This week I’ve been in the new job for three months, which meant it was the end of my probationary period.
It’s also meant I’ve gone through an assessment, which was an interesting experience, to say the least. It’s been remarkably positive – in fact, it’s been excellent – and it’s been nice to see that the company really does appreciate what I’ve been doing with them in that time.
Somehow I’ve managed to get “Excellent” grades throughout the assessment. Even the bits of self-assessment where I’d graded myself as less than Excellent have been upgraded from the company’s perspective.
All told, it’s resulted in a 15% pay rise – not bad – and confirmation of my role as Lead Developer. I’ve emphatically said that for now I don’t want a title with Manager in it – I still feel I’m more of a doer than a manager, it has to be said.
I’m happy with the results of the assessment, and that the probation period is over. I’ve known from early on that my job was pretty safe, that I’ve been doing a lot of work and fixing a lot of stuff that has been inherited from previous developers etc, but all the same it’s still good to know that the probation period is well and truly over.
I’ve been a fan of Henry Rollins for a very long time now, so seeing him doing a spoken-word gig at Norwich UEA was always something I’d be at.
Rollins is one of the hardest working people on the gig circuit – you only have to look at the schedule for this tour to realise that – which always makes it an interesting gig when he talks about his insane travelling plans, along with his life, ideas and experiences. In this gig, he talked about the fact he’s going to be playing a significant role in Season Two of Sons of Anarchy (fantastic news, in my opinion) as well as Thanksgiving, America, elections, being friends with William Shatner, giving speeches at Sonoma University in California, and travels to Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Iran, China, India and many others.
I like the Rollins attitude, which was basically described as “Someone tells me a place is dangerous, I want to go there and find out for myself“. In other words, do things for yourself, don’t just believe what the media/politicians/other people tell you.
In fact that was pretty much the theme for the entire gig – some two and a half hours of it, too – to do your own thing, don’t just sit back and let other people do the talking/doing.
I’m already looking forward to the next Rollins tour.
This time, it’s a spectacular piece of parking in the Sainsbury’s at Bury St Edmunds…
That isn't a parking space, you utter twat
So yes, driver of S3NUM, you’ve been added to the Gallery Of Bell-ends. Congratulations.
The car is finally back in my possession. All is fine with it, it has no visible scratches, and they’ve even cleaned the inside.
It feels insanely fast compared to the POS Chevy Matiz and Avgo I’ve had for the last month.
I’m very happy to have it back. Now it just remains to see how long I can go before scratching the cocking thing.
One of the jobs this weekend involved replacing the cat-flap in the back door.
During the cold-spell, the plastic of the cat-flap itself got brittle, and one part of it snapped off. Wedging it back in was fine until one of the cats went through it, at which point the sodding thing fell to the floor.
In the end we covered the gap with cardboard, just to stop the draught and preventing all the heat in the house escaping. This obviously caused some annoyance in Psycho Cat, which he demonstrated in his normal charming fashion.
We had tried a flap from another manufacturer, but that didn’t work at all. So on Saturday I went down to the local pet store, and found that they have flaps made by CatMate. They didn’t have just the spare doors (and even the online stores appear to be out of stock) so I ended up getting a complete new catflap, although we only needed the door itself.
It’s all sorted now, and the job’s complete – it’d just be nice for these things to not be such a complete faff all the time. Oh, and that flap is supposed to be unbreakable, too – so we’ll try sending it off to the manufacturers, and see what happens.
Following on from this week’s ridiculous stuff with the car, they called late yesterday to say I should get it back on Monday.
I’m not going to believe it ’til it’s actually here, but dear Lord I’ll be pleased to have it back when it happens.
If it does come back on Monday, it’ll be exactly a month since it went in.
One of the things that’s very odd (in my experience) with the Chevrolet Matiz I’m currently driving – but only ’til Monday, praise the Lord! – is the layout of the dashboard. The speedo, rev counter and fuel gauge aren’t in the normal place, but are instead slap-bang in the middle of the dash.
You get used to it quickly enough, but it’s still very odd initially to not have the dials in the normal place. In some ways it’s like when one of your mirrors is unavailable (whether it’s fallen off, been smashed off, or just that the car is so full of [whatever] that you can’t see out of the back window) in that you suddenly realise again how often you do check them. Until you get used to it, every time you look for the dial, it’s a little jolt ’til you remember where it actually is.
I’m not a great fan of having the dials in the centre of the dash. It’s not much different – not like you suddenly have to look somewhere completely different, or move your head/neck in order to see them or anything. But it doesn’t feel “right”. After however many years of having the dials in line with the steering wheel, having them in a different location just feels strange, and somehow “wrong”.
