Lookee - an update!
LJ appears to be having some major downtime this evening, so it's very likely I'll be posting this the day after I write it ;-P But still...
Stuff and things happen, of course. Hard to say how interesting they are to the observer, since they're rarely very interesting to me...
Anyway. Our resident feline, Myfanwy Dirion, has been back to the vet again with a suspected water infection - thankfully it looks like she was merely reacting to her dry diet of IAMS, which ironically I was feeding her because regular food was giving her the runs. The vet advised that I needed to get her back on wet food stat, and gave me some tablets to hopefully help with her stomach. She seems to be doing okay now, if her tray's any indication, though she's not drinking the water I'm putting down for her so I'm going to keep her follow-up appointment on Friday anyway.
Other than that, she's doing great. She wandered outside briefly last week and didn't take the opportunity to hightail it the hell away from here, though I was nervous and tailing her the whole time - like she was a kitten I was introducing to the Great Outdoors for the first time! :-D There's been many, many times the front door has been open and she's only wandered out once - I think because she wondered why Rowan hadn't come home with me - but it's much harder for her to get outside from the stairwell anyway. She very much likes sleeping in my room, and especially appreciates it when I watch TV in bed; she has a habit of jumping off me in a huff when we're having a cwtch on the sofa of an evening, but for some reason she's not as jealous of the bedroom tv.... :-/
The Council have decided it's time to renew the paint jobs in the hallways, so the walls in the stairwell are all fresh and new again, and our front doors have been repainted too. A somewhat vomit inducing barley yellow.... :-p The decorators who achieved the lowest bid for the contract probably think I'm a right cow, as I got a bit terse with one of them when he was trying to sort out a time to paint the door properly, since it needed to be opened to cover the green coat (which replaced a not so bad blue coat a few years back) and left to dry for a bit. I am just absolutely sick of the assumption that, just because I live in council housing, I don't work for a living and am therefore available to give people access to the flat for the myriad maintenance issues that come up every year. It's not my fault that they knock off at four thirty prompt, and therefore can't arrange to do whatever it is they need to do once I get back from picking Rowan up from school, and I cannot just take time off whenever the hell they ask me to. As it is, I could have three weeks or more to wait for them to come replace the washers in the bathroom sink's taps - I'd do it myself if I knew how the hell you do it! They're those stupid quarter-turn taps that are all the range nowadays and B&Q were no help with finding the right replacements - plus the tap that I think is the main stoptap for the water supply was far too stiff for me to turn *fails at being an independent woman...* So at the moment there's a piece of polystyrene jammed between the spout and the handle, as that seems to be more or less stopping the drip.
Work continues to be equal parts boring as hell and hellishly frustrating. My productivity - the bane of my existence for the last seven years - has been improving this year, and I actually achieved the coveted 10/10 on my score card for February! \O/ This meant I got a little extra in my wages for the first time since they instigated that particular incentive - which, ironically, came into effect the month after I last achieved it, many, many moons ago. This month has been a struggle, but hopefully I can get there. As of yesterday afternoon, when I checked a discrepancy from a previous week with my manager, I was clinging on to 100% by the fingertips and there was only that day, today and tomorrow left to go.
We're about to have another team reshuffle, effective April 11th, due to the reinstatement of a fourth reports team on my department. When I first started there seven years ago - and was only dealing with one particular brand - we had about three e-services teams, one renewals e-services team and a reports team, along with a handful of phones teams. Then they decided that the 'needs of the business' required that we cut down on the e-services side of the Customer Service department and expand the phones side, reducing us down to just a couple of teams doing all the work - with the exception of the renewals side. That got sent to the Renewals department, to be handled by the people taking calls. And those of us dealing with the emails/reports also got forced to cover the phones more and more often over the years, until management suddenly realised that actually? The e-services side was quite vital after all and perhaps they needed to give us more time and staff to do that? *eyeroll*
I shouldn't bitch about it, really, since they've always been good enough to not make me go on the phones. They have tried to push me a little, mentioning speech therapy and everything, but it's only ever been a gentle nudge.
Anyway, I'm being shifted to another team, ostensibly because of my 'experience' though I doubt it. Truth is they always have a bit of a rota nightmare when there's a part timer on the team and my current team has three of us. One of the other part timers is going to a different team too - though she apparently kicked up a right stink when she heard - but the remaining guy is staying put - mainly because he's an arsehole and no-one else wanted him. I'm not happy, 'cause other than having the aforementioned arsehole sat directly opposite me I've been reasonably happy on the team. I'm kinda on the edge of the team, and it was slightly lonely till two staff members who check the work of the newbies came and sat at the empty desks, but I was alright. In fact, the one who sits right next to me is slightly irritating as, lovely though she is, she's quite chatty and very, very stubborn in her opinions. She asks her team mate and myself what we think about various procedural issues, but then argues if she doesn't want to accept our replies. It's very frustrating, and I think they are the reason my productivity has been suffering a little, but I knew there was a desk move imminent so I just put up with it. My new team manager was one of the training team till recently so she's not run a team for quite a while and I'm not sure I particularly like her anyway. She's loud, overbearing, and her boyfriend on the Support team irritates me just as much as my arsehole team mate. I used to be sat across from him before I got evicted from my last desk, and I frequently wanted to swing for him.
Yeah, I'm a fab team member aren't I! ;-) Still, I'm used to these reshuffles and I know there's not much I can do about it other than put up and shut up. I just hope my new manager isn't going to be one of those who are funny about letting staff go off the floor for choir rehearsal - if she is I will cry. Then I will complain very, very loudly.
All this meant that we had to get a hurry on taking the two hour team lunch we won several weeks back, but kept putting off 'cause not everyone was ever present. So we went this afternoon, despite the computer system saying there wasn't enough cover ("Computer Says No" is actually something of a reality in my office....) and had a long lunch in the TGI Fridays in town - who told one of my colleagues when he phoned ahead that no, they were fully booked and could not provide a table for ten.... We walked in and got two tables for five, albeit with separate servers :-p The food was decent, though my chips were disgusting, but I ended up on the same table as arsehole *sigh* Thankfully he was reasonably restrained - probably because we were out in public and his usual sexist, lecherous commentary would not have been ignored the way it normally is in the office.
In better news - assuming you've actually stuck with me long enough to get this far! - the choir continues to be quite a lot of fun and there's lots of good stuff coming up which I will tell all about in due course. We had a gig at the new campus for Newport University the other week, which started off with a flash mob performance of 'Don't Stop Me Now' and ended with a proper performance of 'Proud Mary'. There were even 'celebrities' present - Olympic athletes Jamie Baulch and Christian Malcolm. We're just starting up some new material, and there's a couple of gigs lined up for the summer. Plus Rowan and I look to be joining the Roath Community Chorus down at a community centre near his school on a Saturday morning - they're quite a mature choir, by the looks of them, with a large number of the members being over sixty, but there's still some near my age and they had no objections to having a child in their midst! We went to see them last weekend and they were rehearsing both a Gershwin-esque number and a French classical piece, plus the director told me they're planning on doing The Mikado in the near future! Hopefully it'll work out, even if it does mean sacrificing my Saturday morning lie-in. Oh the hardship! ;-)
Stuff and things happen, of course. Hard to say how interesting they are to the observer, since they're rarely very interesting to me...
Anyway. Our resident feline, Myfanwy Dirion, has been back to the vet again with a suspected water infection - thankfully it looks like she was merely reacting to her dry diet of IAMS, which ironically I was feeding her because regular food was giving her the runs. The vet advised that I needed to get her back on wet food stat, and gave me some tablets to hopefully help with her stomach. She seems to be doing okay now, if her tray's any indication, though she's not drinking the water I'm putting down for her so I'm going to keep her follow-up appointment on Friday anyway.
Other than that, she's doing great. She wandered outside briefly last week and didn't take the opportunity to hightail it the hell away from here, though I was nervous and tailing her the whole time - like she was a kitten I was introducing to the Great Outdoors for the first time! :-D There's been many, many times the front door has been open and she's only wandered out once - I think because she wondered why Rowan hadn't come home with me - but it's much harder for her to get outside from the stairwell anyway. She very much likes sleeping in my room, and especially appreciates it when I watch TV in bed; she has a habit of jumping off me in a huff when we're having a cwtch on the sofa of an evening, but for some reason she's not as jealous of the bedroom tv.... :-/
The Council have decided it's time to renew the paint jobs in the hallways, so the walls in the stairwell are all fresh and new again, and our front doors have been repainted too. A somewhat vomit inducing barley yellow.... :-p The decorators who achieved the lowest bid for the contract probably think I'm a right cow, as I got a bit terse with one of them when he was trying to sort out a time to paint the door properly, since it needed to be opened to cover the green coat (which replaced a not so bad blue coat a few years back) and left to dry for a bit. I am just absolutely sick of the assumption that, just because I live in council housing, I don't work for a living and am therefore available to give people access to the flat for the myriad maintenance issues that come up every year. It's not my fault that they knock off at four thirty prompt, and therefore can't arrange to do whatever it is they need to do once I get back from picking Rowan up from school, and I cannot just take time off whenever the hell they ask me to. As it is, I could have three weeks or more to wait for them to come replace the washers in the bathroom sink's taps - I'd do it myself if I knew how the hell you do it! They're those stupid quarter-turn taps that are all the range nowadays and B&Q were no help with finding the right replacements - plus the tap that I think is the main stoptap for the water supply was far too stiff for me to turn *fails at being an independent woman...* So at the moment there's a piece of polystyrene jammed between the spout and the handle, as that seems to be more or less stopping the drip.
Work continues to be equal parts boring as hell and hellishly frustrating. My productivity - the bane of my existence for the last seven years - has been improving this year, and I actually achieved the coveted 10/10 on my score card for February! \O/ This meant I got a little extra in my wages for the first time since they instigated that particular incentive - which, ironically, came into effect the month after I last achieved it, many, many moons ago. This month has been a struggle, but hopefully I can get there. As of yesterday afternoon, when I checked a discrepancy from a previous week with my manager, I was clinging on to 100% by the fingertips and there was only that day, today and tomorrow left to go.
We're about to have another team reshuffle, effective April 11th, due to the reinstatement of a fourth reports team on my department. When I first started there seven years ago - and was only dealing with one particular brand - we had about three e-services teams, one renewals e-services team and a reports team, along with a handful of phones teams. Then they decided that the 'needs of the business' required that we cut down on the e-services side of the Customer Service department and expand the phones side, reducing us down to just a couple of teams doing all the work - with the exception of the renewals side. That got sent to the Renewals department, to be handled by the people taking calls. And those of us dealing with the emails/reports also got forced to cover the phones more and more often over the years, until management suddenly realised that actually? The e-services side was quite vital after all and perhaps they needed to give us more time and staff to do that? *eyeroll*
I shouldn't bitch about it, really, since they've always been good enough to not make me go on the phones. They have tried to push me a little, mentioning speech therapy and everything, but it's only ever been a gentle nudge.
Anyway, I'm being shifted to another team, ostensibly because of my 'experience' though I doubt it. Truth is they always have a bit of a rota nightmare when there's a part timer on the team and my current team has three of us. One of the other part timers is going to a different team too - though she apparently kicked up a right stink when she heard - but the remaining guy is staying put - mainly because he's an arsehole and no-one else wanted him. I'm not happy, 'cause other than having the aforementioned arsehole sat directly opposite me I've been reasonably happy on the team. I'm kinda on the edge of the team, and it was slightly lonely till two staff members who check the work of the newbies came and sat at the empty desks, but I was alright. In fact, the one who sits right next to me is slightly irritating as, lovely though she is, she's quite chatty and very, very stubborn in her opinions. She asks her team mate and myself what we think about various procedural issues, but then argues if she doesn't want to accept our replies. It's very frustrating, and I think they are the reason my productivity has been suffering a little, but I knew there was a desk move imminent so I just put up with it. My new team manager was one of the training team till recently so she's not run a team for quite a while and I'm not sure I particularly like her anyway. She's loud, overbearing, and her boyfriend on the Support team irritates me just as much as my arsehole team mate. I used to be sat across from him before I got evicted from my last desk, and I frequently wanted to swing for him.
Yeah, I'm a fab team member aren't I! ;-) Still, I'm used to these reshuffles and I know there's not much I can do about it other than put up and shut up. I just hope my new manager isn't going to be one of those who are funny about letting staff go off the floor for choir rehearsal - if she is I will cry. Then I will complain very, very loudly.
All this meant that we had to get a hurry on taking the two hour team lunch we won several weeks back, but kept putting off 'cause not everyone was ever present. So we went this afternoon, despite the computer system saying there wasn't enough cover ("Computer Says No" is actually something of a reality in my office....) and had a long lunch in the TGI Fridays in town - who told one of my colleagues when he phoned ahead that no, they were fully booked and could not provide a table for ten.... We walked in and got two tables for five, albeit with separate servers :-p The food was decent, though my chips were disgusting, but I ended up on the same table as arsehole *sigh* Thankfully he was reasonably restrained - probably because we were out in public and his usual sexist, lecherous commentary would not have been ignored the way it normally is in the office.
In better news - assuming you've actually stuck with me long enough to get this far! - the choir continues to be quite a lot of fun and there's lots of good stuff coming up which I will tell all about in due course. We had a gig at the new campus for Newport University the other week, which started off with a flash mob performance of 'Don't Stop Me Now' and ended with a proper performance of 'Proud Mary'. There were even 'celebrities' present - Olympic athletes Jamie Baulch and Christian Malcolm. We're just starting up some new material, and there's a couple of gigs lined up for the summer. Plus Rowan and I look to be joining the Roath Community Chorus down at a community centre near his school on a Saturday morning - they're quite a mature choir, by the looks of them, with a large number of the members being over sixty, but there's still some near my age and they had no objections to having a child in their midst! We went to see them last weekend and they were rehearsing both a Gershwin-esque number and a French classical piece, plus the director told me they're planning on doing The Mikado in the near future! Hopefully it'll work out, even if it does mean sacrificing my Saturday morning lie-in. Oh the hardship! ;-)