Wednesday 4
The hoo-ha over the lack of wall-to-wall Olympics coverage reminds me how different it was when I were younger (eeh). The days of Olympic Grandstand… or just Grandstand. And World of Sport. Neither of whom covered the fencing. We got by and it was no less enjoyable for there being less of it.
Triathlon has been fun though, and the only sport I watched live at night before coming back for the occasional gymnastics and Taekwondo finals the morning after. And the end of the Modern Pentathlons… although, again, no coverage of the fencing. What do we have to do for heaven’s sake?
Thursday 12
Have I mentioned the saga of my hot water boiler?
It first blew in December 2016. The report on this was, apparently, lost. Then it was declared unserviceable in 2018 by the bloke who looks after the building. Then I reported it again in March 2019. And… nothing happened.
Finally, I lost my temper (a bit) when renewing the tenancy for this year – and had to report the fault again. But they are now coming out to swap the old for a new one, next Monday mid-morning. The alternative was 9am Tuesday but I’ve an interview to prepare for (and again, there it was lucky I went for Wednesday instead of the Tuesday interview timeslot on offer).
Monday 16
The boiler men turned up at 9am. This, to them, is mid-morning.
Two hours later… the sound of swearing and water running onto the floor. Turns out the stop cock was cross-threaded and fell away. Fully ten minutes of water running out later we found out where the flat’s other stop cock was… which didn’t work, so we had to resort to turning off the water for the floor.
In the afternoon, someone turns up with a mains-powered dehumidifier and a fan to circulate the air.
Suffice it to say that I didn’t get far with the presentation for Wednesday’s interview.
Tuesday 17
With all of the water sloshing around yesterday it appears that some might have got into the extractor fan electrics, so today I was paid a visit by a couple of sparks. No water damage but the fan was broken any way; so it’s now off, awaiting repair.
This is not helping the interview prep.
Wednesday 18
Interview day. And the first time I’ve ever over-run on a five minute presentation – by five slides! Fortunately I could jump very quickly to the one titled “Actions” but I don’t see this doing me any favours. This is what happens when you run out of rehearsal time. I could have pointed out the problems I’d had earlier in the week but then that looks as if you can’t cope in a crisis, which I most certainly did on Monday.
Thursday 26
I mostly took last month off to wallow a bit, but I have been scanning all of the ‘good’ slides in my late parents’ collection. I’m now on to the negatives. This would be fine if they were all 35mm and fitted into the negative holder, but I found some 126 format negatives in a packet, plus way more 110mm negatives than I thought we had. I don’t even remember that camera; unless it was mine.
Also annoyingly, dad’s camera was an Olympus Pen EE half-frame camera. This let you double up the number of slides and negatives on a roll (so 36 becomes 72, 24 becomes 48, etc.) but, again, requires a bit of jiggery and a lot of pokery to scan in as the two smaller negatives don’t exactly fit the same space as one large one.
It keeps me off the streets though. And I’ve shared a few with the famalam, including on Facebook where we try and remember who is who and what was when. I even created the #TaylorThrowbackThursday hashtag, just to be silly.
Tuesday 31
Took a month off LinkedIn and went back in today. Nothing much has changed, and far too many inspirational quotes from people who succeeded for my liking. Talk to me when you’re a failure, then we’ll have something in common.
But it’s been interesting the number of speculative emails I’ve had from recruiters, probably as a result of reading the portfolio I added. Trouble is they’re not reading too closely. I haven’t worked in a library for over 30 years, and thus have no recent experience of library management systems (we’d only just got one in 1990). I can use WordPress and fiddle a bit with php but I’m not a WordPress developer. And I’m not that keen on handling seafront communications in Bournemouth. It’s a bit of a commute.
Add that to all the posts from an agency setting me up with Network Rail in London and the south east (four days per week in Crawley? No) and you have to wonder if networking is all it’s cracked up to be.
If the short-notice via agency six-month contract interview I had last Tuesday comes through this will be a lot more moot, but they should have made a decision by the end of last week. No word yet. The suspense isn’t killing me as much as it is irritating me, but there you go.