were signposted!
The vendor is supposed to deal directly with the support guy and anything that requires a third party should come through me. So here’s the phone discussion I just had:
Vendor - Nicky, can you get R (support guy) to do this on only these machines.
Nicky - R thinks it doesn’t matter and he can do it from the central machine. You should have a talk to him about why it needs to be specific machines.
Vendor - Can you ask him to do it on the specific machines…
Nicky - I already have and he thinks it doesn’t matter. You need to explain why it does matter to him directly.
Vendor - It matters because …
Nicky - No, don’t explain it to me. I don’t understand this stuff and, if he has any questions, I’m just going to have to ring you back. It’s really much better if you talk to him directly.
Vendor - But if you tell him …
Nicky - Deal with R directly. Anything you need from anyone else, come to me. Let me know when you have any progress. But anything you need R to do, talk to him. Don’t come through me, it’s a waste of time.
The vendor sounded a little put out by the end of this conversation.
We have a major production problem. Our support people don’t know what’s wrong.
I have to be out of the building in half an hour because they’re laying new carpet on my floor.
My vendor contact is at lunch and people in his office are useless.
I have been awake since about 2am and I have a chocolate bar & a bag of chips for lunch.
Anybody want to guess why I’m happy to be leaving?
|
Twitterers
