Tag: work

Work and BSG

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Today was one of those days at work where you find out that something is URGENTLY needed TODAY. The thing that was needed was completed over a year ago, but it has never been tested in real usage, UNTIL TODAY. And today it is urgent. Despite being completely ignored for the past year. I do get frustrated with this. A few weeks ago there was a similar scenario where a fix for something was urgently required for a demo at 2PM. Well maybe if you have a demo at 2PM, don’t deploy an untested new release at 11AM?

Battlestar Galactica spoilers ahead!

So I’ve now finished S3 of BSG. To be honest it’s dragging. Season 1 and the first half of 2 (up to the end of the Pegasus/Cain storyline) was gripping, but since then it’s meandered a lot towards interesting ideas via some extremely boring ones.

I liked the trial subplot and I liked the lawyer. I liked Lee sticking to his innate sense of right and wrong. He and Helo are quite consistent in that, while some of the other characters oscillate all over the place and become unbelievable and dislikeable (Adama, Roslyn).

But where are we now? Starbuck died, and I didn’t care at all. Because firstly I don’t find her to be a nice person at all, and secondly I didn’t think she was really dead. Now she’s back again, wow didn’t see that one coming.

I’ve been very intrigued by who the final five will turn out to be, but after four of them have just been revealed I feel a bit “well, okay?”. What bearing does it have on the story? It just seemed a bit pointless. And tying it all to a Bob Dylan song was really strange and took me out of the BSG universe while I was watching it. Maybe Bob Dylan is the final cylon. Maybe it works better if you’re not familiar with the song, but the line “said the joker to the thief” is so distinctive that you’re immediately taken out of the program and into whatever relationship you have with the song.

I don’t know, to me it feels like we’re entering Lost territory where the writers have lost sight of the original intrigue and are making things up as they go along and stop focusing on keeping a tight storyline.

Halves

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I have signed up to a half marathon in August. There is one in my town (!) for the first time ever, so how could I not? I hope it goes ahead. The last half I signed up for was just as COVID was breaking out, and it got cancelled. In some ways I’m in better running shape than ever, because I’ve been running half marathon distances every Sunday for the past couple of months. In other ways, with the lack of Parkrun and any other timed events, I haven’t run fast for a long time. With Parkrun it used to be that every Saturday morning was a 5k tempo run.

So…. I did some intervals this morning. 6x500m with 60s rest in between. The first interval was about a 4:20/km pace, which considering I used to do an entire 5k at a 4:00/km pace seemed a bit underwhelming, but the others hovered around 4:00/km so it’s not too bad. Though I do vaguely remember somewhere around the 4th or 5th recovery period feeling like I was going to cry and/or throw up (I didn’t do either).

Since I was worrying about on Monday about the fact my manager had casually mentioned about returning to the office in June, there has been a timely discussion thread on Hacker News about “how to negotiate continuing to work remotely”.

There’s a remarkably insightful quote towards the top of the page, which says “The act of trying to force someone to do something, whether by (implied) threat, logic, emotional manipulation, or whatever, can mortally wound a relationship making getting a concession you want moot.“. I realised that it’s up to them at this stage. They’re looking to change the terms of our relationship at my expense, so they need to figure out how to approach it and open the discussion without damaging the relationship.

Office?

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My boss today casually mentioned that the managing director had casually mentioned that he could get everyone back into the office in June. 🤔

I don’t really know how this is going to go, because at the moment my response is “nope” . I mean, I haven’t been vaccinated yet?! But also…

The thing with commuting is that it’s just terrible. It takes up about two hours a day and it costs about £1000 per year. If my employer suddenly says “hey, we want you to work an extra ten hours per week and take a £1000 pay cut”, well, no thanks.

But then there’s also the salary review issue. I’m now 12 months overdue a salary review and am actually due another one just about now. I haven’t worked out how to phrase it yet, but I won’t be going back into the office before they have settled the last 12 months.

My mum thinks I should send an email to the MD and ask about it, but eh, I don’t know. I prefer the idea of waiting until his expectations are clear before I set out my position. I don’t know how it will go anyway, because if he just makes a demand that everyone comes back to the office now then he’s at risk of multiple people leaving all at the same time, and there aren’t many of us to start with.

Though I do wonder how much the salary issue is just an excuse for me. There are much more important factors in my employment, which are: 1) Commuting is awful, 2) I’m an introvert and working from home is far better for my mental health than working in an office, and 3) I’m bored in this job and if finding a new job wasn’t such a hassle I’d have left already.

Worklife

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Today was a depressing day with work.

I finished a big chunk of work yesterday and merged the new changes into my code. The new changes broke my local version – nothing to do with what I’d done, they were just buggy and I had a lot more test data in my database. Working around this pretty much killed my productivity (and will to live) yesterday, but by the end of the day I was satisfied my changes were compatible so I checked them in and logged off.

The build/tests take about an hour to run so I logged on this morning to see the results, and… disaster, the tests were failing. Anyway the short version is that I spent all day trying to fix and work around other people’s problems. At about 4:45 I realised that there was one issue left and this one really was my fault, but as I’d been working since 8:00 I decided to leave it until tomorrow and went out for a walk. Unfortunately I left my emails open and when I came back I saw that another developer had checked in code to fix my bug with the comment “fix this insanity”. If I was in a different state of mind I might have found that offensive, but his choice of words says more about him than me. And I thought it was a bit rich as I’d have had this solved by 8:30 if I hadn’t had to work around all the problems he’d caused.

So anyway, I thought to myself “hmm”. I don’t feel very motivated at the moment and I don’t think the problem is me. When things like this happen I’m acutely aware that I’ve been here for well over a year and haven’t had a pay review. That’s not very good. This is the first time in my life I’ve worked more than 12 months without a pay adjustment.

So tonight I went on totaljobs and sent off my CV to two places.

Over the weekend I was feeling a bit stressed and guilty by the fact I wasn’t really making any progress with this job search. I had an interview in November and then basically did nothing again until very recently. If I still saw my counsellor I’d have probably gone there and admitted to her at some point recently that the prospect seems daunting and I’ve been avoiding it on purpose, on some level, and that’s just me and my anxiety.

So after much thought I decided to bump myself up to a three quarter dose of Citalopram. I’d always intended to go up to the full dose after Christmas to deal with job seeking stress and interviews.

More jobs

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I communicated with two recruiters this week and now have one application in progress. It’s an ‘ehhh, maybe’. Anyway, their wish list overlaps with my experience and the salary is about right, so that’s good? I don’t know. Hiring is dependent on a bunch of things that are basically random.

The other recruiter I spoke to was annoying and pushy. Their role turned out to be a 12 month fixed term contract which they promise will become permanent at the end of it. I replied to say “sorry, I’m not leaving my permanent role for a 12 month contract”. They replied back to give me a long essay on how it’s “as good as permanent” and it just comes down to the client’s budget cycle, blah blah blah, and I should just have a ‘chat’ (AKA an interview) with the employer then decide.

I just ignored that one. I was going to reply back and say “I am only interested in permanent roles. When they are able to offer this I will be happy to consider it”, but I couldn’t be bothered. I already said no.

I replied to a couple more as well, but just a “can you give me some more details please” kind of thing. That’s enough for today.

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.

10

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I think the Citalopram is starting to work already. I decided to stay on 10mg rather than go up to 20 again. I think when I came off it I should have reduced from 20 to 10 and stayed there for a few months before going further, so that’s kind of what I’m doing now. I can always bump it back up if need be, but I think I’ll be OK with 10.

Today my boss annoyed me a bit. The chunk of work I’m working on at the moment is progressing haphazardly because he’s not communicating requirements clearly and I’m finding it frustrating going around in circles. If I ever end up responsible for hiring people I’ll have some kind of written test during the interview just to check they can express themselves clearly in writing.

But despite finding it frustrating, it didn’t bother me too much personally. It motivated me to reply to a recruiter email, which suddenly feels a lot more interesting again, and less overwhelming. That’s a good sign. I read somewhere today that vacancies are picking up again and are currently the highest they’ve been since March. I think it’s time to start being a bit more active.

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…

The big day?

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Today I had one of those incredibly frustrating work days where you spend hours looking at something without really achieving much. The problem with working from home is that it’s very tempting to keep on working past your hours on such days, just to try to make a little bit of progress. I stopped myself from doing that, but it was a conscious decision not to spend my evening reading Elasticsearch documentation. Even now as I’m getting ready to sleep I still have that slightly fidgety anxious energy from being frustrated and wanting to do something useful. But at least I recognise it, I suppose.

Around this time four years ago I remember thinking that I’d be a bit disappointed if I woke up the next day and Hillary Clinton won. It just seemed like a boring outcome. Which I suppose is also why she didn’t win. I haven’t been following it this time around and I think I’m completely fatigued on UK politics from the last few years, but I’m still curious to find out the result. My prediction is a safe win for Biden. And some tantrums.

Edit: 😳😳😳😳

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.