The prize goes to the one who told me Huddersfield was “2 or 3 miles West of Manchester”. Close but no cigar.

So for the sake of your sanity, I’m not saying much. When and if anything new or exciting happens, i’ll let y’all know

The title actually refers to the fact I am being made redundant for the third time.

Arse.

And I was just about getting my head round all the linux tools and such like.

“At least it’s Sunny”, you may say. Ah yes, but remember there is every chance I’ll have to be tootling around Manchester in a suit, trying not to be to sweaty when I arrive. Excellent.

Still, i’ve been letting my X-box skills slip and this might be the perfect opportunity for a refresher.

In our office building, there’s no gents (toilets, that is, not refined male-folk although there’s a lack of those, too) on the ground floor where I am. We’re officially supposed to used the wheelchair-access one but I always feel guilty about that. I’m sure there was something in the bible about verily not using the water closets of the infirm lest the good lord meets you at the pearly gates and boots you down the hell hatch to the bad fire.

Even though I’ve yet to see anyone in a wheelchair within 100 yards of the building, I’d hate to come out to be confronted by a queue of people literally spinning their wheels and glaring. We work at the top of a hill, too, so if I ran off and they gave chase, they’d have the upper hand.

Just in case, I use the one on the first floor. There IS a staircase but the financial institution company representatives employed on the upper floors clearly want to keep the cloven-hooved scum of the lower circles away from them so they have a lock on the stair-well door and won’t tell us the secret password. We oiks have no fear of technology and rapidly worked out we could use the lift instead, pointedly farting as we leave to show those toffee nosed twerps what’s what.

So, the other day, feeling like the sort of treat I mentioned above, I got in the lift and just DECIDED to go to the ninth floor. Just to see! I didn’t even have any reason to go there! Yeah, I know! I’m a wild man – like Keith Moon if he knew about C++ compilers.

And there’s ANOTHER gents up there!

And more on floors 7 and 5!

I’m saving exploration of floor 3 for a special day before I venture into the untold mysteries of the even numbers. I don’t want to burn out before I’m 40.

The eight-hours-of-train-travel-on-the-first-bloody-day notwithstanding.

Still it’s a definite improvement. Lots of busy and nerdy and Linux.

Been to loads of gigs lately and I’ve started trying to review them (see up there where is says ‘reviews’) but it’s making me respect, y’know, PROPER reviewers mostly. Might take them down again. Any opinions gratefully ignored.

more soon. honest

so

what should I do with the time?

Read up techy geek stuff to prepare for new techy geek job?

or catch up on the telly/Xbox/Reading I won’t have time for once I start work again?

tricky tricky tricky

2/ And again when you get to the bus stop.

3/ You take the bus that goes the Other Way just for a change and feel a bit reckless for doing it.

4/ You find yourself watching the students (presumably at this time of the morning on their way home from something) and think about doing another degree.

5/ You notice the bands now playing Ironically at the student union are the ones you queued up for four hours to get tickets for when you were 19

6/ The John Martyn on the iPod is REALLY hitting the spot when the iPod has a hissy fit and dies. Again. You take this as a sign.

7/ You get off the bus and think “Hey, i’m wearing combats and DMs and carrying a rucksack – I wonder if anyone will mistake me for a student” just as the girl who was about to hand you a flyer for a club night glances at you and hands it to the guy behind you.

8/ You get a buzz when your second bus turns up just as you get to the stop.

9/ As you wander through the industrial estate to work, you imagine the foul stench coming from the hedgerow is the badly mutilated corpse of an investigative journalist who got too close to The Truth and you’ll discover it and be on the news and you follow up on the story, drawing the attention of some Mr Big Gang Boss who’ll try to silence you and make it look like a bizarre fencepost accident, but you’ll outsmart him and catch him in the act and you’ll send him to chokey for a stretch and the police will honour you and ask for your help busting crimes in the future and someone in L.A will write a cop show based on your life and you’ll get a fortune in royalties which you’ll spend on charitable good works, booze and loose women, leading to your inevitable downard spiral which will be made into a film on the Hallmark channel, earning you yet more royalties which this time you’ll invest carefully in property and ethical companies, making you millions and meaning you never have to work again, so you dedicate your life to spiritual development and Rockin’ Out, resulting in an album which achieves the never before heard blend of New Age mellowness and hard-edged ball-crunching metal with a folk-jazz-country tinge, capturing the public imagination and leading you to your long coveted career as a professional musician where you achieve success artistically and financially.

10/ You realise the smell is coming from a dead seagull that’s been hit by a lorry. You take this as a sign, too.

11/ You get to your office and realise that the last hour will probably be more interesting than anything in the next eight.

12/ You sigh again.

So far this week, I’ve re-written the test code I wrote to test the Actual code I wrote, because the test code didn’t pass our testing procedures. Got that? then I had to integrate someone else’s test code and go through it again.

Then I had to do something about a warning telling me that a variable wasn’t being used. Which is wasn’t. and Isn’t. and Shouldn’t be.

Now, I’m trying to make it build for a platform it’ll never be run on.

par-tay

That’s the customer in Sweden.

And the arse end of Sweden at that, by all accounts.

I turned it down but mostly, as I don’t feel I have a good enough level of the technical knowledge I’m supposed to be getting from my employers yet. Recently, the work has become much more interesting and is starting to lead me towards the knowledge I wanted to gain about a year ago but at the moment I think presenting myself at a customer site with my level of knowledge would make the company look bad and more to point, make me look like an arse.

My problem is that despite the Project Manager saying it was fine, I’ve been stressing about it all evening. What seems to be bugging me is the implication that I’m not good enough – that I can’t handle the responsibility of the job. Being me, that leads onto internal pondering about other jobs I’d to do like but can’t due to my rubbish-ness, followed by a short trip to “imsoshititsincredible”.

Realistically, the company needs to give me the time to get the experience I want/need, and are asking more of me than is reasonable for no benefit to myself. To get any better at the job, I’ll have to spend a fair chunk of my own time working on training and I’m not sure I want to. There are a million things I’d rather spend my free time on, and which I’d be more interested in learning about, so the choice is whether the job is enjoyable enough to spend my own time on or whether I look for something else entirely. So why do I still feel panicky?

In case you note an unusual hint of positivity, I’ve been reading Susan Jeffers’ book “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. For all its annoying Californian Woo-Hoo-ness, which I usually scoff at, I’m finding it irritatingly useful. I’ve read about a third of it and managed to write an honest blog entry that didn’t cower behind frivolous self-effacing jokes.

Well, not entirely. Maybe by the Bibliography.