Tag: work

Off work

Last week I basically hit rock bottom. On Tuesday (one week ago today) I had major problems and was pretty much non-functional and I somehow managed to get through the day without considering anything too drastic.

I’m not going to say anything about the text messages I got.. “Can you just phone us, we need to know something…”. Ill means Ill – not “I just can’t be arsed coming into the office”

I went into work on Wednesday – primarily because I wanted to talk to the HR director about the process for me going off sick.

My Boss works from the US and when he came on line at about 2pm he asked me if I was feeling any better. I said that no I wasn’t. He then said the most amazing thing:

“If you are sick you don’t need to come into work”

Wow – that’s pretty fucking decent of him isn’t it.

“If you are sick you can work from home”

Err WHAT? What the Fuck? If I’m ill I can work from home… well that’s so mighty damned generous of him isn’t it.

By about 3pm I was a wreck and knew I had to take the rest of the week off. Well that went down like a lead balloon I can tell you.

I saw the doc on Thursday (having moved my appointment back by a week) and he signed me off work for 2 weeks and told me to keep my mobile phone turned off . I logged onto my works email account to set and out of office reply and there were quite a few emails demanding that I let them know things.

I ignored them because I knew if I replied to any of them that they’d just snow me under.

So here I am – and I’m feeling a lot better surprisingly It didn’t help that we got a phone call early on Thursday morning letting us know that Kathy’s dad had died on Wednesday night. So Kathy spent most of Thursday getting a flight back to Maine sorted out and I took her down on Saturday morning.

So I’ve been out for too much beer and Vietnamese food on Saturday (Simon’s birthday) and then I fixed Simon’s Internet Connection for him on Sunday and then had a couple of beers as we listened to Señor Coconut and his Orchestra’s take on some Kraftwerk Classics – and until you’ve heard “Showroom Dummies” played in the Latin style you really have no idea what you are missing.

Talking to Simon and Richard and my brother Nick it’s good to know that people out there understand what its like and are all rooting for me to get better soon.

Living in the shed

I’ve not been doing much coding on the Weblogs recently – I’m just too tired. I’ve been on call (3:30am to 9am during the week) alternate weeks for the past year and basically I’ve run out of energy. The alternate weeks was a “short term” requirement after a member of the team at work quit last October, however the management then dithered and the post seemed to vanish so we’ve been a person down on the team for just over a year and there seems to be no real prospect of the person ever being replaced in any meaningful, useful way in the near future, and indeed I found out today that another member of staff has resigned leaving me as the sole UK DBA for the company… Oh Joy and Happiness (NOT!)

I’m hoping that a long break over in Maine will give me chance to recharge my batteries : apart from Thanksgiving we’ve not really got anything planned so hopefully its going to be a relaxing time … well apart from getting involved in planning my step-daughter’s wedding.

As we’ve got cat/house sitters for the duration we are away we tidying up the house a bit – I’ve finally tidied up the book case in the living room by throwing away what looks like a small skip full of old Yellow Pages and Argos catalogues etc. and shuffling a few things around. The computer cupboard sitting in the corner is over powering and we keep having great plans about moving it up stairs… well moving the contents upstairs and into one of the two bedroom cupboards – the one in our bedroom has a power line in it (I know it has because the plumbers cut throught it when they were installing the central heating) and we can easily run a network cable up through where the pipes come down to the radiator (I might even move the coax cable for the TV in our bedroom and use the same route).

Whilst all of this has been going on I’ve noticed that our neighbour seems to go out to his shed late at night and again in the morning. The other day he was in the back garden in his dressing gown… so all I can guess is that he is sleeping in the shed… seems a bit odd but if it cuts down his foul language as he shouts abuse at his kids it can only be a good thing.

Weekend… what weekend

So its the weekend – those two days when you don’t go to work, those two days when you relax and don’t do the things that last week you said you’d do this weekend.

Ahh – if that was only the case.

I headed into work at 6:30am yesterday morning, worked through lunch and got home at about 7:30pm last night.

Then today, Kathy got up early to pop over to Richard and Michelle’s to feed Blackie (Kathy is cat sitting for them for the weekend) and then she went off with Nick, Colin and Linda to move Mintball over to Norbury Junction for some maintenance work.

I had to stay home as I had to work from 11am to 5pm.. OK today I could work from home so at least I got a couple of things done – I actually mowed the lawn which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but at least Sooty won’t get lost in it again.

Talked to one of the neighbours about the houses going up behind us. The builders have ripped out the old GCHQ fence and the concrete covering over the culverted Rymans Brook. On Friday, after the heavy rain, there were several “springs” in what will become the garden of the house behind us.

It seems the concrete and the gravel and the large kerb edging GCHQ had put in place had been put in for a reason and that was to stop the surface run off from the site flooding the houses that we live in. Now there is MORE built up area on there than there was before, hopefully more of the water will go into new drains but……..

Things

Its lunch time – I’m sitting here watching the horses canter round the field and I can see a small group of tourists walking along the top of the Malvern Hills.

Its so much quieter here than in the Birmingham Business Park, the scenery is much better too, and there are several good pubs within a short commute.

So apart from work what have I been doing? Not doing the kitchen renovations if you must know – the disaster that is the window (Thanks a bunch Cheltenham Council for using jerry builders to build the Priors Farm estate) really is a big disincentive. I’ve also been doing some coding on an extension to CanalPlan which should implement social networking, blogging and “tracking”. OK its not going to do all of that to start off with but…

Of course this means me learning how to handle sessions in PHP and interfacing PHP with a Database. Still its all good fun (!).