Isn’t it funny how things can work out sometimes?
I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker, in a minor way. I don’t mean risk to life and limb (although I do drive rather fast and The Hubby says I have a heavy right foot) nor in terms of being very adventurous doing things which would make me uncomfortable (I’m a bit of a wimp about my creature comforts) but a risk in terms of doing something unconventional and different which doesn’t conform with the Surrey ‘norm’.
For instance I’ve married three husbands and dumped two of them for varying different reasons (The Hubby number three is doing OK so far, he’ll be glad to know) changed jobs and careers a number of times and not abided by the conventions of politeness when I think others are, quite frankly, stupid or need a few home truths telling to them. It hasn’t made me any new friends and on occasion has lost an old one, but I’ve almost always had the conviction in my head that I am comfortable with what I have said and done and have said or done it for good reasons with a degree of integrity. I have never set out to deliberately hurt or disadvantage anyone, although I know a few people have done so to me. I hope they can sleep at night. I have never had a great deal of interest in climbing the overpriced and overhyped UK property ladder (who needs a six bedroomed house with a posh postcode anyway? As long as you have a comfy bed and a warm partner to share it and your life with, what else matters?) and I want to go and live abroad in the next few years to get away from the miserable British climate with its rain and chilliness. I am a creature of the sun, I think.
Regular readers of this blog will know I have hated my job for quite a while. The sheer tediousness, expense and unreliability of the travelling, the thanklessness of the customers and the moaning and discontent of colleagues has pissed me off no end and made the whole thing pretty intolerable most of the time (although in fact I have had to tolerate it because it has paid the bills). So back in February, after a particularly bad meeting and appalling treatment by someone in a position of influence over my job and who should have known better, I wrote myself into a report on some restructuring as a redundancy. I wasn’t entirely sure it would go through and be accepted, but it was and a departure date of 31st March 2015 was agreed.
Doing so was an enormous risk; we have a mortgage and bills to pay. A decent redundancy payment will last a fair while, but I will need to earn some dosh and top it up if it is to last until I can access my pension.
So I have taken the opportunity to retrain to do something I have been interested in for some time but couldn’t really justify chucking in a perfectly good job with a high salary to do – beauty therapy. I’m doing a course every Saturday at a really nice little beauty school in Walton on Thames to become qualified to level two standard, and will do a couple of extra modules in popular stuff like massage, then set up my own mobile beauty therapy business. I will be qualified by January in the whole thing, and have already qualified to do manicures and pedicures. I’m loving it; it’s creative, with people and not a computer and much more relaxed.
But the Council is now trying to bring my leaving date forward. There is a significant financial cost to me if it does so, and I have to fight my corner. But there is a lot to be said for getting out of a place that you really don’t want to go to every day and moving on to a new stage of your life. So really, it’s just a case of what I can get out of it.
Goodness knows how we’ll manage financially. But we’re both resourceful, and we will manage even if it means we have to live on beans every day (if that’s the case, ours will be the house with the roof blown off – you won’t miss it). And overall even if we’re skint we’ll be happier. And I can be at home with my dog and cats every day, and we may even get another puppy.
Who knows?
Wednesday 27 August 2014
Tuesday 19 August 2014
What does your out of office say?
The out of office message is a dangerous thing, isn’t it?
We have a colleague in our office that is universally unpopular. He has upset or alienated almost everyone in his close team and a number of other people besides, including his Executive Director. He has had numerous public rows with people on a range of topics and is, to put it bluntly, not just a loose cannon but also a fruit loop of the first order. How he has survived this long is a mystery to all of us.
He is on leave at the moment, and has taken the opportunity to place a different message in his Outlook diary for every day he is away. Some just blandly say “I am on leave today, please contact Mrs X”. Others are more interesting:-
“I am being harassed at work and taking time off due to the stress. Contact someone else”
….and
“I am stressed out with the pressure at work and am having to take time off. My Manager might deal with your enquiry”.
Needless to say, so one was aware of this until a contractor sent him a message and got the day’s reply, then contacted his manager and reported it. Then everyone scrambled around trying to get access to his email account to change it, but because he is an IT geek himself he had protected it and that took ages.
Great amusement all round for colleagues, some embarrassment for Managers. He’ll be for it when he gets back, no question.
Of course the key issue here is that by and large we have to trust our colleagues to be responsible and behave appropriately in the office and when they are disgruntled or upset, many don’t want to play ball. They will leave inappropriate emails, blank out calendars to be unavailable and send ill advised messages to others without a thought for the consequences, or possibly not caring about them. And once it is in the system, it’s almost impossible to get it back and retrieve the situation.
I remember leaving a past organisation acrimoniously and putting a message on my Outlook which said “I no longer work for this dreadful organisation. Your message will not be dealt with. Try contacting someone else in the team”. My boss went ballistic, I refused to take the message down and stood my ground until I left later that day. By that time, several people had seen it and messaged back “don’t blame you”. Task accomplished, I think.
But at least I was leaving – this bloke has to come back and face the music. Possibly not for long. We’ll see!
We have a colleague in our office that is universally unpopular. He has upset or alienated almost everyone in his close team and a number of other people besides, including his Executive Director. He has had numerous public rows with people on a range of topics and is, to put it bluntly, not just a loose cannon but also a fruit loop of the first order. How he has survived this long is a mystery to all of us.
He is on leave at the moment, and has taken the opportunity to place a different message in his Outlook diary for every day he is away. Some just blandly say “I am on leave today, please contact Mrs X”. Others are more interesting:-
“I am being harassed at work and taking time off due to the stress. Contact someone else”
….and
“I am stressed out with the pressure at work and am having to take time off. My Manager might deal with your enquiry”.
Needless to say, so one was aware of this until a contractor sent him a message and got the day’s reply, then contacted his manager and reported it. Then everyone scrambled around trying to get access to his email account to change it, but because he is an IT geek himself he had protected it and that took ages.
Great amusement all round for colleagues, some embarrassment for Managers. He’ll be for it when he gets back, no question.
Of course the key issue here is that by and large we have to trust our colleagues to be responsible and behave appropriately in the office and when they are disgruntled or upset, many don’t want to play ball. They will leave inappropriate emails, blank out calendars to be unavailable and send ill advised messages to others without a thought for the consequences, or possibly not caring about them. And once it is in the system, it’s almost impossible to get it back and retrieve the situation.
I remember leaving a past organisation acrimoniously and putting a message on my Outlook which said “I no longer work for this dreadful organisation. Your message will not be dealt with. Try contacting someone else in the team”. My boss went ballistic, I refused to take the message down and stood my ground until I left later that day. By that time, several people had seen it and messaged back “don’t blame you”. Task accomplished, I think.
But at least I was leaving – this bloke has to come back and face the music. Possibly not for long. We’ll see!
Monday 4 August 2014
Plain English, please!
It’s long been a bugbear of mine that people don’t use proper English in their everyday lives any more. And it’s getting worse; acronyms, abbreviations and colloquialisms abound. Many of them are due to text-speak, in itself a non word but completely descriptive of a pandemic which is sweeping our society.
Why get in a sweat about it, I hear you say, there are far worse things happen! Yes, there are, but as we become an ever more multi-cultural society being able to make ourselves understood to our fellow countrymen will become more and more important, and the best way to do that is to use a standard form of language that we all understand and which is grammatically correct.
I don’t mean that we have to be phobic about correctness to ‘A’ level grammar standards and that we should all be able to describe what a subjunctive verb is. Nor do I mean we should all be able to use fancy English or punctuate our speech with the odd Latin phrase which if anything, often obscures our meaning more than incorrect English.
All I mean is that we should use English properly and do not bastardise it due to laziness, a desire to be trendy or a need to show how clever we are.
Two things at the opposite ends of the spectrum have irritated me intensely this week.
The other evening, we were sitting in a restaurant and a couple arrived slightly later and were seated next to us. Not only did the young woman (American) have verbal diarrhoea but she also punctuated her sentences to her boyfriend (English) with frequent mentions of the word ‘like’. “It was like, really difficult because like, there were like, ten people in front of me and like, I was in a hurry”. Even worse, the guy, who as a Brit should have known better, did exactly the same thing.
This really is one of my pet hates – either there were ten people, or there weren’t. How can it be 'like' ten people? Either it was really difficult or it wasn’t. How can it be 'like' really difficult?
Then, when they ordered their food, instead of saying “Please may I have ….” They both said “Can I get….”. Yes, of course you can get it. Get up out of your chair, pop into the kitchen and help yourself.
At the over clever end of the spectrum of inappropriate or incorrect English, I have just finished reading the latest book written under the pseudonym of a very popular author. It’s really very good; strong plot, well drawn characters and fast paced. But despite all that, it was ruined, ever so slightly, by being punctuated with obscure descriptive words which despite what I consider to be my excellent education and reasonably high level of understanding of the English language, I don’t know the meaning of and would need to look up in a highbrow dictionary. As a consequence the author, instead of being thoroughly entertaining, has been slightly annoying.
There are also, of course, all sorts of abbreviations and text-speak words which our children know the meaning of and we don’t. For ages I thought LOL meant ‘Lots of love’. It doesn’t, of course, it means ‘laugh out loud’ as I found out to my cost when I used it in what it turns out was an inappropriate way.
There are countless other examples of this. And to what end? Just so you can save 10 seconds every now and then by not typing out proper words? So you can fit your meaningless message into the designated number of characters that your mobile carrier allows?
Why are we sending so many texts any way? We used to manage without such instant messaging and contact previously, and we were probably all much happier for it. My children sit at the table with their mobile phones constantly checking them for messages or the latest hot information to the extent that they have forgotten not only their manners but also how to have a civilised conversation. What do we think we are missing if we are parted from our phones for half an hour? Most of the time it’s not going to be anything earth shattering, that’s for sure.
I think it is time for a return to good old fashioned grammar and spelling lessons in schools and the use of colloquialisms and trendy words or abbreviations should be banned. Perhaps if we return to using proper language, we will return to proper manners and a better understanding of our fellow men. Whilst encouraging innovation and creativity, we should be less tolerant of individualism for trendiness sake instead of indulging those that simply do not wish to conform and by not doing so, influence our young people to the worst.
I know it’s old fashioned, and I know it would be unpopular, but to me the poor use of the English language is part of the steady erosion of our society, a removal of the glue which holds it together.
Is that too fanciful?
(BTW, if you disagree, you have my permission to LOL and get back to me).
Why get in a sweat about it, I hear you say, there are far worse things happen! Yes, there are, but as we become an ever more multi-cultural society being able to make ourselves understood to our fellow countrymen will become more and more important, and the best way to do that is to use a standard form of language that we all understand and which is grammatically correct.
I don’t mean that we have to be phobic about correctness to ‘A’ level grammar standards and that we should all be able to describe what a subjunctive verb is. Nor do I mean we should all be able to use fancy English or punctuate our speech with the odd Latin phrase which if anything, often obscures our meaning more than incorrect English.
All I mean is that we should use English properly and do not bastardise it due to laziness, a desire to be trendy or a need to show how clever we are.
Two things at the opposite ends of the spectrum have irritated me intensely this week.
The other evening, we were sitting in a restaurant and a couple arrived slightly later and were seated next to us. Not only did the young woman (American) have verbal diarrhoea but she also punctuated her sentences to her boyfriend (English) with frequent mentions of the word ‘like’. “It was like, really difficult because like, there were like, ten people in front of me and like, I was in a hurry”. Even worse, the guy, who as a Brit should have known better, did exactly the same thing.
This really is one of my pet hates – either there were ten people, or there weren’t. How can it be 'like' ten people? Either it was really difficult or it wasn’t. How can it be 'like' really difficult?
Then, when they ordered their food, instead of saying “Please may I have ….” They both said “Can I get….”. Yes, of course you can get it. Get up out of your chair, pop into the kitchen and help yourself.
At the over clever end of the spectrum of inappropriate or incorrect English, I have just finished reading the latest book written under the pseudonym of a very popular author. It’s really very good; strong plot, well drawn characters and fast paced. But despite all that, it was ruined, ever so slightly, by being punctuated with obscure descriptive words which despite what I consider to be my excellent education and reasonably high level of understanding of the English language, I don’t know the meaning of and would need to look up in a highbrow dictionary. As a consequence the author, instead of being thoroughly entertaining, has been slightly annoying.
There are also, of course, all sorts of abbreviations and text-speak words which our children know the meaning of and we don’t. For ages I thought LOL meant ‘Lots of love’. It doesn’t, of course, it means ‘laugh out loud’ as I found out to my cost when I used it in what it turns out was an inappropriate way.
There are countless other examples of this. And to what end? Just so you can save 10 seconds every now and then by not typing out proper words? So you can fit your meaningless message into the designated number of characters that your mobile carrier allows?
Why are we sending so many texts any way? We used to manage without such instant messaging and contact previously, and we were probably all much happier for it. My children sit at the table with their mobile phones constantly checking them for messages or the latest hot information to the extent that they have forgotten not only their manners but also how to have a civilised conversation. What do we think we are missing if we are parted from our phones for half an hour? Most of the time it’s not going to be anything earth shattering, that’s for sure.
I think it is time for a return to good old fashioned grammar and spelling lessons in schools and the use of colloquialisms and trendy words or abbreviations should be banned. Perhaps if we return to using proper language, we will return to proper manners and a better understanding of our fellow men. Whilst encouraging innovation and creativity, we should be less tolerant of individualism for trendiness sake instead of indulging those that simply do not wish to conform and by not doing so, influence our young people to the worst.
I know it’s old fashioned, and I know it would be unpopular, but to me the poor use of the English language is part of the steady erosion of our society, a removal of the glue which holds it together.
Is that too fanciful?
(BTW, if you disagree, you have my permission to LOL and get back to me).
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