Tag: life

Anxieties

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Today was an exciting day as it’s the first time since I started back on Citalopram that I’ve had to request more of it. Anyway I just pressed the button to request the next issue and it seems to have accepted it. I wondered if they’d have put it on review since I stopped and started again, or if the fact it’s been so long since the last issue (about 9 months as I’ve not been taking the full dose) would flag it for review, but apparently not. So that’s nice. I just need to go and get it now.

I’ve had a few texts lately from someone I used to work with at my previous job. He was actually a foreign student (France) who came to the UK to do an internship at my old job. Don’t ask me why but it seemed to be quite popular for European students to come to the UK and work for peanuts for 3, 6, or maybe even 12 months and my ex-boss was happy to take advantage of them employ them for next to nothing and give them no real guidance or oversight but still expect them to produce professional standard work. I ended up sort of looking after some of them.

He texted me that he was back in the UK, which was a bit surprising to me because, well, you know we have a lockdown don’t you? Then this morning he posted a bike ride on Strava that lead to the office. So as we were texting anyway I had to inquire – are you in the office… is anyone else in the office?

That was kind of a stupid thing for me to ask because the answer came back “well a few of us are, it’s me, X and Y”, where Y happens to be a name I never wanted to see ever again. I left that place for a whole bunch of reasons, but Y was the main one. If it wasn’t for Y I’d probably still be there. I didn’t like reading that text. As soon as I read it a very vivid image of the office with Y sat in there popped into my head and I felt sick. It’s been a year and three months and it still has that effect on me. And that’s with citalopram.

Though there is a positive outcome because for some reason it prompted me to reply to a couple of recruiters I’d put in the “possibly” section, which I’d been procrastinating on.

Jobs

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I’m starting to think again that maybe I should be making moves towards another job but it’s not happening. I suppose at the moment I’m quite content working from home, but I don’t really look forward to the day I have to go back into the office.

Unfortunately I think my employer has burnt the bridge with me in that they didn’t deliver on their financial promises to me. Though, strangely, I don’t feel any emotional response to it. I don’t feel betrayed or annoyed or anything like that. If I did I’d have left. Working from home is an acceptable trade off for overlooking this, but, with the vaccine rollout, at some point they’ll want me back in the office. Assuming that the vaccine works in real life.

But I am keeping an eye on my inbox for interesting recruitment leads… and… it’s just full of absoute junk. I get multiple emails a day from recruiters who just say “Hello, I have a fantastic opportunity for you, what’s your phone number?”. I’ve been getting a few phoning the home number as well, which is really weird because I haven’t given the home number out! I asked one how he found it and he said it was on my LinkedIn profile. It really isn’t. I find this quite offputting for dealing with them.

I do think it’s getting towards time to move on though. I don’t really feel like I’m growing here.

Projects

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So I did launch my wellbeing app, after all. I think it was about a week and a half ago. Since then people have installed it. I think we might be up to two now. Amazing. That’s OK though, I knew that it will take a while to pick up users initially. These things are a slow burn unless you spend money advertising.

I am now spending some effort on trying to market it. I have tried to make it look like a company’s product rather than an individual’s hobby. It’s a sort of two pronged thing where I want it to be its own thing, but I also have big ideas about being self employed in the future and this is the (as-yet non-existent) company. It gives me a head start if it looks like a company before it is a company.

The non coding side is simultaneously interesting and infuriating. I have a website for it and am writing a few blog posts to try to get Google to notice me, which is teaching me things about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) I didn’t know. The infuriating parts are the arty bits. I tried to create some promo images using GIMP, which was a million times harder than it should have been. In the end I used a free online image editor called Photopea which turned out to be much easier. I can’t believe it’s 2021 and GIMP’s user interface is still the unfathomable disaster it used to be when I was first introduced to it via Fedora Core Linux 4 all the way back in 2005.

Anyway, this is keeping me busy but it’s slowing down now. There is more coding I can do but it’s mostly relatively small features for relatively large amounts of work, and at the moment it makes more sense to focus on trying to get people to notice it.

20

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Today was the first day of the full citalopram dose again. I started myself off on 10mg and today went up to 20, just to make it a bit more gradual. Oh my stomach really hates me today. Hopefully that will settle down tomorrow. I do think I feel a bit more relaxed though. I’m not sure if that’s placebo or optimism or what, but it’s there.

Today was another day spent with me expecting my boss to call me all morning, but he didn’t. This happened a few weeks ago, and it turned out he was on holiday. Apparently he didn’t consider it important to tell me this. I’m guessing it’s the same today…

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.

Hello again, LinkedIn

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I ended up recreating my LinkedIn profile today, because I got a bit fed up of my boss earlier. We don’t have very good processes at this company for deploying our releases. Deploying releases is always hairy but there are ways to make it less hairy, such as taking backups and rolling back if things don’t go as they should. My boss doesn’t do that, and then when it doesn’t work he sends a cryptic one line email which explains a small percentage of what you need to know. I find the email thing really odd. On a call he’s fine, he explains things properly, but on email he just doesn’t. Literacy problem? I don’t know.

So today I got just frustrated enough to make myself visible in the job market again.

But interestingly work was not what was really stressing me. I thought it was, but it’s not. I didn’t notice until this evening, but my watch says my stress levels have been super high all day, even before I woke up.

Even so, I think it’s about the right time to be getting back on LinkedIn. As it’s a fresh profile I don’t have any connections so it’ll take a little while to build visibility to recruiters. I haven’t really done much. I added my current job title and employer and university but haven’t put my old jobs and descriptions on there yet. I can get all that from my CV from last year.

Next problem will be thinking of how to write my achievements in this job. What have I actually done here? Lots of things but it’s all specific to the project, whereas my for my previous job it was easier to explain things in a more abstract way. I will need to think about how to present that. Although I think that after being here almost a year, I’m not sure my CV has really got any stronger. That’s interesting.

And I guess I should also take a professional looking photo, urgh… maybe I’ll leave that a few weeks. I don’t know. The point of LinkedIn for me is to get agency recruiters talking to me. I don’t really expect to be dealing with actual employers. So maybe the photo doesn’t matter.

Work

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With work, we are still working from home. Things are starting to re-open and I am guessing they’ll want us back in the office in the near future, which I have to say doesn’t really excite me. My sister’s employer have announced they want her back in her office next week. This seems slightly dubious because the official government advice is still to work from home if you can. More relevant to me, the trains are still running a reduced service so I don’t know how practical it is for me to get to work anyway.

So I’m a little bit apprehensive about that, though I haven’t yet heard anything.

I’m also a little bit apprehensive about the fact I am overdue a salary review. I was contractually owed a salary review after six months of employment, which was the last week of May. So really the review should take effect from June’s salary. It seems unlikely that’s going to happen now as the payroll has probably already been processed. I don’t particularly want to have to bring it up, because it’s hassle for me, and I just shouldn’t have to. I will make sure it happens at some point though and I’ll make sure it’s backdated to June, too (easily done since it’s in my contract). So in that respect there is no real urgency, and, of course, with the uncertainty of the pandemic, it might be better to wait a bit anyway until some of that uncertainty has passed before putting them into a position where they have to decide whether to be generous or not.

But… the main thing I learnt from my last employer is that I should seek quickly to terminate employment relationships where I can’t trust my employer to behave as they should. Things are strange right now with the pandemic, but when things start returning to normal, this is the kind of thing I’ll be thinking about.

Life!

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I haven’t posted for a while because I haven’t been spending much time lying in bed with my laptop. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not? We’ve been spending evenings doing things instead, like watching Downton Abbey from the start, playing a ridiculous computer game called Overcooked, and trying to protect my poor plants from Very Hungry Caterpillars 😟. Also, with working from home, I suppose I just don’t have quite as much interest in spending my free time at home on my own with a computer.

I’m still reducing my Citalopram but very, very slowly. I went down to 15mg (from 20) by alternating 20 and 15mg doses then kept it on 15 for a while. That seemed OK, so now I’m going down to 10 by alternating 15 and 10mg. It seems to be working because I don’t notice any withdrawal issues apart from occasionally being a bit irritable. I’m not entirely sure how I expect to feel when I’m off them; will I continue feeling how I’ve felt for the past few months, or will anxiety start creeping back? Although I started on them because I was having trouble with life circumstances which have now passed, the truth is that I’ve always had more anxiety than was healthy or desirable, and it’s only been in the later part of my life I’ve really understood that it was a medical issue that was treatable.

Maybe the medication and all the counselling I went through will have reshaped my brain and my thought patterns enough that that’s no longer who I am. I won’t know until I’m off the medication, but it’s possible that in a few months I’ll want to go back on it. We’ll see.

When I was prescribed the last set, the Doctor put it on repeat and I think she said that I’d need to go back for an appointment after two issues. Confusingly, the app has still shown it as being available for me to request, so I have tried it… but it doesn’t tell me when it’s ready. It just says “you can collect it from your pharmacy in 48 hours, your GP will contact you if there’s a problem”. And tomorrow morning it’ll be 48 hours. I’ll probably give it a few more days. I don’t need them for a few weeks anyway, I just wanted to figure out if I need to arrange an appointment or not.

In other medical news, I have something called a fixed retainer on the back of my teeth (a brace, basically), which I’ve had for many years, since I had my actual braces removed. Every few years the glue comes off on one of the teeth and I have to go to the orthodontist, who charges me £40 for the thirty seconds it takes him to glue it back on. He always remembers me though.

JUST MY LUCK that while dental care is severely disrupted due to COVID that my retainer happens to break. It’s not that the glue has come off, it’s that the wire is in two pieces. This has never happened before! I keep catching my tongue on the pointy ends. Then some food gets jammed underneath the end of it, which is very uncomfortable. I phoned them up last week and they said they’d put me on the emergency waiting list… but that’s probably quite a long list when they’ve got patients who are months overdue for brace adjustments. The receptionist advised me to try filing it down with a nail file if it causes me problems. How I’m supposed to get a nail file on something behind my front top teeth I am not quite sure… It’s not really causing problems though, it’s just a bit annoying.

12th May 2020

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This is just going to be a big summary post.

1. I’ve decided to try coming off Citalopram. I feel happy. I’ve felt happy for months. I feel stable and settled. I’ve been on it since August and I think it’s time to say that I don’t really need it anymore. I’m currently on 20mg per day so I’m going to bring it down to 10mg for a couple of weeks and see how that is. I’ll do it slowly. I’m going to keep a log of the dosage along with heart rate and stress data from my watch, which should be interesting.

2. I watched Belgravia. I didn’t like it to start with, but it’s only six episodes long and by the end I quite enjoyed it. To begin with it just seems like a bunch of dislikable people scheming against each other, though.

3. I ran another half marathon distance on Sunday. It went much better than the last time and I finished five minutes faster. I was pleased with that.

4. I seemed to be doing better with the iron tablets, but I took one this evening and now I have stomach aches. Hmmmm.

Furlough #2

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So I spoke to my manager this morning and he revealed that three of my colleagues will be furloughed. One graphics designer, one sales support and one technical support. No developers are being furloughed (at this stage). I am currently very busy, whereas I suspect the three colleagues have been twiddling their thumbs quite a bit lately.

It’s a shame, especially for the sales support lady who started here about a year and a half ago after being made redundant from her previous job of twelve years (which sounded a bit traumatic to me). I feel a bit sorry for her.

But I feel happier now I feel like I know what’s going on.

In other news, I have a blister on my foot. I’m going to ignore it and hope it takes the hint 🤔