Category: Work

It’s a thing. See also “Trump” (lots) and “Money” (not so much)

Advent #24 (Again!)

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, Work

There’s a lad at work who spends all Christmas Eve haggling over what time (aka, how early) we can legitimately finish. Some years he doesn’t even wait until Christmas Eve, and starts negotiations the week before. Which of course saves the rest of us having to worry about it – we just wait for him to leave, then shortly afterwards follow suit.

This year, he booked the whole day off as a holiday instead! (Curses!)

It made for a long and ever-so-slightly uncertain day. And, to cut to the chase, in the end it was me who, at about twenty to four, offered my Good Wishes and my Goodbyes, and went – which was probably a relief to one of our engineers whose plans for Christmas Eve involved leaving at five to go Christmas Shopping. If I’ve helped gain him just one extra hour by legitimising a four o’clock departure then it’ll have been a help. I wouldn’t want to be doing ANY shopping on Christmas Eve (especially not present buying). That’s why I’d already asked my wife and/or daughter to pick up some bread and milk.

On the way home I had a message to say they’d done that… followed by another message asking me to pick up some iced tea and dry shampoo, which they had forgotten!

I popped into brother’s on the way – and saw Mum there too, which was a nice surprise. Nice to see brother too, obviously. (But not a surprise (he lives there).) He’d been given a large Christmas cake, and having plied me with a free sample he also provided me with a tub of it to take home.

After which I took my leave (and my cake (and my daughter’s dry shampoo)) and went, finally, driving home for Christmas.

Advent #24

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Work
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I don’t know much about cars. But it’s odd how attuned to the sound of it you get, so that any new noise registers instantly. I always feel on such occasion like Pat Troughton in The Mind Robber: “that noise… that vibration. It’s alien!”  However, since that’s followed almost immediately by the TARDIS exploding into half a dozen pieces, it’s not a very comforting comparison.

Last Thursday there was a new sound from my car, a loud squawk in fact, as if I’d driven over a parrot (I hadn’t – I hadn’t even made one pine for the fjords). A nasty, screechy, graunchy, squawk of a noise.

I was concerned that this would put a serious dent in my Christmas. As a rule I like to be available to drive to friends or family to help deal with any turkey/sweets/Christmas cake they’ve got lying around making the place look untidy. Certainly, there’s usually a lot of driving involved.

One of the advantages of working for an engineering firm (which helps compensate for DISadvantages such as there always being an awful lot of oil to deal with) is that there’s usually somebody who knows something about cars…

…which is why, like a little Christmas miracle, by the end of Monday the car had new brake pads and brake discs and I had a quiet journey home.

It was such a weight off my mind that, although I wouldn’t want to overstate how much I enjoy either pursuit, it was a real pleasure to drive to work on Tuesday.

I’m sure I’ll be similarly pleasured (erm) as I drive to work today – and even more so this afternoon when I drive home again. Because that will be me and work done until January.

To be honest, I’m looking forward to the brake break.

Advent #20

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Family, Work
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My Dad recently made the point, although more eloquently than I’ve time to expand on here, that he doesn’t really want or need anything for Christmas.

My Grandpa once made the same point (although we ignored him) as did my father-in-law on many occasions (we ignored him too) – and for that matter, the past couple of years I’ve said the same thing myself. (But have been ignored.)

I certainly don’t feel that I need anything. My Mum, I suspect, may worry that I need more shoes. I’ve only got two feet – slightly above average, but even so there’s a limit to how many I can wear. Meanwhile my wife seems to be obsessed with my underwear—

No, I just mean she keeps looking at my pants—

Oh dear, I should have said, sometimes she rummages in my drawers–

>ahem< My wife, to clarify, has formed the opinion that I could do with some new undergarments in the rotation. I disagree. (As in, I think I have plenty – not as in, I disagree with the principle of undergarments.)

I actually said last year (just prior to being ignored probably) that if I went through the whole of Christmas Day without getting any presents it genuinely wouldn’t bother me. That’s not to say I don’t like presents, far from it. But what I really enjoy is the break from the normal routine.

I don’t work over Christmas, but we do stay open, because after two days off my boss says he’s bored with nothing to do. Personally, even away from work I can usually find something to do – plus there’s the luxury of time at Christmas to be able to do a bit of nothing inbetween all the somethings.

As for Dad, and buying Christmas presents…

Obviously we’ve ignored him. (Sorry.) 

Advent #18

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Doctor Who, Weather, Work

Having survived the past week of sub-zero temperatures, when the mercury dropped and the red light on the electric meter was flashing like the strobe at an illegal rave; today, with the weather a good deal milder, I’ve come down with something. As a result I’ve had to pace myself – which mainly means I stopped halfway through the ironing for a snack and a nap. After all, the last thing I want to do is be ill over Christmas.

I can only remember being ill at Christmas once, in 2010, when I woke on Christmas Day feeling achey and cold and not keen on going anywhere without a duvet. Luckily I rallied mid-morning enough to cook lunch and, more importantly, eat it. But as the afternoon wore on I relapsed, ending up shivering on the settee distinctly lacking in Christmas cheer.

By the evening the crowd had thinned, to the point where by the time Doctor Who was on there was just the two of us – me huddled on the settee wishing I could regenerate; and bruv, who I presume had spent the afternoon identifying the optimum seating position where he could be as near the TV but as far away from me as possible.

When I woke on Boxing Day, as is often the case after a good night’s sleep I felt much better – certainly much more lucid. My recollection of the night before was of frozen ladies, flying sharks, and marrying Marilyn Monroe. In the days of Morecambe & Wise or Only Fools I would have known at once those were solely the invention of a fever – with Doctor Who, more of a 50/50 chance. What else could a boy do? I watched the Christmas special for a second time over breakfast.

Just to be sure.

Advent #8

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Doctor Who, Work

At work today one of our customers brought in a large box of chocolates, cakes, and oranges so fresh they still had the leaves on them. It was a token of appreciation for the past year, a kind thought.

Despite being short and thin, I am very much like a one-man plague of locusts when it comes to sweets, chocolates, and the like – so I wasn’t entirely convinced when my colleague opined that these would probably last us into the New Year. He’s far more sensible than me (just as well, really) and proposed that we should ‘ration’ everyone to one item a day, to ensure fair play. We all agreed that was a good idea. And then, he left the box in the office. With me. Alone.

Prepare for your jaw to drop when I tell you, I didn’t break that trust. I resisted the temptation, even though I could hear the siren song of a Crunchie bar calling to me.

When I got home, my Christmas present had arrived. It was just sitting there on the table. I knew exactly what it was, it wasn’t shrouded in mystery or anything – but it WAS still shrouded in the cardboard envelope that His Majesty’s Video sent it in. I’m bound to mention it again before the month is out, so for now suffice to say it was a boxset with a lovely picture of William Hartnell on the front, and a dozen episodes of red-hot (well, black & white hot) Dalek action inside.

My wife said I could have it early, and I must admit I was tempted. But it felt wrong and so, for the second time today, I did the right thing. No, I said bravely, lead me not into  temptation.

Get thee behind me, Santa.   

Advent #14

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Christmas, Work

The weeks leading up to Christmas are a mixed bag at work. On the one hand, there’s the temptation to slip into ‘wind-down’ mode, the grown-up equivalent of bringing in games and eating jelly. But there’s also the big push to get everything finished up properly before the break.

One of my usual December jobs is to put together a leaflet to all our customers wishing them a Merry Christmas – although since it’s sent out with the latest round of bills, there’s arguably a bit of mixed messaging going on. (There’s also some info on tractors we have for sale in case anybody gets some money for Christmas and doesn’t know what to spend it on).

My artistic style (if you’ll allow me to use both those words incorrectly) tends to the ‘less is more’ school, so this year’s first stab only stretched as far as three pale-looking Christmas trees and the outline of a sledge.

After a first review my boss managed to haggle me into a flurry of snowflake silhouettes. I can’t really see her living in fear of me having an easily-offended artistic temperament, so there’s no real reason for the softly-softly approach – but only after several drafts was there the tactful observation that although silhouettes may be arty the style is perhaps better suited to Halloween than Christmas.

In other words, the brief was to “tinsel it up” – which I now have, adding a green tree, bright red, blue and gold baubles, a pile of presents, and to top it off strings of paper-chains above the company logo. I think the negotiations are almost finished now (bar the possible addition of a couple of twinkling stars and perhaps a snowman in the morning).

I hope so – then I can get back to the Ker-Plunk tournament…  

Within These Walls

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in The C-Word, Work

I’ve been sent home from work!

I was sent home from school once, when the nit nurse told me and my little friends that we had to leave. And over the years I’ve left work unexpectedly for many reasons: accident, power cut, redundancy, childbirth. (Is it me, or did I go a bit ‘Tom Baker’s speech in The Ark of Space’ there?)

But it’s none of those this time (especially not childbirth!) It is of course the dreaded virus.

I don’t have it, I hasten to add before you leap the statutory two metres back from your computer screens – but after Monday’s blunt “work from home if it is at all possible” speech from number ten I went into the office on Tuesday morning to be told that it is (possible).

I needed a little bit of training on how to access work’s computer from home, but luckily my colleague is much, much smarter than me on that score, clever enough that he could talk an idiot through it in five minutes – and so five minutes later, with a big wad of paperwork under my arm, I left. I have to admit, I felt unexpectedly emotional as I drove slowly back down the road with Let It Be echoing in my ears. (They were playing it on the radio you understand, my colleagues didn’t spontaneously pipe me off with a haunting acappella version).

I’ve never worked from home before, but I knew instinctively that in order to avoid it becoming an excuse to be lazy (and I don’t always need that good of an excuse, frankly) I would need to establish a clear schedule for myself.

At the risk of sounding smug, in just a few days I think I’ve settled into a pretty strong routine. First thing in the morning I check for new emails in my dressing-gown (yes I know, strange place to have… well, you can see where that’s going). Then there’s the board-meeting with the dogs. Following a bit of spreadsheet jiggery-pokery (because frankly, who doesn’t love a spreadsheet) it’s time for the lunchtime video-conferencing with my colleagues in Erinsborough and Weatherfield. And, well, before you know it, it’s time to clock off and have tea.

I jest of course (well, mainly) and in fact it is taking a bit of adjusting to. The flipside of the modern technology that enables me to be working from home is a partly-irrational sense of being constantly ‘visible’. There isn’t a webcam or a phone tracker logging my every move; I’m not expecting to get my payslip next month with a huge chuck of time deducted for every time I’ve walked over to the biscuit tin; and frankly, lockdown or not, I’m not convinced my boss would have ever suggested I work from home if he didn’t think I’d actually do any work. But at the same time, there’s a constant sense of needing to demonstrate that I am taking the instruction to work at home seriously, and not just interpreting it as meaning ‘Upstairs Downstairs marathon’.

Despite that, though, I suspect the usual distinction between home and work time will become blurred for the duration. As a rule it’s clearly defined by the ten mile journey between the two but now that’s meaningless. I don’t normally work Fridays (I know that sounds a bit like the old “How many people work here?” “About half of them” joke; what I mean is, I don’t normally go to work on a Friday) but today I’ve been able to do just an hour in the morning and another hour late this afternoon. In the normal course of events that would be impossible, unless I swanned in partway through the day in an “It’s only Sonia!” kind of way. Keying in or crunching numbers, even replying to emails, doesn’t actually require office hours, or even daylight – and I suspect I may end up doing an hour or two in the evenings instead.

Frankly I could stay up till 1am and do all my work then couldn’t I – I mean, it’s not like I need to get up to go to work in the morning!!

Keep safe. X

Hooray, Hooray, It’s A Holi-Holi-day

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Friends, Moaning, Money, Pets, Work

I’m on holiday.

Not in a ‘by the pool, excuse the slow typing because I’m holding a pina colada in the other hand’ kind of way. More in a ‘days to use up and rapidly running out of year’ sort of way.

I rather struggle with holidays. In the normal course of events I’m constantly battling with  my instinct towards laziness, but ironically, when I’m actually given licence to be lazy (this isn’t an official licence you understand, I’m not getting it on direct debit or anything) it’s just… Well, it’s too much of a good thing, is what it is.

Maybe I just get bored easily. The start of the day is OK, I can easily pass a leisurely, be-dressing gown-ed breakfast while watching, say, an episode of Friends (I’m now into the final run, and Ross is fine) or some more of The Crown. After that I tend to mooch rather than rush through my bathroom shenanigans before finally getting around to walking the dogs who, long before this point, have rumbled that I’m obviously not going to work.

But when all that’s done and out of the way, and the rest of the day lies open before me, a blank canvas, world’s my oyster, blah blah blah… At that point I feel I really ought to be doing something.

And of course, there’s always plenty to do – cars to wash and windows to clean and ironing to, erm, iron and… Well, there’s an unquantifiable amount of plenty I could be doing; but that makes my time off feels like a wasted opportunity, like I’m fundamentally missing the point if I’m just going to dig out the hoover or scrub something.

I realise, to be fair, that I may be overlooking the obvious in simply BEING on holiday rather than GOING on holiday. And yet, it would just never occur to me that I could get on a plane and fly away from the road where the cars never stop going through the night to a life where I can watch the sun set and–  

No, hold on, I’ve come over a bit Dido there. We don’t live by a road where cars keep on going through the night (the occasional tractor, yes, but not cars) and if I was all that keen on sunsets, there’s one every night just behind the garage block outside our front door.

Nevertheless, slightly-outdated pop cultural references aside, the general point is correct. At least, I think it is, I’m going to have to put down my pina colada and just cast my eye back over the previous couple of paragraphs, just hold on a tic. I realise, overlooking the obvious, capital letters, sunset, tractor…

Yes, yes the general point is correct – which is that I don’t in any way associate ‘being on holiday’ with ‘going away’. Frankly, the heady mix of three dogs, five cats and just the one income has sort of seen to that over the years.

But then, the truth is I’m not really a ‘lying by the pool’ sort of person anyway –  nor a ‘scaling Ben Nevis’ sort either. Maybe what it boils down to is that I’m like Margo in The Good Life, and that I simply don’t know how to enjoy myself.

Some people can, they can switch off from the normal routine, the workaday treadmill, and step away (or fly away) and throw themselves into… well, into whatever it is they do when they’re on holiday. It’s a state of mind, an attitude that seems easy and natural but which I have to conclude, can be very difficult to reach.

Wish I was there.

Photographic Memories

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Carlisle, Childhood, Friends, Work

We had our photo taken at work this week.

I won’t bore you with the details, it was simply a group shot for Facebook purposes, but my main takeaway from the finished picture was the sheer amount of forehead I have these days. Fortunately my wife was at hand with a comforting word: “How could you not know?!” she said.

Inevitably, it reminded me of the last time I featured in a work photograph. When that particular company closed down a few years later, simply on the basis of being the last man standing I ended up with about twenty odd copies of the finished picture. I still have them, hoping that somebody in it will one day become a huge superstar and I’ll be able to make a small fortune selling ‘before they were famous’ pictures on eBay.

The same is true of the ‘class of 87’ photo taken during our last term at secondary school. You would have thought that, with close to a hundred and fifty people in it, somebody surely would have made it big? And yet… Well, it’s now close to thirty-two years since it was taken, so it seems increasingly unlikely.

Mind you, it’s entirely possible that it’s already happened and I just haven’t realised it. I could probably name everybody in that work photo (I mean blimey, it was only taken last Tuesday!) but I would struggle now to put a name to more than a handful of the faces in that school group.

Conversely, though, there are photographs where I can still name everyone, even after forty years. Somewhere in one of my parents’ many photo albums is a picture of half a dozen of us from Primary School, all woollen jumpers, short trousers, and gappy teeth. Robert Campbell is in it, so is Melanie Harper. So am I.

I don’t actually remember the picture being taken I’ll admit – but I do remember the occasion, which was a prize presentation to our group at the local CoOp. We got the afternoon off school for it, and since I know we were in Mrs Lamb’s class at the time that pins it down to 1979. I also remember that whatever prize money I got (possibly a postal order) was very soon spent on a Han Solo action figure. (It was the second version, fact fans, the one with the larger head, and the one which my brother subsequently held too close to the gas fire, meaning that the Corellian scoundrel forever after sported two unsightly melted sections on his cranium. (Although at least he didn’t have a huge mountain of forehead to contend with.))

I don’t know whether it’s something unique to the memories of childhood or if it’s just that, personally, I preferred it, but I’m confident I could still name most if not all of the pupils in my class at Primary School; as opposed to not being able to name very many at all of the crowd from Secondary School (not even the (possibly) really famous ones).

Our last ever day at Primary School, although there were some games, mainly involved a lot of ‘end of term housekeeping’ and our teacher of the time (with no apparent regard either for posterity or for recycling) made us all throw our exercise books into the huge wheeled bins at the back of the school.

With that simple act, alas, I lost forever the details of the slimy, slithering constructions  of a far-distant alien world. Trashed along with it was ‘the history of a house’ through two wars. And I’ll never be able to check just how I managed to fill a whole page on the uninspiring topic of ‘a World without Oil’.

But amid all the cultural vandalism, there was a pause where we posed for a class photo, altogether on the climbing frame, just a few hours before it dawned on me (rather late in the day, I’ll admit) that I probably wouldn’t see any of those friends ever again – which has indeed turned out to be the case.

I can remember that too, the moment when that bombshell really hit me.

I bet my face was a picture.

Making Up For Lost Time

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Work, Writing

Never mind the hour last night, I’ve lost a whole day.

Not in a “we’ve all had weekends like that, fnar fnar” sort of way. My ‘lost day’ refers to the fact that I worked on Friday. I admit that’s not tremendously dramatic in itself, other than I normally work a four day week, Monday to Thursday. Even then I’m secretly pining for the brief heady period in 2017 when I was only doing a three day week. (My bank manager is understandably less nostalgic about it.)

This week, however, and as previously advertised, I worked Friday as well – and unexpectedly it’s thrown me off kilter for the entire weekend. ‘Entire weekend’ in this instance is only two days, of course, and it really does feel so much shorter than usual. (As well it might, having been reduced by a whole third.) Just as you start to get into the swing of it, it’s over. Compare and contrast that with my normal routine, where there’s a whole day of prologue before Saturday even arrives.

It’s not much, I suppose, in the scheme of things; and the feeling of a curtailed weekend has probably been accentuated by having time taken up yesterday afternoon in cutting the grass for the first time this year (a chore I hate). And of course there’s the mysterious hour lost overnight. Put all these things together, and this weekend really has had a sense of being more ‘edited highlights’ than ‘full-length feature’.

As a rule, I manage to get in a bit of writing every morning of the weekend, sometimes in the evening as well, and although it only ever comes after a ridiculous amount of evasion (laundry, walking the dogs, idly gazing out of the window, that sort of thing) I do usually end up getting something done.

Somehow, without that initial kick-start of Friday to get things underway, this unusual two-day weekend has not made any headway in that regard – although after an unusually enthusiastic rush of it last weekend I must confess I’d run up against a wall anyway.  I’ve not exactly run out of plot but I have reached a point where I don’t quite know how to bridge the gap between big chunk of plot A and big chunk of plot B. So as it happens a weekend off probably won’t do it any harm.

And I realise that not having Friday to get things going sounds like a really lame excuse, because arguably as regards time it isn’t how much you have, it’s what you do with it that counts. (That sounds vaguely familiar…) Nevertheless there’s just a tiny warning light there, or at least a timely reminder, that for almost twenty-five years, when I did work a five-day week, I hardly did any writing at all.

As John Rowles opined on yesterday’s Pick of the Pops (1968, to save you Wikipediaing it) “If I only had time.” Or, if you prefer, as Sylvester McCoy said of the punishing BBC schedule in the documentary about the making of Silver Nemesis (1988, to ditto) “we didn’t want more money, we wanted more time.”

Next week, as far as I know, it’s back to normal, back to the four day week and the three day weekend. It’s swings and roundabouts of course (as my bank manager would point out). Yes, there’s more weekend (and less stress) with my job now; but there’s also less work and hence less income.

I still wouldn’t want to turn the clock back though.