Month: October 2020

Yawn

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I woke up at about 1:00AM needing something urgently then didn’t go back to sleep until about 3. Apparently, at this time of night, my mind considers the most important thing in the universe to be my old job. So it wasn’t really great quality sleep from then onwards, and I still felt stressed about it when I got up.

Maybe I’m just less tolerant because of this but the recruiter spam has really been annoying me today. The best one today is a job based in…. the Netherlands. Not only that, but hidden right down at the bottom of the job spec, it says “Dutch speaking is ESSENTIAL” 🤦‍♀️ Yes, in bold and capitalised. In English. I clicked “Report spam” on this one. This one is utterly absurd but despite not making my location a secret, I get more that are not even slightly commutable than are.

I’ve also had a recruiter try to phone me FOUR times today. About a month ago, he phoned me up by chance one day (he must have had my number on their system from when I was looking previously) and we had a bit of a chat which mostly seemed to be him probing me for information about my employer’s hiring plans, but I humoured him because he said he had a few jobs that might be relevant and he’d send the details over. He didn’t send the details over, it was just a fishing call. So I guess this is the follow up “How’s the job search going, where have you been applying?” *scribbles down company names*.

So anyway… four times! He seems to urgently want to speak to me, but isn’t leaving a message or sending an email indicating why I might want to speak to him. In related news, I discovered a wonderful Android feature where you can set a contact to always go to voicemail.

I think I need a better plan for passive job seeking because so far it seems to be taking up too much of my attention and yielding no results.

Weekends

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This week I have felt a lot better about myself and I think it’s because I’ve been doing what I said I would last week – I’ve been rewriting one of my apps in a more modern framework. It feels a lot better than spending all evening reading Reddit. I think by the end of next weekend the first one will be about ready to go.

I am still getting a lot of spam from recruiters but I’m starting to get tired of the fact that it’s all noise and no signal. In some ways it’s surprising that recruiters still exist because most of them could be replaced by bots. I’ve had a few messages this week about roles that are clearly unrelated to me. I also had one message which asks for my phone number so he can discuss some “roles on his desk” which, in his words, I “may possibly” be a good fit for. That’s his sales pitch – “I have something that you might want and if you let me phone you I’ll tell you what it is”. That sounds like a great use of my time 😕

I actually had one that looked interesting but the salary was too low, so I replied and told the recruiter as much, but he didn’t come back. It was actually slightly higher than mine, but it doesn’t make sense to move for “slightly” higher.

Running is going… not great. My hip and hamstring haven’t been behaving. It seemed to improve a bit this week but after a full week’s running it’s going backwards. I have been doing some reading on this though. Apparently, if you have trouble with one hamstring, the place to look is the opposite hip flexor, because that’s what’s activating and pulling your pelvis forwards when your hamstring is already at its most lengthened.

So I’m really going to focus on stretching out this hip flexor for the next few days and see where we are. I hope that whatever fixes the hamstring also fixes the hip because it’s probably just a matter of pelvic stability, or lack of. But if not then I think it’s physio time.

Do I exist?

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Today has been a strange day. We were supposed to be taking part in the ONS COVID19 study, which means they come to your house and test you. This is separate from the NHS testing, I think, this is a statistical study. We had an appointment and everything, but they just didn’t turn up. I was interested because as well as the swab test they also do an antibody test, and as I think I had it in March, the results would have been interesting. But they didn’t come and haven’t contacted us, so I don’t know if that’s just not going to happen now.

Also, my boss usually calls me daily just for a catch up, but today he didn’t. I was expecting it all morning but it didn’t happen. The only other time he has not made contact was one day that he pre warned me he’d likely be busy. What happened? Was he even working today? I don’t know. Very unusual.

I coped with this… poorly. I was nervous about the COVID test for whatever reason, and I suppose the anticipation of hearing from my boss and then not also contributed. Today was definitely one of those days that I miss being on citalopram.

Also, my foot/neuroma has been aching today. I don’t feel it’s really settled down ever since I aggravated it way back in June. I’m not getting the sharp pains anymore, it’s just a dull aching. Is that better? Probably…

Job progress or lack thereof

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This week the job seeking has again not progressed much. I have had one recruiter ask me for a CV, at which point I realised I didn’t have an up to date CV and had to create one. Well OK, I need to do that anyway, so I did. But he now wants my phone number and I’m not sure I really want to talk to him. Hmm. 😶

I had another recruiter contact me with a job spec which is actually a possible match. It’s not a 100% match, but it’s a I’d be happy to be put forward for it. HOWEVER, there is a note on there that they are having meetings once per week in the office. I haven’t been into an office in six months, and to me it seems questionable to expect your staff to commute into a city centre by public transport as cases rise rapidly. So I flagged that with the recruiter and will see what he says. The nice thing about job seeking while not being in a rush is that you can afford to ask awkward questions because you can just walk away and wait for something else (Boris Johnson take note).

I had another one contact me with a ‘local’ role (his word). I was tempted to reply back to him and say “if I have to google the name of the village, it’s probably not local”, but I ignored it. I had another contact me trying to get me to employ someone. Um, ok. I think he needs a better recruiter.

One of the things I am noticing is that my skills are becoming a bit out of date. A lot of places want experience with modern JavaScript frameworks and ES6, which I used a fair bit at my previous job but not at all at my current job. My current employer is not staying up to date with the market at all, which is a problem because they’re also not compensating me enough to accept risk to my future earnings.

A few years ago I wrote an Android app in a (now obsolete) JavaScript framework (which currently earns me around £1 per day!). About a year ago I half finished another app, in a more modern framework, but I never finished it because at the time I didn’t want to spend my free time doing my job. So I think what I need to do is spend a few weekends rewriting the first one in a modern framework and finishing the second one, so at least I have some recent experience and can talk about it a bit more convincingly than if someone asked me about it now. And who knows, if I publish the second app, maybe my income will increase to £2 per day. As long as it stays below £2.73 per day. Because then I’ll have to declare it and pay tax on it. 🙄

Everything hurts #2

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Not everything. My hip and my butt and my hamstring. Or maybe it’s not my hamstring, maybe it’s just my butt. I don’t really know. I felt it was improving. I was running. Not as much as I wanted, but not that far off. I was doing daily hip strength exercises, planks etc and even deadlifts every couple of days.

Then disaster yesterday morning as after about 20 seconds of running my butt and or/hamstring cramped. Ouch.

So anyway I got a tennis ball into my hip and it now feels a lot better, and I’ve been trying to foam roll the very top of my hamstrings (which is actually not very easy to do effectively, because it’s a big and soft area). I still have some discomfort there but everything feels a lot looser now.

I’ll find out over the weekend if this is enough. If not then I’ve decided I’ll just bite the bullet and book a physio appointment on Monday.

Worklife

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

The passive job searching thing isn’t really working. LinkedIn sends me emails every day with lots of jobs I could apply for, but the problem is that I need to read it and filter it down to some I might be interested in. One of the big problems is companies who advertise jobs but don’t advertise salaries. At the moment I’d just avoid all of those because it’s not a good use of my time to go through an interview process to get an offer that’s less than I’m currently earning. I guess the problem can be stated more succinctly and generally in that those adverts I read and do not think “I want this job”. So that’s where that is. I haven’t reached the point that I want to start investing my own time into finding a new job. It’ll happen though.

My sister is currently about half way into her notice period and is bringing back memories for me as she is dealing with terrible HR at her current employer. She had a month’s notice period but it’s taken them two weeks to finalise her finishing date. She had asked to take her holiday and finish a week early and they’ve finally come back and said no (which is a bit petty in my opinion), but to get to this point she’s had to send numerous emails to HR. The last one, which finally got a response, pointed out that she’d handed her notice in two weeks ago and she would like to know her finishing date, and the HR woman replied to say that she didn’t think it was unreasonable to make her wait that long. I read the emails and thought my sister was polite and the HR woman was quite snotty. In that circumstance the right thing to do is to apologise for the inconvenience, not to double down and act like the person you’re inconveniencing is being unreasonable. My sister is being quite grumpy at the moment though. I think she is just bored and wants to leave. That’s how I felt when I gave my notice this time last year.

Work is a hassle. I’m still wondering about going self employed. It’s just the hassle of chasing potential clients, but if I did it right I wouldn’t need to. It’s all preparation. Maybe I should be starting that.

LINKEDIN DRAMA

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I’ve been getting some interest from recruiters since signing up to LinkedIn last week but I haven’t really been paying much attention to it. For whatever reason I felt more settled at work this week so it seemed less important. I have one chat going with a recruiter which I think is going to fizzle out soon with him accepting he doesn’t have anything I’m interested in at the moment, and I have another I declined because it would need to me to drive to their office, which is less appealing than taking the train. If I was desperate I’d go for it, but I’m not. There’s another one that looks like a possibility but under the desirables, it says “pre-existing security clearance”, so I think I’ll skip that one.

So that’s all OK, but today I got a notification on there saying “Someone at [my old company] viewed your profile”. That just made me panic. I don’t even know who it was because it doesn’t say. I am definitely not over that job. This is why I didn’t want to be on LinkedIn. It connects me to somewhere I don’t want to be connected to.

So. I went and blocked a few people I definitely never want to speak to again, which means they can’t see my profile at all. I forget the aliases I used to refer to them as now. One was Becky, obviously, since she was the reason I left. Another was Mike, who I kind of used to be friendly with but he wasn’t exactly supportive or trustworthy. Mike would say pretty nasty things about Becky behind her back, but to her face he was the the total opposite and seemed to want her attention, which I found irritating. Things cooled, well, froze when she repeated something I’d said to him in confidence. I later learnt that he’d actually said quite a lot of things. He seemed to think he was a friend but he was one of those “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” kinds of people. My counsellor described him as ‘leaky’ and suggested that when he learnt something he tried to use that knowledge to get people to like him because he was insecure (which he definitely was). Probably true.

So anyway… as I went on his profile today to block him, I read the summary he’d written about himself and thought it seemed familiar. I unblocked and went back to Becky’s profile. Yes, he’s literally plagiarised her summary paragraph. It’s about 100 words long and all he’s changed is the job title. He’s also left her a comment on a post she’s shared saying that she is “lovely”. Which is a totally normal thing for a man to write on his married co-worker’s social media, right?

Anyway… they are blocked now so that’s the end of that and hopefully I’ll feel a bit less on edge about LinkedIn knowing that they won’t be able to see that I exist on there.