Tag Archives: rant

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

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I just can’t get my head around the inconsistencies where I work. One signer will spend three hours to change a figure that has a £1 impact, whereas another will apparently quite happily sign out a blatantly incorrect piece of work.

I was working on something on Friday and it hit me that in prior years something had been done wrong. Badly wrong. Excusable given the circumstances, but unacceptable (to me) in the current circumstance (things changed). I hummed and hawed, and wanted to verify the position with the signer, but they weren’t in. I left at about half nine on Friday evening. During my journey home I concluded that the only way I was going to get any sleep over the weekend was to come in and make sure the work was done in a technically correct manner. So that’s what I did. 9 hours straight on Saturday, and probably another 4 over the last couple of days. I finally pass it through and guess what? They’d have been happy with doing what had been done in previous years, despite the fact that it was incorrect and misstated the figures by 200%.

Ah well, I had to make a decision and it turned out to be the wrong one. I still can’t get over the attitude about signing out knowingly incorrect work though. It sickens me.

Good job I’ll be leaving soon. I have decided to wait until at least my 1 year anniversary of being in the job before resigning as I want to make sure my recruiter gets his full whack. He’s a nice bloke and could do with the money to fund his snowboarding.

(having the) Hump Day

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Have I mentioned my feelings towards FirstGreatWestern? Maybe once or twice?

Another classic today. My train left Reading about 7 minutes late (no surprise there), and made decent time to Paddington (which is a surprise, no random slow downs so that we can all get a nice clear view of the Nestle factory). Why it then remained outside Paddington station for 15 minutes is a mystery. At least two other trains passed to get on to platforms, so I blame the way train operators are measured on performance. As I understand it a train is classified “late” if it arrives 10 minutes after it’s timetabled arrival time. This means that it is better for the operator to further delay an already late train if it means it can get other trains into their stations before the 10 minutes isup.

The fact that this delays travellers on the “late” train further appears to be of no consequence to them. Meanwhile, I get into work late, again, through no fault of my own and doubtless will now not be getting home tonight, but rather tomorrow morning (as with yesterday).

In other news, I would like to suggest a new class in schools: how to walk in a straight line and not drift across pavements into the path of other people.

I’m done

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I’m through with this place. As soon as I find out how much I’m going to be out of pocket on this divorce I’m quitting and getting the money some other way. If I have to sell the house or work in Tesco then so be it, it’s got to be better than here.

It’s the UK deadline coming up, and I’ve got returns to get out. I’ve got 3 different senior managers wanting everything done yesterday as well as other queries to be answered/bills to be sent/admin to be completed. I’m working 09:30 until 20:00 every day (any later and my brain is no good). I’ve worked tight deadlines before, I’ve worked long hours. No problem. What I can’t take is the bitchiness and accusatory tone of internal e-mails demanding stauts updates (durr, maybe if you let me actually do the work instead of spending your time hounding me there’d be a chance of it happening), the sarcastic review notes (heck, the review notes which are questions and not anwers: Have you checked X? Well yes, but evidently missed something, maybe if you told me what it was I wouldn’t have to spend my time re-checking and still missing it) and the deadlines agreed with clients with no thought as to how they’re going to be met.

They win. They’ve broken me. They’ve completely destroyed any self-belief I’ve ever had in my technical knowledge and made me question the most basic things. I’ll be gone within 6 months (if I last that long).

I don’t believe it!

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My car’s a bit broken. The right-hand side taillight and brakelight don’t work. The bulbs are fine, the fuse is fine, the indicators are fine. So, I booked it into the garage to have the unit replaced and advised work that I would have to work from home on Friday (the hours I can drop the car off and pick it up mean I could log a whopping 4 hours in the office, with 3 hours travel).

Things are getting a bit hectic at work, so I let the people I was working with know asap what I was doing (on Wednesday, when I booked the car in). No complaints.

One of my colleagues wants some work to go out this week. Fine. It’s taken a lot longer than expected, but I finally passed it through. Spoke to the individual, reminded them I was working from home tomorrow but would be contactable. Still fine.

Within 5 minutes of them leaving the office (and saying goodbye to me as they walked past my desk) I get an e-mail from their Blackberry saying I had better work from the office. WTF?! They couldn’t have said that to my face? It’s only because I was checking a few things before shutting down that I even got the e-mail, otherwise I wouldn’t have read it until tomorrow morning. From home.

Cue e-mail explaining the situation (again),  bcc’d to my “performance manager”, stating all the ways I would still be contactable and still have full access to everything on the network. I’ve now had to wait for a reply to say that we  can try and manage it remotely (the only thing I can’t do is print stuff and physically be there).

 Asshats

The wrong sort of cold

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I have to get a new Season Ticket the other day as the current one had stopped working. I joked that it was because of the cold. “Wrong sort of cold” the ticket guy joked.

Alas, despite the fact that the UK has fairly predictable weather really, Network Rail still hasn’t worked out how to not have the points freeze. I’ve been late every day this week due to points failures, signal failures, cancellations. I’m starting to see why people drive so much (now that I can). Of course, none of these delays are ever mentioned on the local news, as it seems that they don’t classify it as a delay if it’s under an hour. My journey from Reading to Paddington should that 25 minutes. It was an hour and five today.

The best laid plans…

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This week was going to we spent out of the house, doing fun things. It got off to a good start yesterday with a free night of dancing courtesy of Ceroc. Tonight it was the turn of the Punkscience guys to entertain me. Alas they hadn’t banked on public transport in London. I left the office with plenty of time to spare, but got to the tube station (after being bashed into by someone leaving their office and not checking no-one was walking along the pavement before blustering out) to find the Central Line jammed. Walked down to Holborn to find they had two whole barriers open. Someone tried to push me through one, which wasn’t so helpful considering that particular barrier wasn’t accepting paper tickets.

I did manage to get a seat on the tube when it finally arrived, so got a bit of knitting done as it stop-started to my destination. Unfortunately I got there just as Punkscience was scheduled to start. I figured I might as well get out and maybe do a bit of Xmas shopping. Even this was not simple. The oaf sitting next to me was resting his fat arm on the seat, on top of my headphones, so that as I stood up the headphones were ripped from my ears, and the ipod, flinging the ipod to the floor. I didn’t get an apology, this is London after all. The shops were a bust, but they did have Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose in very close proximity, but they just made me hungry so I came home, eventually, after waiting another 15 minutes for a tube to turn up and having to deal with tourists <shudder>.