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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
My wife and I have been looking on the Net at what sort of temporary work we might do while we’re in England for six months. Obviously we don’t want to work the whole time, and we’ve got rellies to visit and friends to catch up on and places to see. But a few dollars in the hand would help the funds as we go along.
Last night she came across an ad for some group wanting an experienced
rehearsal pianist. I could do this standing on my head, yet it hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility.
We were having a meal with friends last night and one of them suggested looking for work as an ‘extra’ in a film. I had thought of this, and it sounds just up my alley. I’ve done some acting over the years, and seeing the inside of a movie studio, something I’ve always been keen to do, would be great fun
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One of the programs we use at my temporary job is called SAP. You can imagine what the workers claim is its full name. I don’t find it user friendly, though it improves as you get the hang of it. Maybe it’s the way it’s been set up for this particular company, but there are some aspects of it that I find annoying.
The worst feature for me are the reports that you can’t save as you’re working on them. If you don’t complete them in one hop, you’ve had it, and you’ll have to start all over again. What program doesn’t allow for saving data you’ve entered?
And then, in two of the reports, you’re given a choice of up to twenty columns which you can reformat into the order required for that particular report. But wouldn’t you think the program could do that reformatting each time you opened a new file in that report, instead of you having to shift columns into place each time? Surely if a report is called blah-blah-blah123, and it’s always called blah-blah-blah123, then the format should be set. Not with this program
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I’d never heard of Ryanair until my wife started checking out flights on the Net for when we go to the UK. Their current main page advertises fares from one English penny! Good grief. You have to ask, are all their pilots volunteers? Do the customers do their own catering as well as putting their own bags on board? Are there no stewardesses/air flight attendants?
Apparently not. Ryanair started way back in 1985 and, though it’s had some blips on the screen in its career, it’s barely looked back. Okay, it lost £20 million pound in 1990, and the Ryan family (who must have had a bit of cash behind them) invested a further $20 million to keep it afloat. Since then it’s progressed by leaps and bounds, beating the competition at their own game over and over.
I love the comment in their ‘history’ in which they say Ryanair was set up by the Ryan family with a share capital of just £1, and a staff of 25. They launched their first route on a 15-seater Bandeirante aircraft. Ryanair's first cabin crew recruits had to be less than 5ft. 2ins. tall in order to be able to operate in the tiny cabin of the aircraft. Hilarious
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Yesterday was Anzac Day
in New Zealand, which meant we had a day off work. I can remember when I was a child that everything closed up on Anzac Day and one of my family complaining that we all had to sit home doing nothing while the old soldiers went to the RSA rooms and drank themselves silly all day.
Well, things have changed. The old soldiers still go and drink themselves silly – along with their wives – but the rest of us are only ‘confined’ for the morning. In the afternoon everything is back to normal. And if poor old Anzac Day has gone that way, no doubt Good Friday will be next on the agenda – in fact it already is on some people’s agenda.
What is it about people these days? In the past we had whole weekends off, with shops shut completely. Now people seem to get in a panic if the shop is shut for a morning. One of my colleagues at work told me today that they went to the supermarket yesterday afternoon, and it was chocker. It’s the same on the Saturday of Easter weekend. You’d think the shops were closing for a month the way people spend up large
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In the long patch between finishing my old job and trying to find a new one, I considered several ways of working from home. My wife and I thought we might gradually set up a secondhand bookshop in the house; certainly we wouldn’t have to pay rent on the place, and it’s the rent that often kills a business. We would build up an email list of customers, hopefully, and keep alerting them to new stock.
I considered doing people’s accounting, but while I can do bookkeeping, I’m not quite an accountant, and might not have been able to do the job satisfactorily.
I searched the Net constantly for ways to make money, and discovered that there are plenty of ways to make money, but none of them will keep you in anything more than pocket money – and I mean children’s pocket money, not what an adult would call pocket money. Still, I did discover some ways to write for cash, and though the gains are slow, they’re steady, and have been worth doing. Writing posts that include links to business sites is one of the more lucrative ways (if we take the word ‘lucrative’ to mean rather less than its usual meaning) and sites offering opportunities in this area are on the increase. Some are better at doing it than others, some are too restrictive in their approach to the task, and some have already folded for lack of advertisers
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The last week or so I’ve been parking the car not close to work, but about a quarter of an hour’s distance away. This gives me roughly a half an hour’s walk each day, which I’ve been sadly lacking. Normally in the past I would have walked to work each day, again taking about half an hour.
My usual walk last week took me alongside the wharf area, which was great, as the seawater in the harbour is always a delight to walk beside. And the other day there were four boys fishing off the wharf, as boys have done for centuries.
Today I had to go and get a blood test, which meant I had less time to walk. So I parked the car closer than I have been, but in a different area. My office is in an industrial area, as I’ve mentioned before, and by the time I get to work it’s well and truly woken up, with machinery buzzing and clattering and trucks and couriers on the move
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I’m back at desk number two at present, in my temp job. There was some encouragement to take over desk number five, which had just been vacated, but I didn’t want to have my back to another staff member, and anyway, desk number two is in a better spot, with better light.
We’re two staff down in the office at present, and last week I entered data from timesheets until it was coming out my ears. (Whatever that expression actually means.) This was also the result of one of the other staff members being off for two days, so I wound up with two days’ worth of her timesheets as well. One of the other staff said I’d be dreaming about timesheets in my sleep. Nope, I didn’t, but I certainly have dreamt about versions of that office recently. Scary.
On another point, every so often you walk out our office door to go to the other office building around the corner, and discover that a ship has appeared out of nowhere, and is parked, two or three storeys of it, at the end of the street. Okay, it’s in the water, but it’s almost within spitting distance. And occasionally you come across sailors of various nationalities muttering their way up the street towards town. It’s a bit of a hike to the shopping area, and even worse when you’ve got to cart your purchases back again
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I've just been tagged by another blogger on the meme theme of simple things that make you successful, so this particular post is slightly off from the usual topic I deal with on this blog. That's okay. Flexibility is something that makes you successful!
So there we go, my first sttmys is Flexibility. Unfortunately it's not something I've got a lot of. I had a lot more of it when I was young, both physically and generally, but you get less flexible as you get older, I suspect
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It's Good Friday here, so work in the office was done for the week yesterday - and there's a holiday on Monday. I can certainly do with it: don't know when I've felt so tired. Perhaps part of the tiredness factor is that I've really worked at the job this week, because we've been short-staffed. Instead of having time to twiddle my thumbs - something I'm not keen on having to do in any job - I've pretty much had my eight hours filled up. Not filled up in an exciting way, exactly, but filled. Not quite as tediously as someone on a factory line watching items going past in order to catch the odd one that doesn't fit the quality control, but not much more excitingly!
Should I grumble? Probably not. I could play that old game parents used to play at the dinner-table: eat up your vegetables, meat, potatoes, whatever. Think of the starving children in China, Russia, Africa, whatever. My grandmother used to threaten to send my food to them if I didn't eat it. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that the food wouldn't be up to much by the time it reached either China or Russia or Africa, but the trick worked for a while.
Meanwhile, apropos of none of that, I've discovered that myLot, a forum I write on somewhat irregularly, is now including blogs in its many features - in the sense that blog-owners can write in an ask for their blog to be 'fed' to myLot's innumerable discussion participants. So for my benefit, here's the link. This link probably won't take you anywhere, so don't get too fussed about it. But you can also 'be referred' by me to myLot, if you're so inclined, by clicking on here.
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Since I've been in the day job I've had three desks. The first was the desk where the person I was subbing for normally sat, and I had to adjust his chair quite a bit to get comfortable. Plus he had the screen resolution set up in such a way that the text was barely readable.
The second desk was the office junior's, which I took over when she took over someone else's desk - a person who was on sick leave.
This desk was much more roomy, the computer could be read at a decent distance without peering at it, and the chair was...okay. But it was close to the photocopier, and there was a constant bustle around it, which was good
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I’ve now told both my workplaces that my wife and I have decided to go to the UK for six months, from early June. We came to the conclusion that this would be a worthwhile thing for us to do independently, since we’ve been so unsettled since I resigned from my job over six months ago. And have had nothing permanent come along since.
Of course, as soon as I told my day-time job boss that I’d be leaving in June, he tells me he was going to offer me a full-time job. What’s with the ironies, huh?
I asked him later if he’d consider me for work when I got back, now that he knows who I am and how well I work. He couldn’t promise anything, but said it was worth a phone call. Whether I want to go back there or not is another thing, but it’s possible beggars can’t be choosers
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A last few pointers from Justin Daniel on the subject of keywords.
Firstly, something that you’d think would be obvious, but not everyone will do it. We’re often busy putting our keywords in the places that we think spiders will pick up, such as the meta tags, that we forget to put them in the actual content of the page. Again, a couple of times may be more than adequate. Spiders, like humans, don’t like to be hammered over the head with the same piece of information. (Don’t you hate those ads on tv that go on for a full couple of minute and repeat everything two or three times?)
But there is another computer-focused place to put the keywords, and this is in the alt text of your image file(s). This is often a place people don’t use. I’ve just realised, in fact, that including a more relevant name in the Orble image files would be wise. I’ve been tending to get lazy and put the word that fits the bill and nothing else
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263 Posts dating from December 2006
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rehearsal pianist. I could do this standing on my head, yet it hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility. 
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