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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.[ August 2007 ] [ October 2007 ]
Work Report - September 2007Smoothies - mark twoSeptember 30th 2007 14:28
 Just came across a post on another blog where they writer gives several good reasons why smoothies are a healthy ‘snack’. Not sure that I’d call them a snack – more like a drink to me (and a good alternative to coffee, that’s for sure). She lists the following as good reasons to make smoothies (perhaps this is a good basis for the marketing side
 CruisingSeptember 29th 2007 12:24
I think if I ever take a long holiday again I think I’ll have a go at working on a cruise ship. Not as a steward or room service person, since they seem to work incredible hours and never really have any time off.
I’ve just been reading on a blog how someone has successfully worked like on a cruise ship and spent quite a bit of time in the ports whenever they stopped. This girl worked as a theatre technician, which means that she had quite a bit of free time, but there are other roles in the entertaining area that also leave plenty of free time. People like dancers and musicians work fairly normal hours, though apparently the competition is stiff for the positions available. For those without artistic talents there are jobs looking after children on board, or working in the retail area (shops are closed whenever the ship docks). Jobs that take up more time, apparently, are those done by photographers, casino employees, activities staff, waiters, cooks and people working in the spa
Reading religiouslySeptember 28th 2007 21:23
I’ve been reading religiously through my stats book (Statistics for Dummies) since I bought it in Borders a few weeks ago. When I say religiously, that’s maybe not the best word; spasmodically might be better. That’s because I’ve been tenting for the last two and a bit weeks – have I mentioned this? (!) – and reading by the light of a lamp in a tent ain’t so easy. Plus, now that I’m back in a real house with a real computer working on real broadband I’m more inclined to blog and not read.
But I’ll have to get into the book and finish it, because I’ll need to be a bit more up with the play  All that by way of introduction to the fact that I’m discovering I’m not a total dummy when it comes to stats. I already know a few things, already realise that many stats are badly organised and presented, and that you need to read between the lines. Now I just need to read the rest of the book
Surfeit of Books?September 28th 2007 14:29
I think I’ve left behind me the idea that I’ll be working with books again. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I miss knowing what’s new in the book scene – and you realise just how much ahead of everyone else you are as a result of working in it – but equally now, when I go into a Christian bookshop, I find I don’t enjoy the experience. It’s like I’ve been eating icecream for too long, and can’t face the thought of any more at present.
Too much of any good thing eventually destroys the palate. It’s a great pity, but you become  So I’ll have to just discover new books like most people do: by accident. Okay, I’ll miss out on some things I would have found otherwise, and maybe that’ll matter. Probably not. But hopefully I’ll get back to enjoying books again. At present I find it very hard to pick up a book with a Christian theme without feeling as though I’ve read it all before
The craze spreads!September 27th 2007 20:17
One of my grandchildren in NZ introduced me to High School Musical not long before we left for our trip to the UK. Introduced me inadvertently, I suppose, since I had no choice but to watch the thing – which she’d already watched umpteen times, and knew all the songs, and dance routines. (Some of which she could imitate.)
And now of course, High School Musical 2 is available on DVD – my great-niece here in England already has a copy. What a phenomenon. You have to wonder a bit at why it’s so popular. It’s fairly cheesy, the songs aren’t great, the story is all over the place, the characters are stereotypes – and it was probably made on a shoe-string budget as a piece of tv filler. Yet somehow it took off
Driving WearinessSeptember 27th 2007 20:01
We’ve done more driving in England than we’ve ever done in NZ, I would think. To get from A to B in NZ, especially in our city of Dunedin, you just get in the car, and ten minutes you’re there, give or take a couple of minutes.
Here in the UK, even from our ‘base camp’ as I call it, it takes at least a quarter of an hour to get to the next relative, maybe ten more minutes to get to the next (if we don’t get lost) and at least twenty-five to get to the nearest major city (Norwich, in this case). When we went camping recently, we drove more in the two and a bit weeks we were away than I think I’ve ever driven in my life. We seemed to be on the road constantly, and came home suffering from fatigue in a major sense
More on enamellingSeptember 24th 2007 20:24
Our trip from Kidderminster to Attleborough today went via Corby. We’d been looking on the Net last night in the pub (while a quizmaster with a difficult-to-control giggle read out his questions) at places where enamel materials are sold, and Corby was on the way home.
From the website it looked like a large shop we could browse around in. We finally discovered the place in the midst of one of those industrial estates that seem to be all the rage here in the UK. It was almost overlookable, and seemed closed. Nope, it was open, and consisted of two smallish rooms: an office and a warehouse. There may have been another even smaller room to one side. The proprietor, whose name I’ve forgotten I’m afraid, knew the woman who’d taken us through the basics of enammelling the weekend before last, and was very friendly and helpful. My wife finished up picking her way through a pile of bits and pieces, and came away with plenty to get us started when we go back to NZ, plus a book and a folder of notes
BudgetingSeptember 21st 2007 20:57
When I first started working at the shop as Manager, some 17 years ago, the then Chairman of the Board used to do a monthly budget for me. I used to look at it and think, well, yes, now what? It’s all very well doing a budget, but as the current treasurer of the shop often said, a budget is only a guideline. And of course, you can do better - or much worse - than your budget.
Budgeting in that business was always a difficult thing, I found, because the income was never consistent, and was often below what you needed, and the outgoings for stock were erratic, because you often needed to buy on the spur of the moment, rather than waiting for next month, when you could afford it budget-wise. Maybe I wasn’t the world’s best manager, though I was fairly canny as far as keeping track of the cash was concerned
How to run a caravanning and camping siteSeptember 19th 2007 15:25
 This photo isn't of a camp site I've been to - but it has similarities!
Make sure that everyone has to have a key just to go to the toilet - and has to pay a deposit for said key. Make sure that the hot taps in the wash basins won’t stay on for more than two seconds, and have to be held down in order to keep them flowing. (This is to make it more difficult when the customers are trying to wash their hands
Titanic....again!September 16th 2007 20:05
I read a book some time ago about James Cameron, the director of The Abyss, Terminator and Titanic - among other movies. It gives a fascinating insight into the determination of the man, his phenomenal hardworking nature, and his unwillingness to give way when being hounded by the producers and the people who are putting their money into his movies. This was particularly the case in the making of Titanic - a movie which I’m afraid I think is highly overrated. It has a weak script as far as the characters are concerned, and waiting around for two hours for the ship to go down (and most of the characters to get killed) is a bit like waiting for something to happen in an even worse movie: Pearl Harbour. Yet Titanic remains a movie that millions of people watch over and over again - for the love story! I find this rather incredible, as it’s not a particularly well constructed love story, and without the talents of Di Caprio and Winslet, would hardly have come off.
Anyway all that by way of introduction to something I just came across on the Net: at Branson, the Live Music Capital of the World as they say there, a museum has been built which focuses on the Titanic. The exterior is a half-sized replica of the original ship, and inside is a faithful reproduction of the grand staircase, as well as many other features of the ship. Photographs abound, and each person coming into the museum receives a boarding pass with the name of one of the original passengers (which means, presumably, they won’t get boarding passes for most of the characters in the movie!). There are  It’s a curious thing about the Titanic. It’s not the greatest shipping disaster in recent history, yet it remains the one that most people think of when they talk about such things. What makes it such an archetypical event in our history? Why is it that one shipwreck is constantly retold, and many others are forgotten, even though in terms of human tragedy there’s little difference? Why do we latch onto some disasters, as though they somehow represented all disasters of that type, and ignore others? I’d love to know
How to put up a tent - or twoSeptember 16th 2007 19:05
Since we’ve started our three weeks or so of tenting, we’ve had to learn how to put up two different tents. The one we began with, which we borrowed from our nephew, is a small tent that you can’t stand up in. Being two people who can get discounts because of their age at the camping sites, we didn’t find crawling around on our hands and knees that exciting, nor trying to fight our way out of the tent in the middle of the night, nor trying to get dressed sitting down.
So we bought another tent (which means our poor little Peugeot is carrying all the gear associated with two tents around on its back seats now). This one is stand-uppable-in, and that makes a huge amount of difference. It’s also larger all round, so there’s more room for the endless amount of gear we seem to have to bring when camping. (Or when going anywhere, for that matter.) Putting up the first tent wasn’t too drastic, and apart from a few sharp words between me and the good lady, we managed it without disaster. The second tent is more complicated, although the principles involved are the same. It just requires living with a few moments of suspense when you try to hold up two diagonal poles simultaneously, while trying to plug the fourth hook into the end of one of them. Beyond that it’s full of little hooks and eyes (or the tent equivalent of them) and in general is pretty easy to erect. Our first attempt at erecting it took what felt like two hours. Today, in spite of a blustery wind that threatened to carry the tent and the two near pensioners away with it, we got it up in about half an hour. (One good thing about having lots of stuff is that hopefully it’ll all hold the tent in place if the wind gets any worse.) By the time we’re finished camping we should be able to throw the thing out of the bag, toss it on the ground, give a few flicks of the wrist, and it’ll be standing
AbstinenceSeptember 15th 2007 20:01
While we’ve been staying in the hotel in Lichfield, I’ve been reading The Independent newspaper - because the hotel offers it free each day. It’s an interesting paper, similar to The Times, and with heaps of reading. I don’t know that I’d get through a single issue in a week, let alone a day.
Amongst the wealth of reading matter there was an interesting letter in The Independent by someone who worked in drug rehabilitation for a number of years. He stated that the current use of methadone as a way to help addicts isn’t a solution; all it does is shift their dependence. This person, and a number of others in the know, maintain that abstinence is the only long-term solution, but abstinence is not considered the way to go for many funders of addiction programs. Like abstinence as a solution for teenage sexual behaviour, it’s not considered ‘appropriate’ for people in the 21st century
Enamelling (LINK)September 15th 2007 17:50
Our long-awaited trip to the Curborough Craft Centre near Lichfield took place today. We’d booked in to do a one-day course in enamelling some time ago, and had been looking forward to it for ages. However, by the time we arrived at the Centre today, both of us were feeling a little nervous, not quite knowing whether we’d do very well at the craft.
As it was, we flew through the hours, thoroughly enjoying ourselves. Enamelling - at least basic enamelling - is something most people could pick up quickly, and we came away feeling very good about what we’d learned and achieved. The basics are straightforward, and only require that you keep your wits about you. But once you’re past that point, the world’s your oyster in terms of what you can do. It’s a very adaptable craft, full of techniques, and still developing after more than two thousand years
Lacking the EnergySeptember 14th 2007 19:50
One of the things we never got round to doing after my mother died was to send out thank you notes to the people who’d sent us cards. I’m sure I should have been more organised about keeping track of the cards - and normally I would have been - but in the circumstances I just couldn’t get up the energy to do anything about it. And to be honest it’s often quite hard to find cards that are reasonably-priced enough to send out to people on such occasions. I know that it can cost a fortune to buy the right sort of cards in any quantities.
We used to have people coming in the shop when I worked there asking for cards for such occasions: they just weren’t available (at least not through the suppliers we had) and we always had to turn people down on this. When I say they weren’t available I’m prevaricating a bit: they were available, but only in packs of six, or ten, and they cost a heap. Which is why we’d stopped stocking those sorts of cards in the first place. It was the same with engagement announcements or wedding invitations. The sort of thing we could provide was always going to add a large sum to the already heavy budget of the Big Day
Drug TestsSeptember 12th 2007 18:47
Something that surprised me when I was working in the last temp job was that they regularly did drug tests on all new staff. I only discovered this when a new office junior joined us, and the other staff were talking (before she arrived) about how she‘d be seeing the staff nurse for a drug test. If I’d stayed on in that job (as was a possibility for a brief hour or so) I too would have had to have taken a drug test. Good grief. What have things come to?
I don’t know whether this is a regular thing with all firms these days, but I guess it’s certainly much more frequent than it used to be. I can’t imagine that I’ll have to take one when I go to my new job in December, but you never know! Well, they won’t find any problems. The only drug I take is for that old man’s problem, the prostate, and I’d be surprised if that’s an issue (for them, I mean, not for me
EnamellingSeptember 9th 2007 21:33
My wife and I are off to Lichfield next weekend to do a one-day course in enamelling. I think it’ll take a good deal more than one day for me to get hold of what enamelling is all about, but time will tell. It’ll be something to do that’s different anyway.
We were originally going to have it up our sleeve as a possible money-making scheme for when I get back home, but with the new job on the horizon, it’s unlikely I’ll be doing it as anything more than a hobby. There are all sorts of use for enamelling, quite apart from the purely decorative arts. Though I guess a lot of enamelling is done in a factory situation rather than by hand, which is what we’ll be focusing on
Starting to deal with StatisticsSeptember 9th 2007 19:50
As part of the job I go back to in December, I’m going to have to deal more with statistics than I have before. In line with this I went to Borders bookshop in Norwich today to see if they had a copy of Statistics for Dummies, and they had at least two. I nearly got a different book but the SfD looked more interestingly laid out. This should give me a bit of a foot up in the world of stats – enough to deal with the sort of material I’m likely to encounter.
I already have a fairly skeptical view of most of the statistics that get thrown out at us every day, and often look at them with a quizzical eye, wondering whether the writers have actually the information right, or whether the researchers did their job accurately. Apropos of this, I was just reading a report on the number of car accidents that happen in the wider New York City area every year. It said: In 2005, there were more than 225,000 motor vehicle accidents resulting in more than 1,300 traffic fatalities in the state of New York. 
Leading a disciplined life....or notSeptember 9th 2007 07:40
One thing I find about this long holiday is that I’ve become so undisciplined. Thinking about planning ahead as to where we’re going next and even doing some of the day to day things all require extra effort. Maybe they always did, and the holiday is just highlighting that!
When our children were young I would get up at six each morning to spend some time reading my Bible, praying, thinking about life and so on. At seven I’d rouse the children (and my wife) and get everyone moving. We had to be out of the house by eight in the later years to get the older children to school on the other side of town. Most nights I’d be in bed by 10.30. But in the last couple of years or so, with no children in the house and no need to rush so much, getting up in the morning has been very variable. There’s barely been a routine, and often I’m late to bed which makes things worse the next morning. You could say that the discipline years are having a rest, and that life doesn’t need to be the same forever. Yes, that’s fair enough. But certain things – for me – need to be more focused, and that’s not happening at all
Working by the waterSeptember 8th 2007 20:22
While traveling from Luxembourg this morning and into Germany to the Frankfurt Hahn airport, we passed through a town called Bernkastle-Kues. It has this double-barrel name because part of the town was on one side of the Mosel and part on the other. A
 But the interesting thing was that the level of the water was only a few feet from the upper levels of the banks. It wouldn’t take much for the Mosel to build up strength and take over the town. It may have done it in the past. Yet in spite of the possibility of flooding, waterfront places have something that appeals to human beings – in all sorts of parts of the world, from South Carolina to NC waterfront property is highly sought after, from Dunedin to Auckland, from the Thames to the Tyne
The New JobSeptember 4th 2007 22:11
I haven’t talked about the job that I’m going back to much yet, partly because I’m not entirely sure what it entails. However, so far I know that it’s partly an admin job in a small office (a Christian Missions Resource Centre), and partly a job that involves taking statistics and using them to produce reports relevant to the office’s work, and it’s partly a job with scope for creativity, because the office aims to produce some written material on the work they’re doing and to create power points and such. (May even be able to make use of my recently-discovered understandings of podcasting!)
If all that sounds vague that’s because it is. However, in my head I have a pretty good idea of what’s involved because I already know the people who work there and the sort of thing they do. The job had been discussed with me before we left New Zealand to come on holiday, when it was still just a possibility. I recently had a very detailed email which gives me a good deal of insight into what’s involved, and then I’ve had a long phone discussion (via our friends at Skype) which also helped to clarify things further. No doubt in due course I’ll be able to set down the details - for my own benefit at least - and when I start the job (as soon as I get back pretty much) I’ll be able to see what gives in a hands-on way
Getting LitSeptember 4th 2007 21:36
One of the jobs I have to do occasionally - or at least someone in our family has to do - is replace the outdoor lighting. Outdoor lighting might make it sound a bit grander than it is. In fact it consists of one single bulb in a shade that’s stuck on the front corner of the house. Fortunately, because we forget to put it on most of the time, it doesn’t blow very often, but when it does it’s a major task to replace it. Well, ‘major’ in my terms of the things I find enjoyable or not. And if the truth be told, I think it was my daughter who changed the bulb last time anyway!
 One of these days we’ll probably improve the light out there; perhaps get something that looks more like the photo on the right, something with a bit of style to it. Whatever we do, I’ll make sure it’s easy to change the bulb, and doesn’t require getting out an extension ladder to do so.
More on Paid PostsSeptember 3rd 2007 20:30
Rather to my surprise, I haven’t written about payu2blog on this site as a place where you can earn money for doing a paid post - or blog advertising, as some call it.
I’ve been writing for this site for some time, and find them top class in every way. They began by emailing you your assignments - it seems only a few months ago. But then they got their site up and running, and though it loads up a bit slowly, it works, and your assignments come through ready-made at a reasonable rate of knots, and they pay you within a week. What more could you want from a paid post company? None of the waiting around that some other companies insist on - like payperpost, who make you wait a whole month before they pay you. (And their site is even slower to load up, in spite of all the fuss they make about themselves
HobbiesSeptember 2nd 2007 21:24
One of the hobbies my wife hasn’t got into is welding, though I can’t say she hasn’t been tempted. For this reason, I’m not going to mention the plasma cutter I’ve just seen advertised on the Net, or she may just decide to go online and buy one.
I hadn’t heard of a plasma cutter until today, and if I didn’t already have a job to go back to when I finish my holiday, (more about that in a later post) I might wonder if this wasn’t a sign to think about becoming a plasma cutting person. Sounds like a wonderful mix of technology and good old fashion grunty-type work. Some who know me might say that I don’t have that sort of grunt, and they may be right - but perhaps this is also the time to build up those long-abandoned muscles and return to my home with increased biceps and solid abs
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