March
Goldilocks and the three bears…
2010 so far has been eventful, but not always in nice ways. In January, my team at work was informed that my company had lost the tech support contract we were doing, and the contract was going to be given to another supplier instead.
In the UK, permanent employees are protected in this case by laws know as TUPE. They basically say that if you provide services, like my team does, and the service provider changes, your employment must transfer over to the new service provider, guaranteeing you continued employment. TUPE can also happen if the company you work for becomes/is sold to another company.
I went through a TUPE last year, when Fujitsu Siemens became Fujitsu. It was uneventful. We were all presuming that in THIS case, however, geography would mean we couldn’t work for the new employer, since they didn’t have offices in Sheffield. When that happens you are usually made redundant if you can’t move to somewhere nearer to the new office, so I started a jobhunt pretty quickly.
After about a month of looking and countless CVs, I got a bite – an interview for a junior web developer post within commutable distance. I (as I am wont to be) was rather happy about this development. I then got another interview for an internal tech supportish position at my current workplace, the day after. I rock, right? I spent oodles of time preparing and revising my PHP/mySQL, CV, thinking of answers to interview questions, purchasing clothes and perfecting a professional look (which I think I managed quite well), freaking out, and so on.
The day before the dev interview we had a work meeting (which took most of the day) that gave us a big bit of info we’d not really been expecting: The new company who was going to be doing our job had leased a building in Sheffield, so we were still all going to have jobs. Hugely unexpected news. It felt too good to be true, too.
The next day, the dev interview went well, had a rapport with the interiewer (He preferred Gnome to KDE! Pffffff….. ;)) but came out aware that I didn’t have enough experience. From what he’d been saying, if someone else came along with more experience they’d get the job, but my interview style was good. (You know when your cheeks hurt from too much smiling?). I was told I’d hear back in about a week, as there were more interviews to perform yet.
The day after was the interview at work, so I wore my interview clothes all day (I already take a backpack to work with a change of clothes in it, I’ll be damned if anyone can convince me to take two changes of clothes). I quite liked when I was asked jokingly if I’d joined the FBI… Once again the interview felt like it had gone well, and I was told I’d hear about this one the next day.
….. a week passes, no news from either of them….
Thursday, two days after I was supposed to hear about the first interview, I broke and emailed both interviewers to enquire. I got a phone call almost immediately to say that I’d not gotten the dev job, although it took an agonising amount of time for him to get to the point…… Simply put, I didn’t have enough experience. Not even for a junior web development job, not even when I have a qualification in web development. It’s hard not to feel stuck when I am working full time (and trying to do well at it), studying in my “free” time, also wanting high marks, cos I’m a fool who sometimes thinks that matters, and trying to keep enough real me-time to stay happy as well. Where am I going to fit in this extra experience that is needed? I just DON’T have time to take on serious freelance clients! I was pretty gutted that I couldn’t even secure a junior position, and had to battle feelings of miserable inadequacy for a bit. I’m purposefully NOT thinking too hard about what I’m writing lest I get stuck feeling sorry for myself and trying to figure out how to work harder / take away more of my free time…
Interview response 2 came the next day. Unsuccessful, this time because I was too interested in programming rather than because I’d done anything wrong – first time I’ve ever experienced that old irritating “you’re OVERqualified” grind… I wasn’t really too bothered about not getting it – if I had gotten it I would have had to think long about whether I wanted to take it. I’d applied for it when I thought I had NO job in my future, meaning anything that put money in my bank account would be okay. Now that I knew I had a job, I wasn’t so sure I would be interested.
The thing that struck me most was the irony. One job too little experience, one job too much experience elsewhere. Hopefully the next bowl of porridge will be JUST right….
*sigh*
Look here, I have money in my pocket. I’m willing to share it with authors and publishers, in exchange for their works.
I’ve been walking to work, 40 or 50 minutes, because of the snow. I thought it might be nice to listen to an audiobook while I was doing it. So I had a bit of a browse, and it seems the place to get them downloaded from is audible.co.uk. It’s illegal to rip CDs in the UK (This BBC article is the newest info I could find on it, if anyone else knows anything more I’d be grateful) so I can’t purchase a CD of the book I wanted and rip it to listen to on my phone. I foolishly purchased a copy of the book from audible.co.uk and tried to download it to my phone only to find out the audio format was not something my phone could read – and don’t get me wrong, my phone supports quite a few audio formats! They have software that allows you to transfer the book to mobile devices, but not for Android. I could burn it to CD and then rip it into a non-proprietary audio format, but as I said earlier, that’s not legal.
The biggest mistake I made was to assume that the book would be in a commonly supported audio format before purchasing, believing statements on the audible site like “Chances are if you have a mobile audio device, it’s compatible with Audible”. It’s nice that they use software to enforce “honesty” on behalf of their consumers without quite managing it themselves. (They do have a list of compatible devices, but with a statement like that it seems silly to double-check that they support a rapidly expanding mobile OS like Android!)
If you Google “dragon keeper audio book torrent”, you’ll quickly find what you want, in .mp3 format. It seems such a shame that copyright management only harms people trying to deal legally and fairly with the publisher. I don’t think I’ll be attempting to purchase an e-book or audio book any time in the near future. I’m calling my “purchase” of this book a waste of money and leaving it at that. I won’t download the torrent, even though it seems ridiculously unfair. But seriously, do you wonder WHY people pirate things when honest consumers are treated like criminals already?
These are a couple of comics that are true repositories of teh awesome.
- The Oatmeal releases amusing one page comics, including important reference charts such as How to use an apostrophe, Why it’s better to pretend you don’t know anything about computers, and how everything goes to hell in a zombie apolcalypse.
- The second (strip featured above) is XKCD. It’s actually witty and intelligent, with few cheap gags. The author makes fun of Ender’s Game, Portal, and many other wonders.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to change my webhost in a couple of months. It’s silly to avoid blogging because you don’t want to cope with the slow server…
Most people I know won’t have to guess, since I’ve plastered Facebook, Twitter, all my IM statuses with it, but I got a letter saying I’d been accepted for British Citizenship in the post this afternoon. I need to call up Notts county council to arrange my Ceremony ASAP, as if it’s not performed within three months you need to reapply. (Ack!! another £720!?!? how could anyone possibly miss it?)
They even got my name right, after the initial Linacre mixup. I’ll finally have the right name in a passport for the first time since I left NZ and changed my name to Yochannah (from Yohannah, which just looks weird to my eyes nowdays). My Israeli passport doesn’t have my middle name (Joy) in it for some reason. But my British documentation shall have Joy, and shan’t have Linacre. It shall be Correct. Finally.
Next stop: red passport. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I am so so so so so so so so so happy to have my life as I would choose to make it accepted, legally and (prettymuch) irrevocably.
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