Category: Work

Britain, Humor, Linkstorm, London, Weekend, Work, Writing

Friday Links (Frantic Pace Edition)

“We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work”
― Thomas A. Edison

Another busy week, my possums. I’m so grateful to Ruth for getting me out of the house on Wednesday to go to a freelancing event (more on that later), but I was honestly worried I wouldn’t be able to go at first and spent the whole day at a frantic pace to carve out that evening. Ditto for pizza on Monday.

You wouldn’t think it, especially based on last week‘s theatre adventures, but January started off fast and hasn’t slowed down for me at all. I’ve been helping a client with a major rebrand project since mid-December and it’s basically eaten my life. I have tons of personal emails to catch up on that are just piling up, thank you notes still to send for Christmas gifts and letters, and even job hunting (while still very much an active project) has given way to it on the priority list. Since I’m so many hours ahead of the client I’m usually kept up quite late every night, and I’ve started obsessively checking my phone like one of those people I used to poke fun at. Because every time I step two feet away from my flat, a major and highly urgent project arrives in my inbox. Without fail.

It’s a bit stressful, but really rewarding at the same time. All of 2013 seemed to involve being thrown into situation after situation that was completely uncharted territory for me, which I loved even though it frequently intimidated the hell out of me, and 2014 looks to hold more of the same. I never thought I’d be working on some of the projects I am, or have the skills I’ve been able to acquire. I’m still figuring out how to balance competing demands and projects (and occasionally failing to find a balance at all, reduced to eating gummy candy for lunch and working until 2am), and there are still many things I can do much better than I’m currently doing. But I’m learning quick and working hard. So, even though I’m feeling pretty tuckered out from this week, I’m happy as a clam.

Here are your links, tell me what you’ve been up to lately in the comments!

Goodness knows the sports world has a long way to go in respecting and embracing social/gender/cultural inclusion across many groups of people, but I still think this is kind of a cool story.

Fascinating article on how and why people disbelieve what they do.

I’d read this in a heartbeat.

True fandom never dies, I guess. I was a Spice Girls fan myself, unabashedly, but this level of devotion is quite foreign to me. Then again, I’m currently on a Sherlock kick so perhaps I need to judge less harshly.

h/t to Jeff for this commercial about the less glamorous but wholly necessary side of paper. I have a kindle for convenience sake, and I enjoy its many uses, but you will have to pull printed books from my cold dead hands.

Medical science is really just a staggering thing. This will either make some really awful dystopian scenarios come true, or…honestly I’m not sure I can think of an alternative. And I’m the woman who’d be fine with sprinkling the various elements and chemicals into a jar, letting is sit for a few months, and popping the cork on a fully developed infant as a reproductive system.

Etsy shop find of the week. A bit odd, but frankly also a bit adorable.

h/t to my friend Annette who works with refugees in Salt Lake City, patterns of forced migrations since 1975.

How big is your vocabulary?

Kids write the darnedest things.

Photographs of a museum’s collection at night.

Loved this piece from Cup of Jo about living in small spaces. Our flat is bigger, but decorating it is a challenge and I found lots of this helpful.

Seriously. It took a fictional character being denied inheritance rather than actual people?

Speaking of fictional characters…in defense of Ron Weasley! (h/t Savvy)

Holidays, Humor, London, Work

Digging In

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Things that I MUST do today and MAY NOT avoid:

Mail off a bagful of Christmas presents already! (Seriously, how is Christmas only a week away?)
Complete another module in a training program I’m doing for a client.
Drop off an order at the dry cleaners.
Turn a draft of an analytics project into the final product.
Complete January’s content for three clients (and get started on February’s).
Finish my 101 in 1001 list, because it sounds much more interesting than Resolutions.
Start lining up year end tax information – blerg.
Laundry – double blerg.

Time to slap on some seasonal music and stay hydrated! Working from home, glamorous.

Humor, Work

A Conversation With Myself and Other Job Hunters

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
–Winston Churchill

Let’s get confessional, ducklings.

Here’s the horrible, smug truth – I’ve been offered every job I’ve seriously applied for since I was 16. Yes, some of those opportunities came through connections, dumb luck, and even parental urging, but the fact remains that I have been very luckily in work. I know it and acknowledge it. I’ve been grateful for my good fortune, but I’m also now getting to go through a crash course in the program. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

You will get frustrated. Frustration is fine, but it does not entitle you to complain or get cranky. After a lot of frankly easy good fortune, it is no fun at all to come up against disappointment and difficulty, but you will. Deal with it with humor and dignity. Because…

You’re not special. In a place as varied as London, my skills are not unique and I have a lot of competition for positions. It is nothing personal when I don’t get them. On the other hand…

You have something special to offer. Just because I have the same practical skills as the next girl does not mean we combine them and our personality strengths in the same ways. I am a creative problem solver who is good at making existing systems and programs work better and coming up with solutions when issues arise. Someone else will be an organizer who is able to spot new opportunities and exploit them. Someone else will be team leader who is good at finding the right person to fix certain problems. We all could potentially have the same practical skills and work history, but our strengths are different.

You will make stupid mistakes that will make you cringe. A very kind person recently went out of their way to help me on my job hunt. I thought I had sent a thank you note after a meeting and an extremely thoughtful email, only to discover five days later that I might have written it but I hadn’t clearly sent it when they followed up with me. I was badly embarrassed to have made such a rookie error as to not have doubled checked I sent the damn thing before I closed a page! Double check everything, but know you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up too badly when it happens (she says after thunking her head on the desk she felt so stupid), apologize if you can and keep on trucking.

You will feel overwhelmed. I’m effectively trying to make a career change. That means I’m starting from the bottom in a new city, on a new continent up against scary smart competition who are both sharp and local. Forget finding opportunities, I’m having to locate the sites and forums where opportunities are even posted! I’ve been lucky to have been pointed in some good directions, but it’s still a daunting prospect. It’s fine to feel out of your depth, it generally means you’re trying something foreign.

You will be rejected until you’re not. That’s nearly a 100% failure rate. Know that’s what you’re going into and be ready for it. It makes the word “No,” so much less scary than we often give it credit for. Hearing no, and often hearing nothing, has been less than enjoyable to adjust to, but knowing that it’s going to be the norm makes it much easier to deal with.

Again, it’s not personal. Frankly the people I’m applying to don’t know me, therefore it’s not possible for them to dislike me. Ergo, not choosing me for a position isn’t an insult, a slight, or even an opportunity to be mean or hurt my feelings. It’s just a “No, thank you.”

There are some of the lessons I’ve learned or had to relearn. Minion who have or are job hunting, share your wisdom! What did you figure out about job hunting that you didn’t know before hand?

Humor, Linkstorm, London, Weekend, Work

Friday Links (Settling In Edition)

“Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
― Albert Einstein

The shopping, it must be noted, did provide a great deal of humor as well.
The shopping, it must be noted, did provide a great deal of humor as well.

It’s been a bit touch and go this week as I’ve dived back into freelancing with the temporary internet we’re using until our real connection is installed (hopefully) on Monday. Additionally, running errands in a city relying on public transport take considerably longer time to accomplish. There is no popping into a car and running to a store and back in 20 minutes here, you must budget up to two hours to complete such an assignment to properly factor in walking, Tube delays, bus route changes due to unforeseen circumstances, etc. You get your checklist done, but it takes much longer. Throw in the job application process, with all its attendant hopes, fears, and emotional strung-out-ed-ness, and you’ll understand that it’s been a really fun, productive, but rather tiring week.

On the other hand, we are now the proud owners of a microwave and proper duvet, which more or less rounds off the final necessary purchases required for the home. The last time we set up a household, Jeff and I were getting married and were the recipients of a lot of generosity in the guise of both hands on assistance and wedding gifts. We thought we were appropriately grateful at the time, but of course both hindsight and setting things up in another country have taught us we were wrong. We have never been cheap about wedding presents for our friends and family, but we’re going to try and pay it forward even more in the future.

Here are your links, ducklings, and let me know what you’re up to in the comments!

Thoughts? I know many of you here entertain, and I confess I’ve always had an idea of doing so when I became a Real Live Grownup, but is it a dying art?

British weathers doomsayers are abundant and between April and August, every time there is even the tiniest cloudburst, hordes of them will band together miserably and declare, “Well, looks as if Summer is officially over.” They are seldom correct and Summer manages to make it through its designated seasons after all. But I admit a the tips few leaves around here are starting to yellow. Stateside minions are encouraged to enjoy the foliage changing locally.

I do consider myself a connoisseur and a purist in a lot of ways cookie related, but it was kind of interesting to read a food blogger take on the many variations of the chocolate chip cookie.

One of the big stories in London the other week was…this headline.

Fascinating gallery on age an beauty!

We have much to thank this man for.

Tumblr find of the week – hereditary privilege can really take it out of you.

It’s a big weekend here in London, London Fashion Week kicks off (I may wander downtown to see if I can spot any of the action and/or Beautiful People), the London Book Fair is going down, and Jeff and I are going to a show on Saturday.

Home, Humor, Life, Work

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got…

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Hey team, glad so many of your are still with me in spite of the crazy pre-scribbled posts I’ve been putting up (though I hope you have been enjoying the snapshots of local life).

Now, a quick vent. As gorgeous as it is, I understand what various family members have said about it being difficult to live out here. We are a good half hour to and hour away from basic things like grocery stores. And I’m not talking a dash on a suburban road, I’m talking a country two lane-r through the woods without shoulders and usually with at least one moderately size roadkill carcass along the way. Possibly stuck behind a very slow moving tractor.

Picking up my mother’s tasks means that I regularly lose several hours round trip on any given day. I’ve taken on quite a bit of the cooking and cleaning as well, plus I just try to help my family out when I come around to visit because I like doing so. But the most inconvenient thing has been trying to work reliably. It’s ten times harder here to do very basic things than I ever imagined possible.

h49CAD505Headache the first: semi-reliable internet. Back West Jeff and I complained about our internet which was, to be fair, not always good. But compared to here in Virginia it was luxurious! The town in which we live (and we live a good 15-20 minutes away from the center of town itself) is far enough off the beaten path that there is no real infrastructure to connect it up. My parents have to make due with a wifi hotspot creator which is so laughably bad it makes me want to cry. First and foremost it doesn’t hold a charge – for reasons the local service provider can’t explain satisfactorily – and second it only broadcasts a signal for about three minutes before dying – for reasons the local service provider also can’t explain. Dad’s already replaced it once in the month I’ve been here and it hasn’t helped at all.

Headache the second: mobile phone service. Mine vanished last Saturday and has yet to reemerge. Calls to the provider only serve to tell me that they are aware and working on it but can’t give me an estimate when coverage will be restored. Causing a minor panic because even though the internet at home is non-existent, I could still get and respond to work emails from my mobile. It’s been three days without that thing and I swear my blood pressure has spiked as I try to scramble to get work projects done borrowing my father’s mobile between his own calls and needs. I’ve started coming into work with him at 7:30 in the morning and borrowing an unused conference room (with permission of course) just to have a place with an internet connection.

I think my data needs rather perplex my family who by now are used to getting by with much less…but when your job is information gathering, blogging, social media management, and being able to respond quickly, the lack of connectivity is a legitimate terror. It’s barely Tuesday and I feel jittery and stressed trying to accomplish what should be quick and easy tasks that now stretch far longer than they should.

On the other hand, all whining can and should be kept to a minimum. Our visas have been approved and are on their way to us. Jeff flies in a week from today, which is an instant balm to my stress level. Weekends without the internet, though initially vexing, are really quite relaxing. Inconvenient work is a pain, but it won’t kill me. It’s also compelled me to learn some basic blogging skills – such as scheduling posts ahead of time, cheers.

Humor, Linkstorm, Weekend, Work

Friday Links (Working Girl Edition)

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

(via)
(via)

Well beloved minions! It’s my first Friday as a totally self employed woman and do you know – it kinda rocks. I’m still busy beyond belief, I’m still scrambling around, but the projects I’m working on are fantastic, the experience is already leaps and bounds ahead of where I was, and I’m learning all sorts of new programs, ticks, and skills.

The pay is small, the hours irregular, and the projects all completely unrelated. It’s bloody incredible! I should have gone for full time freelancing years ago! I’ve got a couple of clients that I’m doing virtual assisting for (one of them none other than incredible and incredibly prolific Caitlin Kelly!) doing everything from research, to editing, to press releases, to social media, and now on to professional networking and branding. It’s a brilliant apprenticeship! Once I get all my current projects well handled, I’ll start sending out more pitches of my own and see where I can go.

Here are you links, kittens. Even in the midst of this sea of change you know I’d never forget your need for a little light Friday reading. Let me know what you’re up to this weekend.

In case you haven’t seen it.

Librarians are awesome.

Busy as I am, I know of no one who’s this desperate. Although frankly who knows what our space in London will be like so maybe I need to look into it.

This brings back some mighty fun memories. King Mendenbar for me, please, and Edward Cullen can take a flying leap for all I care. (And with that I’ve lost a significant percentage of my audience…remember this is a safe “team” space, everyone!)

I admit it, I am somewhat conflicted about many Disney films for these very reasons.

Visions of the future from the past.

This made the rounds across media a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t think I shared it anywhere. And it very much needs to be shared.

I was a good kid who didn’t get pregnant, do drugs, or generally mess up. You’re welcome, siblings. (More importantly you’re also welcome, parents.)

Here’s a great article about the role that dance played in women’s liberation in the 1920s – possibly my favorite decade.

One of The Girls works at Colonial Williamsburg, which means I get archeological gossip before it hits the presses (the delights of historical nerdiness!) so I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week. Which is morbidly hilarious because it’s long been established in the courts of historical gossip, to say nothing of the historical record, to be true, but now they have proof, alas for those who have dismissed it as slur and slander all these years! Being an adopted Virginia girl, we learned about the Starving Time in school, but I suspect it’s often left out of other history books. Suffice it to say, looking back, I really do marvel that the US ever materialized, the odds against it at every turn were astronomical.

Humor, Work

Freedom!

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.
~Robert Frost

A pictorial account of my day, thanks to an utterly fictitious account of William Wallace:

Leaving the office:

braveheart_freedom
Huzzah!

Getting home, turning on my computer to view my freelancing and personal task list, which has doubled:

wait
Wait…

The universe:

Condescending Robert the Bruce meme.
Condescending Wonka Robert the Bruce meme.

There’s no rest for the wicked, kittens! (Serious post forthcoming, but first I have stuff to do!)

Humor, Life, Work

There Is No Winding Down

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
― Leonard Bernstein

Three weeks from today will be my first day in nearly five years that I don’t have a full time job. Getting there is equal parts exhausting and frustrating, but strangely not in the least terrifying. I thought I would feel more panic or at least fright about the future, but there’s none of that.

The legal team at J.’s future employment has started the ball rolling for our visas.

We have short term housing worked out.

J. has a current job.

I’m getting braver by the day about diving back into freelancing.

Stress-ZebraStripesAll good things! No, the trouble is not the future, it’s (as it often is) the present. Getting from here to there. The proverbial now.

My trainee is still struggling mightily and there is so much out of my control when it comes to her training. I can’t force people to hold certifications to suit her time frame, I can’t even always get her to commit to the training time I want. I had to arm wrestle with administration to get what I have now, and the whole experience has been an lesson in a lot of energy expended for very little thanks. I may have to post about that next.

Training itself is challenging, and not just because my trainee has very poor retention! She constantly makes little mistakes and errors – from typos to major data storage snafus – that she does not catch herself. I fear even running to the vending machines now because I’ve come back to find her giving a patron majorly incorrect information, and once stopped her from disseminating highly confidential paperwork. She requires constant supervision. Lest you think I’m being too hard on her, these are things she should already have experience with as a dispatcher, it’s not new aspects to her job at all. I can see why they are trying to find her a new position, but I’m surprised they think giving her mine is a way to minimize damage.

It is the end of my semester and my supervisor is truly swamped with trying to get her assignments completed, and so she is not as available for me to address concerns with her. It’s not her fault, but the business culture of my office is (unfortunately) rather dog eat dog and I honestly worry about being blamed for my trainee’s lack of knowledge once I’m gone and no longer able to respond to such criticism. That sort of thing has happened to others in the past and I’m anxious to avoid being another casualty of it.

My new 6:30am drop off time is seriously hurting. I’m in a perpetual state of nearly-but-not-quite sick and due to the way schedules fall out we often don’t get home until after 6 or 7pm at night. At which time we need to cook, clean, and run any number of other errands. Last night I didn’t get dinner on the stove until nearly 9pm – the hour I wanted to be in bed. Speaking of dinner, a diet of pizza and cereal because we have not been able to make it to a grocery store during normal business hours isn’t helping. Dinner was a heavy duty vegetable minestrone to combat fears of scurvy!

Three weeks from today is going to be a good morning! The next 20 days are going to be stressful in the extreme. Perk me up, kittens, bring me your offerings of humorous tidbits, words of wisdom, or even commiseration as I do battle with elusive retailers for the MP and rewrite another section of my manual for my trainee!

Humor, Life, Work

The Monday-est of Mondays

“Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.”
– Author Unknown

Weekend was a blur of family photos, a bit of local activism, and many dinners. For the first time in memory, Sunday dinner at my godparents spread out over three tables (plus one for the kids)! All wonderful but not exactly relaxing. Hence when I stumbled through the office doors this morning at that hated time 6:30am, I didn’t even try to force wakefullness; I just set another alarm and fell haphazardly onto the loan sofa in the department. I awoke an hour later covered in some sort of sofa-fuzz that needed a lint roller to resolve, but refreshed and ready to start the day.

Until our housing management company called and said our previous managers did not properly transfer our deposit so they have no record of our prepayment of this month’s rent. Currently, we’re tracking down four year old bank account information to prove ourselves and liking our former managers less and less by the minute (although to be fair we like the new ones quite a bit. We just wish they’d been our managers to start with as I imagine if they had been we would not currently be having these issues). I spent lunch wheedling information out of some people who did not want to give it to me and chasing information up phone trees like a metaphoric cat. And my trainee forgot every single thing I taught her on Thursday – plus she’s taking two days off next week which is two days of training she won’t get and desperately needs, since I only have 16 days left.

Mondays. I do not recommend them. Pizza for (a late) dinner, I think. Onward.