Day2Day

I've been working on this pile of screws and wood for over three hours now. Why isn't it a bed yet? Why do I only seem to be about a fifth of the way through making it? You know what? If you ever stay at my house you had BETTER APPRECIATE THIS BED!

It's hard to dismantle a wardrobe when the answer to "What's holding it together?" seems to be "Magic". But I did it. And I dragged the bits upstairs and rebuilt the wardrobe.

Then I built half a bed, came downstairs and put the living room furniture into place. Then I returned to building the bed. Right now it's awaiting the rest of a drawer and a headboard before it can be considered a complete bed.

My house looks like cardboard city and I'm utterly knackered. What am I going to do with all these bits of boxes? The dustbin was full three days ago!

Also, apparantly, kicking a hammer by accident when you have nothing on your feet makes the end of your toe fall off. It hurts.

Pictures! ( No, not of the toe )

Okay, so they're supposed to deliver six items of furniture between 7.30am and 1pm. We're halfway through that time and there's no sign of them yet. At what point is panic and/or irritation justified?

I go to bed at around 11.30pm now. By midnight I'm asleep. My neighbours, it turns out, are quite noisy. I think there are two unruly teens next door. There are a lot of kids around the neighbourhood hanging out on bikes and scooters, playing with footballs and the like during the early evenings. By 11, though, it's all quiet and I fall asleep easily in the silence at 11.30pm.

At 1am last night there was a nosie that woke me up. It was a single loud click. It sounded (to me, in my paranoid state) like the sound you would get if you pulled down a door handle then let go so it sprang back into place. I was immediately awake and checking at the windows. There didn't seem to be anybody around, front or back.

Interesting that it should happen at exactly 1am. Perhaps something in the house switches over at that time. I thought perhaps the video I left running had reached the end and ejected itself. No. I'm not aware of anything the heating is supposed to do at 1am. I wondered whether the bag of rubbish hung inside the bathroom cabinet had fallen. No. So I still don't know what it was. Five minutes of investigation and I was ready to go back to bed. I'm going to wonder what that was for a long time, though.

As a kid when people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up I never really had an answer. For a while I talked about being a teacher. I still think I could be a good teacher, but it seems like an underpaid and soul sapping career. We did a questionnaire in the senior school that generated a list of potentially good jobs. Mine came out with social worker and prison officer. I don't think I'd make a good prison officer, I'd be too intimidated. I don't think I want to be a social worker because that depends on following ideals that aren't my own (I figured this out after applying to volunteer in a teen hostel for reprobates of some manner when I was unemployed).

For a long while I wanted to be a writer. Hell, I AM a writer. I'm always scribbling stuff. But I'm not a motivated and professional writer. You don't get a nine to five job from an application form or a CV as a writer. It just doesn't work that way.

I became a coder. It was a complete accident. I was doing stuff for the Red Dwarf Fan Club which introduced me to computers. I had access to computers at the polytechnic I was at and the internet was just starting to look like the next big thing. It fascinated me. I signed up with Demon Internet and spent much of my grant money on phone bills and ISP charges. I learnt HTML and built web pages. Then I happened to stumble across a job offer for someone who knew HTML. We were in Bristol at the time, Raz and I. However, this was pending finding a place in the Camberley area. The job was in London, the commute didn't look too bad and the pay, despite being paltry looked somewhat lucrative for someone currently without any money to call her own.

I went to an interview - it was fifteen minutes long, if that. Then I went all the way back to Bristol. A week later I was turning Quark Xpress files into HTML and uploading the FT Magazines to their home on the web. Nearly six years on, here I am - still.

Time passed. It was a weekend job but it turned full time very quickly. At one point I was working 9 days in a row, being paid per hour. The wage rose, slowly. They finally took me on as permanent staff with a contract and paid holiday and all (first thing I did was book a week off!). It was easy work - cut and paste, make a chart, screen capture, upload. Edit, tweak, tidy, build new site for new client, rinse and repeat.

Then things changed. The web turned dynamic and suddenly everyone wanted to put things in databases. Truth be told, most of the pages we were building weren't suitable for this - there wasn't enough commonality to have a template that was workable. Still, we bought the software that looked like it was the next big thing (it wasn't, it was buggy and horrible to use) and off we went. I learnt to code. It was fun to start out. Databases and loops and all manner of new toys.

They abandoned the tool after a year of painful use. We started using embedded perl - much nicer. This was the time of the dotcom boom. Work was fun. I had great colleagues, there was camaraderie among our team and it was all very new-media and relaxed but we got things done.

Things got kind of beaurocratic along the way. The company was floated and we tried to look all corporate, but beneath the spit and polish sheen we were still the same group, still having fun and building stuff that kicked ass - even if it was all financial stuff. I wasn't the greatest coder, but I had input beyond coding and my code was passable.

So then everything crashed and redundancies kept coming up. People moved on, things changed. Then it got really bad and the company was taken over. Things had become more and more strict and formal but with the takeover it really, REALLY changed. Now the beaurocracy is so bad that I sit around with nothing to do because the coders' time is being mis-managed. We don't get a say in how things are done any more, we do as we're told and we're largely invisible like some tiny hidden cog in the middle of the workings of a great big corporate machine.

I'm not sure I want to be a coder any more. I certainly don't have the motivation to go and learn the next big thing all by myself, although those around me are studiously learning new skills and making themselves marketable. I'd like to do that, but I don't know that I'm that marketable, really.

I've never been a wonderful coder. I like knocking out little programmes and things but I know full well they're hacky and inefficient and I can't wrap my head around some of the higher concepts of programming. Maybe if I hadn't done a poncy media degree (and a crap one, at that) then it would be different, but I'm not a real coder, I just play one at work.

So I come in, I do nothing, book my time to a project that we would be bug fixing if there were any bugs in it, and go home. And they pay me. They pay me an average coder's wage which is bigger than many other wages and I'm kind of used to the money. It makes it hard to get up the enthusiasm to look for something else more suitable. I've just heard that there's a lull coming up while they sort out our next project. That means we go into the resource pool. That means we officially have sod all to do but get paid for it anyway. Well, until they wake up to what they're doing and make us redundant, I suppose.

This afternoon I'm meant to have a one to one meeting to discuss whether I'm happy and how I want to move within the company, think about my career in general and so forth. Well, I don't care enough any more. I just want to be paid, really. Sad, isn't it? I mean, I'm not utterly skilless, but I don't know what I want to be (maybe it's because of the "when you grow up" clause - as far as I'm concerned I haven't grown up yet).

So if you see any 9-5 jobs for faux-coders who really want to be writers, let me know. I'll send on my CV. Meanwhile I'll have to think of some way of bluffing my way through the meeting with my line manager this afternoon...

Yo all those who guessed at one item - congratulations! You win. No prizes, sadly, I've been far too busy building my one bit of furniture to go shopping for prizes. I only bashed one finger with the hammer and only have four odd bits of wood left over wondering where they were once destined to live.

I knew it was too good to be true when Argos ammended my order for me. You see, this began as my fault. I ordered my seven items, but picked one incorrectly from the catalogue. I noticed the price was lower as it was rung up on the till so I checked the receipt when I got home. Going back in I was assured that there would be no problems with the substitution item being put in with the main order.

So when Mr Argos turns up on the doorstep with only the computer cupboard under his arm this morning, I'm not impressed. Especially since I've been up since 7.30am and it's nearly midday when he gets here and I realise when he says that's all he has that I'm going to have to deal with the horrors of customer support and I'm going to have to drag the mattress back into my room and turn it back into a bed and I'm going to have to take another of my annual leave days and waste it sitting around at home... But customer support were very helpful, considering. In fact, they pinched items from other people's orders to put on my list so I could get a delivery this week. Now I just have to confirm I can get another day off this week with work...

So it's not been the best of days, but at least I have a cupboard with a computer in it.

[Poll #29333]

Well the nap last night turned into an early night. I was more tired than I realised. However, I was up at 6.30am this morning ready to attack the house once again with my tidying-up hat on. I'm sure the fact that what I'm actually doing by 8am is sitting at the computer indicates something but at this point I don't care to consider quite what. And you shouldn't, either.

Okay, so I had a bathroom/kitchen/water related disaster, but I'm told it should all dry out without further intervention so I'm going to try to forget about it, save for fixing the leaky tap area.

Meanwhile, though, in my first foray into the world of DIY I have successfully put up a shelf! It's not perfect, I haven't figured out what to put on it yet, but it's a shelf and it's on my dining room wall and I put it there. With a drill and everything. Impressive, huh?

Earlier I said I'd be seeking out the nearest convenience store on my way home (store? when did I go all American?). I didn't. The weather chose to pour down as soon as I came out of the station and continued to rain heavily all over me until I got home. Of course it stopped the instant I got inside.

I ventured out into the garden to put out the bin after that. I think the one solitary bin out on the road opposite could be a clue to the coming of the bin men. Doesn't explain why we had no sign of them last Friday though. Maybe I'll just leave the bin out there until they do turn up and empty it - it's not like I can use it now it's full, after all.

Must find a shop, though, the other "nearby" one is about 15 minutes walk away and I need milk since Natalie appears to have fed it all to Denver. And she scratched my non-stick pan by stirring something with a metal fork! Still, it's very quiet without them here and Nat helped out a lot.

Well, it's getting late so I better shut down and make bedwards moves ready for a fun packed day of doing nothing in front of a computer tomorrow followed by the shop-hunt I aborted today.