Author: e.v.

Interview…

~ e.v. ~ 4 Comments

I had an interview today. It went OK I think. I got really nervous about it, but I don’t know why. I also got really nervous about seeing the physio last week, because…? The tablets make me more functional when I’m nervous but I’m not sure they reduce the nerves at all.

He asked me some technical questions, and I got the hard ones right and the easy ones wrong (duh). Not because I didn’t know the answer, just because I’m not used to having to suddenly remember and regurgitate obscure technical trivia over the phone. I’m not too worried because I was able to speak in depth on the harder stuff. Apparently the next stage is a technical test, which is usually where I look at it and go “I’m not spending the next week doing this!”, but we’ll see. He said it would be about 45 minutes, which is reasonable… assuming this estimate bears any relation to reality (big if).

I’m not too sure what I think at the moment. The recruiter told me it would be predominantly remote, in the office around once a month. But the interviewer had other ideas and said they were thinking of it being more of a hybrid role with 2-3 days a week in the office. The plus side is that it’s within walking distance (just about), so 2-3 days in the office there is much better than 2-3 days in the office at my current employer. But that’s not really the right comparison, is it?

Freedom?

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

So apparently we’re out of lockdown and most restrictions disappear on the 19th, or two weeks today. In the same press conference, the Government predicted that cases will rise to about 50,000 per day by the end of the month. I think this is completely bonkers.

But what I’m most concerned about is the removal of the work from home guidance. Personally I like working from home, but, ignoring that, I’ve only had one vaccine dose so far. So I’m definitely not getting on a train before I’ve had two doses. And even after that… I just can’t see myself commuting regularly. Commuting is horrible and while there may exist pleasant offices, my employer’s is not one of them. My ‘office’ at home is a hundred times nicer than an open plan office.

I don’t know whether my employer will start pushing for me to come back to the office, but he was starting to talk about it when we did salary review a few weeks ago.

I re-arranged my ‘office’ over the weekend so I feel ready to start interviewing again. I’ve been getting inundated by recruiters lately, so I went back through the last few days’ email. I found and replied to six that looked potentially promising.

Phsyio

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The physio trip was interesting. He spent a lot of time poking my ankles and said he was confused. Apparently, when I’m standing up normally, I tend quite strongly towards supination (underpronation). He said that usually when people are like this, their ankles lack the mobility to overpronate so that’s not their issue. But with me, the movement is there, and I have a strong callous on the inside of my big toe which suggests I am overpronating. He seemed to think it was a bit unusual.

He did all the poking and pressing based diagnostic tests for a neuroma, but couldn’t get any of them to be positive. This matches my experience with the podiatrist years ago – he did all the tests, they were negative, and then goes “well, I still think you have a neuroma”. The physio was less sure. It’s not really that important unless someone is proposing cutting into me, though maybe at some point I should go to the GP and see if I can get some imaging done on it.

Anyway, the outcome is that he wants me to 1) Stretch my calves a lot, because he thought they were resisting even at a neutral foot angle. He said the lack of movement in the calf could be compensated for by my metatarsals and my ankle (i.e. pronation). And 2) get some insoles to support my foot more. He put me on a pair of insoles and seemed to think that everything aligned better when I was stood. I was a bit worried he was going to try to sell me some ridiculously expensive insoles, but he actually just gave me the name of some and said “you can buy these online for about £10”. So I have.

I’m still getting numbness though. Even after having a few very easy weeks, which in previous flareups was always enough to settle it down.

Weekly update

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I had to rearrange my running physio appointment for next week because I somehow managed to give myself an ice burn on my foot last weekend. So I also ended up not running all week, which gave it a rest I suppose. I did a short-ish (6.5km) run today and it actually felt OK, but I’ll still keep the appointment since this seems to be a cyclical thing.

I’ve been preparing myself a bit more for interviewing again. I decided to get serious about it, which means I’ve completely overdone it. I bought a new webcam and a high quality microphone so I can use my desktop (with a wired connection) instead of my laptop for video calls. I read somewhere that high quality audio makes you come across better, so I thought, well, OK, let’s invest some money into that. It makes sense to me. If the other people interviewing are on low quality laptop webcams (pointed at their chin) with noisy audio and then I come along with 2K video and clear audio then, rightly or wrongly, I look a lot more professional. So now I have a big desk microphone plugged into an audio interface with lights and knobs (I already had the interface for my guitar) and I look like a radio DJ or something.

The problem now though is lighting. The window is behind me, which isn’t great. I kind of got away with it before by having my laptop angled at the side of me, but doing an interview like that with a desktop monitor isn’t really going to work. So I’m rearranging the room. Now I just need to buy a longer ethernet cable…

In totally unrelated news, I don’t get the Tour de France thing, with them threatening to sue the woman. The woman holding the sign didn’t collide with the rider, the rider collided with her. I mean, he’s on a bike and he ran into a stationary pedestrian. Did he try braking? Nope, he kept pedalling until about 2 metres before he crashed into her. Even Lionel Hutz couldn’t lose that case.

Breathe again…

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

So I got a reply to my email and the end result is I’m getting a 5% pay rise from July, which is my 2020 pay rise, and there’s a 2021 pay rise to come. So it’s a good outcome, but I am still somewhat underwhelmed because the 2020 pay rise should be backdated to, well, 2020.

Anyway, it puts me in a better position to start interviewing again now. I read today that the number of vacancies is currently at the highest point since the pandemic hit, so it’s as good a time as any.

I found this highly stressful and I’m glad it’s over now 🙄

I booked an appointment with a running clinic nearby for next week. Unfortunately I had the dreaded numbness in my toes this morning when running so I just decided to get on with it, like I was considering doing the last time around. Apparently they do proper gait analysis, and the practitioner is a runner with a (super fast) 1:10 half marathon time, so I think it’ll be an interesting experience even if they don’t actually fix the problem. I don’t know if there really is a fix for the problem other than a neurectomy (where they surgically remove the end of the nerve), but that doesn’t make sense at the moment since all I’m getting is a phase of numbness every few months, which is obviously better than the permanent numbness that the surgery would leave me with.

I’ve been feeling it slightly for the past few days, but it’s been very minor. A slight loss in sensation is just an odd vague feeling that you wonder if you’re imagining, but today it was getting towards proper numbness. The weird thing is though that it seems to come on after about ten minutes of running, but then a little while later it improves. That seems a bit strange if it’s purely a nerve compression issue. That sounds more like a muscle warming up.

Anyway, my left leg feels like it doesn’t work quite as well as my right. At this very moment the left side of my bottom is aching, and the left ankle always seems a bit stiffer than the right. And I get a few twinges of plantar fasciitis in my left heel every so often at the moment. So hopefully he will say “at yes, you’re a bit unbalanced” and figure out how to rectify it.

Emails are hard

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t send that email this morning after all… I felt too stressed about it. I’ve had a week off, it’s really hot and I haven’t slept well, and I did a lot of running last week. The thought of having to spend all day working was bad enough, without sending it and then having to deal with the outcome, so I just didn’t.

But I told my mum and she got a bit grumpy with me. I’d already talked about it with her and she’d suggested some wording. She thinks I should be hassling them and that it’s pretty bad I’ve been here for a year and a half without a pay rise. She’s right…

I checked my offer letter and contract yesterday and it’s not quite so clear as I thought. I was definitely told verbally at the interview that I’d have a review at six months then annually thereafter. But the offer letter actually says my first review will be “scheduled after six months from my start date”, which is the same words but arranged in such an order as to have no meaning. The word “after” makes for awkward English and makes the timescale completely unbounded. It’s obvious what I’m supposed to understand from it, but it’s not obvious what their intention was in writing it. Is it just clumsy phrasing or do they think they’re being clever? Probably the former, but the fact they haven’t delivered on it makes me wonder.

I chickened out of dealing with it today but I did send the email before I logged off, so it’s done. In the end I revised it to be more simple. I just said “It was my understanding that blah blah blah….did I misunderstand this?”. Which is just as effective, I suppose.

Acorns

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I’ve been spending a lot of time attending to my plants this week, which has involved pulling out a lot of weeds. I noticed one weed in a pot a few days before, which was unusually big and seemed to appear virtually overnight. You know that feeling when you pull a weed and wiggle it a bit and the whole root comes out with it? Well that wasn’t happening here. I looked down the stem and could see there was a pretty big rhizome or something in the soil, so I decided to come back to that one later and dig it out properly…

So I came back to it, and…. it’s an oak tree? This was just in a little 10cm square pot, and I definitely did not put the acorn there. I guess a squirrel must have planted it. I wish I could show the little squirrel what it did. Yes, you made this! Anyway, it’s now in another pot where I hope it will be happier.

In other news I had a recruiter email me with a job that sounded promising, but it turns out it’s with a company I interviewed with about two years ago… who never got back to me after the interview! Well, actually a phone interview and an on-site interview. I can understand not responding to failed applications, but not contacting interviewees is just bad.

That had me a bit stumped – what’s the etiquette here? I’ve mailed him back and said so, and then said that normally I’d be happy to re-interview with a potential employer after two years, but in this case I’m not sure it’s a good use of my time. If he wants to convince me it is, then he can try but it’s probably not happening. I did a bit of LinkedIn sleuthing and it seems that they have high turnover. I met three people there, and two of them have since left after being there less than two years. Good: The person responsible for behaving unprofessionally might have left. Bad: The company behaved unprofessionally and has high turnover. Ehh.

Plans

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I’m off work this week, but I’ve decided that next week is the week! The week to start making moves. It was always my plan, at least for the last couple of months, to not do anything before this week off so as to avoid being stressed during it. Next week I will email the MD about my very overdue salary reviews. I think the phrasing will be something along the lines of “While I’m enjoying working here, I’m sure you understand that it’s important to me that my salary remains fair and market rate….” and then refer to my contract which says I’m entitled to an adjustment effective from May 2020, and another from May 2021. It’s fair and factual and doesn’t assume malice but it will set out my position that I haven’t forgotten and I’m not going to let it slide.

But really this is just the first stage. The second stage is starting to interview elsewhere again. I could just do that in parallel or instead of, but if I end up negotiating a salary elsewhere using my current salary as a baseline then I want that baseline to be as high as possible.

I don’t really know what to expect here. It’s possible that as soon as I mention salary they’ll find a reason to get rid of me, and the reason I’m concerned about this is that they’ve got rid of two other people since I started, under strange circumstances. I don’t think this is likely and I think it would be extraordinarily stupid as they are currently in violation of the written contract, but it’s a possibility. But I also don’t expect much positivity either. I mean, I don’t think it’s an accident that we are where we are. So I’m expecting that anything they offer will be more of a token gesture to satisfy the contract rather than a genuine effort to be fair and competitive. I guess my feelings are prejudiced by my last employer, so maybe I’ll be proved wrong.

But how they respond to it is up to them, not me.

Vaccinated

~ e.v. ~ 6 Comments

I had my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Wednesday morning. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, because my mum (who had AstraZenica) spent about 3-4 days feeling like she had flu, whereas my dad had absolutely no reaction whatsoever. I had a bit of a headache and an achy arm in the afternoon but nothing much. I went for a run on Thursday morning and found I didn’t have any energy and ended up cutting it short, then Thursday afternoon and evening my left leg was aching a lot all over, like I’d really overdone the running (I hadn’t). I ran again this morning and it was much better. And my leg doesn’t ache.

I was worried a bit that I’d react to it like my mum did. I had an upset stomach last week and I really wasn’t looking forward to another few days of feeling horrible.

Also, on the medical theme, the NHS is going to start sharing medical records with commercial third parties starting in July. If you haven’t heard anything about this, it’s probably because they’ve kept it very quiet. The data is ‘pseudonymous’ rather than anonymous, meaning that while it won’t have your name in it, it certainly can be used to identify people. Personally I think as a whole, this is appalling. This is an NHS Digital initiative, but hasn’t been adequately publicised by NHS Digital, who are acting as if it’s the individual GPs responsibility to inform patients even though it’s a national issue. The fact it’s happening as an opt-out system under a short timescale without any effort to inform patients is bad, and the opt-out is complicated and confusing (as there are two different opt-outs) and inconvenient as you need to locate, print, and submit a paper form to your GP specifying your preference. Making the opt-out paper based is a little ironic given that we’re talking about massive digital data collection.

It’s hard to look at this and assume good faith.

There are some details on how to opt-out here. The overall story is covered by the Financial Times.

Plants

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Last week the government announced it is going to ban the sale of peat compost from 2024. Which is good because peat is a precious resource and the vast majority of compost does not need to contain peat. But it’s bad if you grow plants that have evolved to grow in peat bogs, like me. I tried a peat substitute called Thrive a few years ago for germinating seeds and it was rubbish. The seeds germinated fine, then grew for a little while, then just stopped and eventually died. Meanwhile the ones in peat kept going.

So I’m trying again!

These are some Venus Flytrap seedlings which were germinated in peat. I think they’re about a year old but I’m not exactly organised when it comes to this stuff.

The ones on the left are in coir, which is some kind of coconut by-product and supposedly* an eco friendly peat substitute, and the ones on the right are in sphagnum, which is/can be a beautiful moss (not so much here, but hopefully after the sun gets on it).

My prediction is that the ones in sphagnum will do fine, and the ones in coir won’t.

Here are a few other planties. I’m pleased with the plant in the first photo, which is a Sarracenia Luecophylla. It’s been very slow growing and doesn’t produce many pitchers, but it’s 70cm tall this year. I have a few divisions of it now but this is the biggest. I liked how the colours on the second photo came out.

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*I am sceptical that coir’s real life production is either eco-friendly or ethical, but that’s for another time.