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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.
I wanted to check out the meaning of sconce online, and came across Dr Johnson’s dictionary, which has the following meaning:
Sconce. A fort, a bulwark, a fortification. The head. Perhaps as being the acropolis or citadel of the body. A pensile candlestick, generally with a looking-glass to reflect the light.
Who would think these days of called a fort a sconce? And it never helps, I find, when a dictionary definition introduces another word you don’t understand. It sends you off on a search that may take all day
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As a minor hobby, I enjoy learning the derivations of words, and playing around with them. (Some readers might remember I almost turned this blog into a word-play blog at one point.)
I find the use of the words check and checking account by the Americans, when they mean, cheque and cheque account, can often be confusing, even though I understand the use of it.
For instance, I misread a sentence that had the words, checking accounts, to mean someone was actually checking the accounts. But what the Yanks mean is an account that’s processed by a check, (or cheque
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One good thing about going home is that we’ll be able to get the treadmill out again. I’ve missed exercising over here in the UK; there just doesn’t seem to be the opportunity (or motivation!). We’ve been swimming a few times, and that’s something I want to get back into as well, and I’ve done a few long walks, but apart from that I feel very stiff, and seem to spend the day sitting – far too much.
I’d like to get started into swimming (aqua-jogging at the very least) as soon as we’ve got over our jet lag. Not sure if my wife will be so keen, but I may have to go on my own if she isn’t!
For a period of my life I was a repetiteur. That’s the fancy name (but also the usual one) for a rehearsal pianist for opera singers. Repetiteurs not only work in rehearsals with the producer of an opera, but also in the earlier stages, when the singers are learning their roles. Some repetiteurs also conduct, both offstage and in the pit. Some go on to be fulltime conductors. Some accompany singers in concerts.
So to be a repetiteur is to work in a many-faceted way.
I was a repetiteur, on and off, for about three or four years. I intended to continue in the job, but things didn’t work out. During my repetiteuring stint, however, I rehearsed with and played for a small group presenting an abbreviated version of La Boheme around small country towns. I then went on to play for four opera singers who presented a 45 minute concert to secondary schools around the country. We might do one, two or three concerts a day – and a great deal of travelling.
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In our house we’ve got rid of all the open fires, but an open fire is something I really miss in the winter. So I was intrigued by something in the ‘what will they think of next’ category called Oriflamme fire tables. They work on the same principle as Urban Fire Glass. This is a special type of coloured glass rubble that ‘burns’ (with the aid of a propane gas pipe) and can be placed in a normal fireplace, or in a specially designed ‘fireplace’ such as an outdoor brick wall with a groove in it for the glass. Though the glass gives off heat, it’s not basically there for that purpose; it’s primarily a decorative feature. Just as the idea of a cosy coal fire conjures up comfort and protection from the cold, so these glass fires do a similar thing with the added bonus of the glass being available in a variety of colours. (You can even mix the colours).
The fire tables work in much the same way. Here a specially designed glass-topped table has a ‘pit’ in it. A design such as Ying/Yang, or a Sun, or a Flower is set in the pit and when the fire burns, it burns in the shape of the design. Again, propane is used.
These are probably not good items to have with small children around – although the fireplace glass can be provided with a glass shield – but with a group of (non-drunk) adults, they’d make a nice addition to the décor
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I’ve just come across a typo in a post on condo hotels that I wrote back in June. I’d written ‘taking too somewhat unrelated items’, when of course I should have written ‘taking two somewhat unrelated items’.
There’s a great tendency to rush when you’re writing posts – and an equally great tendency (on my part, anyway) to forget to proofread your work. I try to discipline myself to do it, but sometimes, if I’m feeling under pressure, I forget.
One of my daughters acts as a proofreader for me, and every so often I get an email pointing out a slip I’ve made. She sent me one this morning but at first I couldn’t understand what she was getting at. She seemed to be passing on a bit of news to me, and then had put a completely odd sentence following
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I’m not sure that I’m desperately keen to get back to work, but both my wife and I are very keen to get back to New Zealand, and our family, and our own home. This last week has been very slow as we wait for Saturday to come. We fly out around 8 pm, going back to Korea (it takes some twelve hours) where we stay for a couple of nights, and then home to New Zealand. Unfortunately we’ve got to wait in Auckland for seven hours (!); one of those hitches that occur due to flights not meshing together well enough.
Never mind, at least once we’re there, we’ll be able to sort out our place again and take all the things out of the room we stored them in. By all accounts our tenants have left the place in a reasonable condition, so on that score things are okay.
Because we’re now going home earlier than planned we’ll have some ten days or so before either of us starts work. I can see my wife getting fed up and wanting to go back to her job sooner than that. She’s already fretting at the slowness of time here
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Having trouble finding the perfect nude lip gloss? That’s a question posed by Jane Iredale on her blog.
I’d never heard of Jane Iredale until today. I presume she’s an actual person, and that it isn’t just some adman/woman writing the blog and asking such odd questions
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I may have mentioned previously that my daughter used to work in a casino. She began working in the kitchen, but it was badly run, and she was fairly unhappy there. After a time she was able to become a cashier, a job that had its good points, and its not so good.
For instance, the cashiers had to show at all times that they were being honest with the money, by constantly revealing what was in their hands to the CCTV cameras. It was the same when they were counting money, an alternative part of the job. Their routine always included opening their hands to the camera to prove that they weren’t pocketing anything.
For the most part she enjoyed the job, although the hours weren’t so hot. And she got to know the people who were regulars, both those who had money to play with and those who didn’t – but still came anyway
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Amongst the many jobs I applied for when I was looking for work were some with the ACC, that is, the Accident Compensation Corporation. (You can see why we refer to it by its initials: try saying the full name quickly five times.)
I didn’t get any of them, and I’m glad of that, to be honest. The work with this government agency is stressful, and the turnover of staff is high. People working in the claims section of the ACC have a reputation for turning down all sorts of realistic claims, or prolonging payouts when people are in need.
This isn’t the case all the time, of course. We tend to hear about the few ACC interactions that have gone wrong, more than the many that go right
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Won’t I be glad to be back in NZ and earning a regular income again. The best part of having been offered a job while I’ve been overseas is the knowledge that when I go back I won’t (a) be having to look for a job again, and (b) I will have money coming in – needed in part to pay those extra expenses that cropped up as a result of being in the UK for nearly six months!
We didn’t have to borrow any money while we were away, except from ourselves (which sort of doesn’t count!). None of those so-called Payday Loans, which sound like they’re the sort of thing where you borrow money to tide you over from one payday to the next and then pay it back. Of course that doesn’t quite happen. Whatever caused you to borrow in the first place is usually a larger amount than you have to hand, and then of course it gets larger because of the interest on top. There is even something they call Faxless Payday Loans now. Presumably that means you don't have to deal with any paperwork whatsoever, and it's all done online. (Bankrupts can apply as well - good grief!)
Still, it’s handy to be able to do it sometimes, but isn’t highly recommended long-term. I should know, having had to have a long-term overdraft during most of the time my children were growing up. Overdrafts are just payday loans with a different name
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One of the things most people who work at home don’t attend enough to is proper lighting of their office area. Home lighting is just as important as the lighting in an ordinary office, and no one working at home should put up with lighting that causes you to sit at awkward angles, or that reflects on the computer screen, or that isn’t strong enough to be able to read materials you’re working on.
If that sounds like an ad – it isn’t! I know from experience that I’ve often put up with the wrong kind of lighting at home just because I couldn’t be bothered to do something about it. It was easier to let that aspect of my ‘home office’ go and concentrate on the work. Of course, if I’d done something about the lighting I would have got on better with the work anyway.
Not every home is geared up to having people work in it, and sometimes the office isn’t in the right part of the house for good natural lighting. At one point we shifted our piano away from an outside wall where I see the music easily, to an inside one, but all it did was cause problems with seeing the music, as now I was sitting in my own light. We tried various lamps and placings, and put up with it for months, but in the end, the original position was better for me – even if not for the piano
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When I arrived at the job I had before I came to England, the woman who’d been the boss in the office had moved up into the human resources department. In fact the human resources department increased by two more in the four months I worked in the place.
When I worked in offices, years ago, there was never such a thing as a human resources department. Sometimes there was a personnel officer, but often that was combined with some other role. Human resources wasn’t regarded highly in those days.
Now of course it’s the in thing. Rightly so, in some cases, but also partly because everyone has to have a job contract these days, and the HR people are those who attend to this side of things - at least in big firms. (Small firms have to muddle along as best they can as they always have had to do
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Since we’ve been over here in the UK - and while travelling around Europe - we’ve noticed the enormous number of people whose job it is just to stand in a certain place all day. There are commissionaires of various sorts - some in elaborate uniforms, some not so elaborate. There are security guards, from those who actually guard something important to those who merely stand in shop doorways keeping an eye on things. There are bouncers, of course, and there are people whose job it is just to point you in the right direction.
Some of these people can interact with those passing; some barely do. Whatever, the jobs seem to me to be ones that either give the people plenty of time to think, or perhaps too much time. Standing in one place all day. The thought of getting up in the morning and thinking: I’m going to be standing all day, and standing doing virtually nothing all day. It’s horrific.
I suppose the jobs have to be done, but in these days of CCTV (we’re told that we’re photographed by CCTV 300 times a day in London) you’d wonder why there have to be so many humans involved in watching other humans. Maybe we’re not impressed by the thought that a camera is watching us, whereas a real live person has more clout.
In one of the European countries we visited – I can’t remember whether it was Germany or Switzerland, but I think it was the latter – we came across life-sized mannequins of babies in shop windows. They were so cute that my wife wanted to go into one of the shops and ask where she could get one.
You get used to seeing mannequins not looking like human beings. Most adult mannequins these days sport some sort of difference as though they had to be defined as not human, just like the
Not getting any younger!
androids or replicants in films like Blade Runner. (Incidentally, did you realize that Harrison Ford, who has just made his fourth Indiana Jones movies, is 65? That makes him due for a pension in New Zealand.)
But these baby mannequins were so lifelike that your attention was arrested by them. And of course they were beautifully dressed in fashionable European-style baby clothes
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My wife and I spent some time last night and another hour or more this morning trying to arrange a bed and breakfast place to stay at for the end of the week. What a job. Sometimes the Internet makes such tasks even more complex because there’s so much choice.
You’d think it would be easy: you set yourself a price limit, you choose a location or area, and set the dates – and away you go.
Don’t believe it. Nothing is simple on the Net. The places you think might be suitable don’t have online access; or rather, you have to email them (or, gulp!, phone them), and this is a surprise in a day when it seems that every hotel in the land is on the Net
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We’re now back in the UK after our month away in Europe and we no longer have a particular need to get up in the morning. No tourist stuff to do, no chores of any great importance, no need to exert ourselves.
In a way, it’s not a good place to be. At least before we went to Europe we were doing quite a bit of travelling around England, and getting ourselves out and about. Now we’re almost at the point of pointlessness. That’s not entirely true: we have to go and see some relatives again before we finally go back to New Zealand, but those aren’t things that require great exertion either.
I’m looking forward to getting home and getting my teeth into a job again, having a routine to the day, knowing that there’s a reason to get up in the morning
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One of these days I’m going to be tempted to throw away my wedding ring and replace it. It’s had a crack around nearly three-quarters of its surface for years, and when I tried to see if it was possible to get the crack repaired, I was given the brush-off, somewhat. I got the
impression that the ring wasn’t worth that much in gold terms and that for a jeweller to spend his time on it just wasn’t economic. No one insulted me to my face (I knew the ring wasn’t worth a lot; I’d bought it, after all) but they certainly insinuated that if it had been a gold of real carat value they might have considered doing something.
So it goes.
I look at the websites with wedding bands (as the Americans seem to call them) and think: hmmm, it would be nice to swap the cracked model I’ve got for one of these quality jobs, maybe something with a bit of decoration on it, such as the Celtic one in the picture. And then I look at the price, and think: it’s possible I’ll crack before my ring does. If I don’t, then I’ll replace it at that stage, but probably not with one that I’ll need to take a mortgage out on
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The worst thing about something that works is that everyone wants to make money out of it, and plenty of unscrupulous people will get in on the act.
Take hoodia, for example. The genuine product has some qualities that will assist in weight reduction, but do you think that stops other people selling stuff that isn’t genuine? Nope.
Fortunately, there’s a group called the Hoodia Consumer Review. They’ve begun a site where you can find out which versions of hoodia are useful and which are not, as well as read up on the background to the hoodia industry. There are also a number of news items on it. It’s an informative site and is worth visiting if you’re thinking of purchasing some hoodia. Check out the facts before you do
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These days you can get term life insurance quotes on line. But I was once sold life insurance by a man who could sell it just by sitting in his chair chatting to you. He was the most laidback insurance salesman I’ve ever met or seen.
The usual stereotype is of a person who’s rather frantic to beat you into a corner, or who’s full of garbage and doesn’t give a damn about his customer. But this guy was getting on in years and had been the company’s most successful salesman for decades. I really don’t know how he did it. Whether it was a natural talent or whether he had learned something early on that worked for him is now an unanswerable question. The point is that it made him successful and made all those other hardworking insurance salesmen look like frantic ants in their search for a bit of food.
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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