Monday 16-05-16 Moving Floors - A New Era at Work

So yesterday, the 16th, was our first day on our new floor at work. We've moved from the 3rd to the 2nd, and also changed from having set desks to a "hot desk" environment. This meant we packed up on Friday 13th, which was a bit inauspicious, but to be honest I'd already done most of my drawer-emptying by Wednesday, and on Friday I threw away the last of my stuff.
As part of the new regime, we get a small locker which needs to contain our "hot box", and there is space for a couple of other items - a docking station, a mousemat, a box of tissues, and not much else, to be honest. The desks have to be cleared each night, and then it's a case of sit where you like when you get in to the office the next morning. And the interesting thing is that there are fewer desks than staff, so if you don't get in on time, you don't get a seat. It's like a game of Musical Chairs for grown-ups, but the rounds are played very slowly (once per day) and there is no music. Hmm.
It doesn't make the workforce feel particularly valued, especially when there are enough empty seats (currently) on the floor to easily seat everyone. But then, I guess that is the decision that The Company has taken, and they don't particularly care who comes in and does the work, as long as the work gets done. At least they keep paying me - it could be worse, I could be a struggling artist employed (but not paid) by Sainsbury.
I settled in fairly easily, I found a desk and plugged myself in. There were quite a few leads involved, so I went up to our previous lair and retrieved my docking station. Besides the keyboard and mouse leads, there was the power lead and the display lead, and the ethernet cable too if you want to go wired. So five in total. To unplug and go to meetings without a docking station would be an annoyance, relatively speaking. And that was that for the day, mostly.
At the end of the day, it was a bit annoying to have to put everything away, I must have needed about four trips to get everything in the locker, and then by the time I got out of the office, the next scheduled train was cancelled. That was a bit more annoying, but in the grand scheme of things my little annoyances don't amount to very much. And then I was home. So that was my office moving story, except it wasn't very moving.
TTFN.

Saturday 14-06-28 - Party Prep

So the weekend arrived. And the first thing I had agreed to was a work-related call at 09:00. How very relaxing. I logged on to the laptop in advance of the call and saw that the team had emailed me the results I needed to check, rendering the call unnecessary. So, I checked the results, provided some feedback and thought that would be it. 'Ah', advised my colleague over IM (Instant Messaging), 'now we can move on to the second stage of the change'. Oh, bugger.
'Do you need me online for that?' I asked. In three hours or so, came the reply. 'Okay, I'll log back on at one pm', I wrote back.
TW had, by now, taken the girls to gymnastics, and so I showered and went to pick them up. Once we returned, I was faffing around with something, then TW's best friend (and husband, and young son) arrived. So we had a very nice time chatting and drinking tea. TW made lunch, some lovely burgers in rolls, and by then the son was getting tired and so our visitors left, heading back to the Big Smoke. Or actually Maidenhead, I think it's where they've moved to. Anyway, then I checked the TV listings and saw that there was some T20 cricket on, so I sat and concentrated on that while TW was very active doing washing, and shopping and stuff. She does do things in a disorganised manner; if I was her I would arrange my life so that I actually got to sit down for a few minutes. But that's not her style; even when she's busy (or says she's got a lot to do), she's quite happy to sit and play Candy Crush for 20 minutes. So, I've given up trying to work her out. She was going out in the evening, some wedding reception which I wasn't interested in attending, and she wanted to make sure that things were ready and in place for Eldest's party on the Sunday.
At 6:30 or so she got a text message - we had arranged to buy a tent and the guy selling it was back and available. So I jumped in the car to go and pick it up, and guess what? Heavy summer showers. As soon as we do anything related to camping, it bloody well rains. We just don't have the luck. So I collected the beast (it was so big that light was bending around it)  and took it home.
Once I'd unloaded that, it was time to ferry TW in to town.
That evening I had a couple of EPAs from River Cottage and watched a bit of telly. I headed up to bed at about 22:30 I think.
I had forgotten to log back on to the work laptop to validate the second lot of results...

Development Planning Time Again

It's that time of year at work when Management insist we produce Development Plans. This to demonstrate they have our best interests at heart. I'm lucky this year in that I've just changed roles and so my development plan is to get to know my new role. A stretch goal would be to excel in my new role.
I'm becoming more aware, however, that I'm quite happy doing what I'm doing - whatever that is. I'm not sure that I want a promotion, because I see managers having their priorities changed hourly, as information is requested for decks, or Management are planning a visit. As long as I can ensure our standard of living improves, I think I'll be happy with that for now. Which is lucky, since I should now stay in role for 18 months or so. I'm sure by the time I get to the end of that time, I'll be looking for another opportunity / promotion. Happy days.
TTFN.

Half-Days and Time-keeping

I took a half-day yesterday from work, with the original intention of going camping yesterday afternoon for an extended weekend. As it was, I had a call with Australia at 07:00 (after a 21:00 call the previous evening), and didn't finish in the office until 13:15. So by that point I had worked four and a half hours. Then when I got home I joined another call from 14:30 to 15:15, bring my work hours for the day to five and a quarter. There are some days I work less than this when I'm putting in a 'full day'.
Still, I got lots done, so that's okay. And you can probably guess we didn't go camping yesterday. We are planning to go today, as long as it's fine. There's no point going for two days just to get wet.

Going back to the work thing, we are so busy at the moment it is untrue. There have been two rounds of redundancies at work so far (one at end '08, one just completing), and our department wasn't impacted, so it's not like we have three people doing five people's jobs. It's just really busy. And the company have decided in order to maintain liquidity, they are going to stop paying into our pension funds for eighteen months. So we are working our socks off, having been given a pay cut. It's a crazy world.
TTFN.