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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.
You come across some strange phrases when you hunt back to see what people have been looking up on Google. ‘Clapping Reich’ was one I came across. It conjured up all sorts of visions of some weird Nazi group who’d only just come to light after years of being buried in the dust of history.
Which reminds me of a lovely passage from All’s Well That Ends Well, that oddly chauvinistic Shakespeare play. In it, the King is talking about honour, and gets a bit carried away fuming about the lack of such in modern life:
the mere word's a slave
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Man, if I ever think I’ve had it bad, I just need to remember the guy on telly the other night. He’d decided to start a pig farm, which would include raising pig varieties that were on the verge of extinction.
So far so good, except that he was making no money out of it, virtually, and was spending huge amounts getting the thing up and running. He had an extremely “she’ll be right” attitude, even though he also seemed to be weighed down by considerable burdens, and by a lack of support from his family – who’d nevertheless shifted to the countryside with him!
It seemed to be perpetual winter in the doco, and much of the time was spent trying to deal with pigs, in or out of the pen, in the freezing cold, or trying to sell home-made sausages outside a supermarket – in the cold - or giving away fliers on the streets of the local towns – in the cold
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I’d always thought elliptical meant a way of speaking that worked around the subject. Seemingly, in fact, its meaning is different altogether. Someone is elliptical in speaking is extremely economic in their expression, often avoiding superfluous elements. So says one of the online dictionaries. However, it quotes H O Taylor, who wrote (somewhere or other) ‘The explanation was concise, even elliptical to the point of obscurity.’ Which sounds more like my understanding of the word.
But English, in spite of its huge array of available words, insists on using some of them in an excessively economic way. Thus one small word might have a dozen meanings, or more. And I find that elliptical has at least two others that to me don’t bear much relation to the original meaning.
One of these is that the word is used for a kind of exercise machine. There’s a thing called an elliptical trainer which is a stationery machine on which you can pretend you’re running through the country at great speed. It’s better known to me, I discover, as a cross trainer. I tried one once, and nearly broke myself in two trying to keep my arms going according to the machine’s routine at the same time as my legs. Nasty machines which are not good for the knees
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One of these days I must attend to my computer here at home. I haven’t had to deal with it while we’ve been in the UK because we took the laptop; the PC might have been a bit difficult to lug around!
When I open it up I get two messages which warn me about something – I never notice what it is anymore because clicking OK gets me past them. And then another message arrives telling me that the computer can’t find something on the hard drive. I ignore that too because obviously the computer can manage without the file it’s talking about as it’s managed to do so umpteen times.
And then, when I’ve finished working on the thing for the day, it often won’t switch off by itself. Sometimes I’ve forgotten to check, and gone to bed, or come home after a day’s work, and find that it’s still telling me it’s closing down. I know it’s not, because if it takes eight hours to do it, it’s forgotten how
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Cat 5 isn’t the fifth cat we’ve owned (think there have been more of them than that) but a kind of cable that’s used with Ethernet and is designed for high signal integrity. (I know that because Wikipedia told me so, so blame them if it’s wrong.)
I came across Cat 5 because it was being advertised on a site with the name Norfolk in it, and anything that has Norfolk in it at the moment is likely to attract my attention, since that county has been my second home for the last few months.
I remember that Oscar Wilde is supposed to have answered, when asked what he thought of Norfolk, ‘Very flat.’ Yes, it is, but surprisingly that’s a plus rather than a minus. I’ve never enjoyed cities (like Christchurch) that are all flat; they’re hard to find your way around in, and being used to using hills as landmarks, the lack of them makes me uncomfortable. However, Norfolk somehow overcomes that. Maybe it’s because it’s mostly countryside, and very pretty countryside too, with its endless hedgerows and lanes and trees hanging over the roads, and sudden open skies. There were certain spots that made you gasp with their beauty: one particular place we drove through a number of times had recently cut-down corn in the fields, and the sky felt as though it was just about to fall into your lap. I remember that feeling in Ireland too, when I was hitchhiking there years ago. The sky seemed low enough to touch. (I don’t think we get that kind of experience in New Zealand – certainly not in Dunedin, where the sky is always definitely above the hills
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Some time ago I wrote about the worm farm I visited in Norfolk, England. At that time raising worms was one of several options I was considering in case I didn’t get a job when I went back home. Besides harvesting worms for compost, and anglers, the people at Anglian Worms sold special double shelf trays in which worms got to work on dog poo.
I hadn’t heard of anything similar being used for human excrement, not at least in NZ, until the other day when there was a bit of a hoo-hah here about an inventor who’d made a compost toilet. He’d applied to the local council for approval, and to his amazement, one of the staff (who was obviously having a real Political Correctness Day) turned him down until he could prove that the worms wouldn’t be psychologically upset by having to work in human poo.
The story made national news. New Zealanders don’t like people who come up with such nonsense and seemingly get away with it. In the end the inventor triumphed when a vermiculture consultant reported that the worms were breeding well and were in excellent health. (Whether she meant mental or emotional health, we’re not told. We presume it was physical health
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Over the last week at work I’ve been beginning to learn more about several programmes I haven’t used much before: Xcel for one. This was okay, as it’s similar to the Works spreadsheet in many ways, and I could use my skills from that one to figure out how to sort out Xcel.
But I’ve also had to start to get to grips with PowerPoint, Adobe In something or other (the names continues to escape me) and a database programme in Microsoft Office. Access, if I remember rightly. I’ve come across it before, but wasn’t able to use it much because of the way things were in that particular office. This time I’m making up databases of my own, which has been slow but interesting.
Haven’t really started on PowerPoint yet, but did do some work on the Adobe job the other day and nearly tore my hair out trying to get the tutorial to match up with what actually happened in the programme
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We went to a barbeque on Thursday night (for my wife’s workplace!) and forgot the number of the house. We were out in the country, because the barbeque was taking place at the beach house of one of the bosses, and discovered that the cellphone wouldn’t work when we tried to ring them to check the number. My wife reminded me that when my daughter had lived along the same road, her cellphone wouldn’t work either, something that hadn’t stuck in my memory as a particularly vital fact.
Cellphone coverage and cell reception is still very irregular – not just here in NZ but also in England, where we sometimes had the same problems.
It was even worse with the mobile connect we were using there, which sometimes got a great signal and sometimes was as slow as a wet week. And it was inconsistent: twice I began using it in the tent (running our power off an extension cord attached to a caravan hookup) and both times it was going at full strength. When we went to the pub down the road, however, it reverted to a weak signal and would hardly work at all. Very frustrating, as it’s a lot more comfortable working at a computer on a pub table than on your lap – even though laptops are presumably designed for laps. Sort of
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The job so far has seemed to consist of meals. Apart from the lunch we had on Wednesday at a conference we were attending, there was Christmas dinner that night with about a dozen people. And games – which were wild and fun and disturbed the elderly ladies having a fashion parade next door.
The next day we had leftovers for morning tea and lunch, and then came back into the office to find that a group who have meetings there were having another lunch. Which lasted us into the next day, when we also went out for lunch. Phew!
Weight watching has not been an option this week
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Well, I’ve now done two days at the new job, and am still coming to grips with it. A lot of the time I’ve listened to discussions about what the group as a whole do; some of the time I’ve tinkered with things on the computer; I’ve gone and done shopping for a dinner that’s on tomorrow and used the boss’s credit card - and then got her pin number wrong and had to use my own; I’ve been taken out for lunch (there were eight of us in all); I’ve cut out bits of stuff and made up a photocopied collage (there was a real purpose behind it); I’ve learnt how to use the pocket calendar/personal thingee – at least I’ve learnt how to do some things on it; I’ve tried to figure out how to use Adobe Professional – with not much success so far (but not much time to do it either); I’ve washed the dishes; I’ve bound up the cardboard for recycling.
As you can see it’s all a bit this and that. My official title, believe it or not, is The Research and Resources Development Assistant. Fancy, huh? What it means is that at some point I’ll actually be collating material for people to use, anything from stats to anecdotes, from articles to jokes, from reflections to sermons. I’ll go hunting for stuff and bring it back to present to the wider family– a kind of hunter/gatherer job, in fact.
I felt quite uncomfortable yesterday, because things are rather laid-back in some respects, and most of all, I wanted to get on and do something. But today, having got to grips with the fact that things aren’t all about doing in this job, I was more relaxed, and went with the flow
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In case you thought poetry wasn’t important to people, think on this. A poet called William Chrome sits outside a Manhatten supermarket with his typewriter most mornings, and writes on-the-spot poetry for anyone who cares to pay him some money. If they haven’t a theme in mind he’ll sell them a ready-made poem. Otherwise, in about ten minutes, he’ll write a poem based on any ideas you come up with. They’re not poems with metre, or rhyme – call them abstract mostly – but they’re poems.
Chrome makes between $15 and $20 an hour and produces between seven and fifteen poems in a four hour stretch. There must be a distinct pleasure for the recipients in receiving a poem that’s unique to them.
I have a friend in London who, when I was there back in the late sixties, rushed me into a bookshop one day and excitedly scanned the poetry shelves. She pulled out a slim volume of poems and told me with great enthusiasm that a poem in the book was dedicated to her. It was by John Heath-Stubbs – he’d been her neighbour at some point – and the poem was entitled, In Return for the Gift of a Pomander
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I’m told that New Zealand has one of the highest debt levels in terms of credit cards in the world. That’s pretty scary when you consider that we’re a fairly small country in terms of population – some 4 million of us – and we’re upholding debt of some $4.5 billion. This is an extraordinary amount. I can’t even work out how much each one of us owe, because my calculator doesn’t like to think in billions!
Blame the people using the credit cards, the economists say. Yes, certainly each and every one of us needs to watch carefully what we spend, or else we wind up paying high interest rates for anything we don’t pay off in time. And there’s a certain mentality amongst the younger marrieds that they should have everything now – plus holidays, and good cars, and children. No wonder their debt level is high. Many of them have no idea how to save or spend wisely
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I spent a couple of hours at my new workplace last Wednesday. It was a kind of familiarisation time, and we also looked at the employment contract, a lengthy document full of what my employed should do and what I should do and who shouldn’t do what and when we should or shouldn’t do it – whatever it is.
My boss to be, as it were, also gave me a bit of a run-down on what I’ll be doing. To an extent. I’m not sure that I’ve completely grasped the details yet, or that my boss is even entirely sure of all the details yet, but at least it doesn’t sound boring. And a number of the others from the team (who are scattered around NZ) will be in Dunedin next week, so I’ll have a chance to meet them as well. Not sure that much work will get done in this first week.
I always go into a new job with the peculiar notion that I should somehow know in advance everything I’ve got to do. It’s just one of those things about me. Perhaps I don’t like to seem unsure of things. Trying to accept that this is a quirk of my personality isn’t easy, but at least I’m now aware of it, which is a start
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Well, since we came home we’ve spent the bulk of every day trying to sort out house out again. I’d thought it was a big enough task putting everything away before we went, but getting it all out again seems even bigger. You have to find a home for everything again, and some things aren’t going back where they were before. Some are being tossed out, including some furniture (we’ve had a problem with borer over the years). We’ve had to get over our sentimental feelings for the older items. There just comes a day when….
The difficulty comes when you decide that a large item - like the exercise treadmill - is going in a different room to where it previously resided. The treadmill always took up more than its fair share of room in the place it occupied previously, but where we’re going to have it now means we have to shift another piece of furniture out. Which means that something else has to go elsewhere. It’s like getting a jigsaw sorted.
Alongside all this my wife has decided she wants to redecorate two of the smaller bedrooms upstairs. So they’ve been stripped of their wallpaper in the last few days, and she’s begun plastering the walls ready for painting. We go from big picture things like that to detail stuff like sorting out all the tiny bits that have accumulated: are they worth keeping or not, is the constant question
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I’ve spent the day sorting out boxes from the room where we stored stuff while we were in England. It hasn’t just been a matter of putting stuff back it was before, but of sifting through and seeing if we really want to put all the stuff back. My wife and I had a little debate this morning when I suggested some tinky-tonk items (the sort of things people give you as a little gift but which eventually start to clutter up your shelves) might go the way of all junk. At first it was a definite No, and then she relented and four bits went into the rubbish.
I earmarked some of my books for the secondhand bookshop or op shop, books that I know I’ll never look at. Sometimes it seems to take a couple or three workings through such material before you finally decide the things have taken up room in the house for too long.
Later on we worked our way through some of the boxes containing my deceased mother’s possessions. We were a bit more ruthless with these, as we have less sentimental attachment to them. It’s still a bit strange, all the same, to be throwing out things that have sat on window ledges or shelves for many years, or have hung on walls in both her house and ours. (She lived with us for twenty years
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I could easily get into gambling on the Net – or ‘gaming’ as some people call it. (Does deleting the ‘b’ make any difference?) There are an increasing number of casinos and the like online, and obviously business is thriving.
But to win on any of these requires hard work – and perhaps genius. Amateurs may as well stay away and keep their money. It’s a sure thing that it’ll go the way of most money that’s pinned on things like horses, lotto tickets and roulette wheels.
Money’s hard enough to earn as it is. And I’ve been burnt enough in my lifetime (quite apart gambling) not to let it dribble out of my hand at a rate of knots
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One of the things that amused my wife – and sometimes irritated her – when were flying, was the way in which people took what amounted to suitcases on board with them. These were basically the same kind of thing as large suitcases; that is, they had wheels, handles that pulled out and so on. But because they fitted the current limits on hand luggage, they could be taken on board. And what’s more, they took a lot more stuff than any of the bags we carried on.
We were tempted to buy one of them at the last minute, in one of the underground shops in Seoul. I doubt that the cases were a name brand, such as Samsonite, but they looked durable enough, and anyway, we only needed the case to get us as far as New Zealand. After that, we weren’t likely to be flying again in a hurry.
We’d thought about buying the case after all the fuss we'd had at Heathrow airport, where the security now insists that a handbag is an extra bag, and can’t be carried as well as any other luggage. Consequently, along with other frustrated people, we had to shove stuff from my wife’s handbag, and my man bag, into our carry-on luggage. A totally absurd situation, because Korean Air, with whom we were flying, weren’t worried in the least about passengers having two lots of carry-on luggage
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I haven’t had to move house since 1978, when we moved from our last rented accommodation to the current house, which we’d bought. And I’m glad of it, because from what I hear moving house is up there with one of the major stresses of life – like getting married (!), or dealing with a sudden death in the family.
Even moving ourselves around England and the Continent, and getting from New Zealand to the UK and back again was stressful enough. We always seemed to have too much stuff, no matter where we went. It’s very hard to gauge exactly what you’ll need, and we always overestimated.
And then there was the issue of the stuff we bought in England and which we wouldn’t be able to get back home in our suitcases. My daughter works for an international moving company, and she arranged for us to parcel up two boxes of stuff that the company would move on our behalf. This was a major plus
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Well, I had my first taste of the new job - a mere sliver at this point.
We got back from England on Wednesday evening, and I woke up on Thursday feeling like a box of birds. This was a bit of a surprise, as we'd been absolutely zonked on the Wednesday after our two long flights and lack of rest.
Anyway, I was in town, so I thought I'd drop in and see the new 'boss' (she doesn't want to be called The Boss - bossy, maybe, but not the boss
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As I’ve no doubt noted on here before, I collect cufflinks. One of our holiday occupations while in the UK was to go to the various op shops (or charity shops as they’re known there) and see if they had any cufflinks going at reasonable prices.
We picked up a whole range of them, though I can’t describe them in detail because they’re all still coming from England in a container. (Not that I got a container-full: the boxes the cufflinks are in are inside a container.)
There was one pair that were computer mice, another pair that were a golf club and ball, another pair that were yellow tennis balls, and many more. All I’ve got to do when they finally get here is find some room to display them
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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