The end of my doctorate!
I’ve added a review of my Doctoral viva. Follow the Review links or go straight to Viva (voce not Las Vegas). It was horrible - trust me, I’m a Doctor 
BitchAboutIT
Usual bitches and moans about stuff.
What is an employee worth?
When people stayed with companies for all their working lives they would get the “gold carriage clock” when they retired. Even more recently when staying at a company for more than a few years has become unusual, when an employee leaves, one expects a small gift. So after leaving the company where I’d worked for two and a half years, regularly in excess of 50 hour weeks, was I wrong to actually expect something?
When members of my team had left I went out of my way to make sure that, for their last day, they had something appropriate as a leaving gift so that they knew they would be missed and that they had been valued. One of my team even bought me gifts when they left!
Today was my last day and although I wasn’t anticipating anything big, I honestly thought that the company was sad to see me go and I’d get something.
At my leaving lunch I was given a card, signed by half the staff, with nothing inside. Back at the office, nothing more was said, so I got ready to slope off. I was told there had been a “modest” collection and would I “like a bottle of scotch?”. I was given nothing as a gesture, not even a bunch of flowers, and I felt that the company didn’t care that I was going.
30 months of dedicated work and I wasn’t valued enough for a leaving gift (or the time to sort one out), which really underlines that I made the correct decision in leaving.
Maybe a bit late to point this out but…
Admittedly, those guys on strike
do have a point - they should get far more money than they earn currently but couldn’t they have checked their signs before printing them? All the news stories managed to include the apostrophe in "Writers’ Guild of America", so it makes me wonder why the professional writers managed to miss this…
Doing two people’s work and a broken car
The past few weeks at work have been particularly hard. A few of my team have moved onwards and upwards to different companies and while I can’t begrudge them their careers, it’s been a real pain for me to meet the end of year deadlines. Last week was a particularly big deadline as we had clients in on the Monday and the weekend immediately before was our work Christmas party. No pressure there then… Unfortunately, I was the only one with the skills to get it all done, and if the system wasn’t going to be ready then not only would we upset a new client, but we would also be unable to invoice until the new year. No pressure there either… Naturally, in the wold of software development, nothing ever goes smoothly and time just seemed to diappear. I was lucky if I got home before 11.30 and was most definitely running on empty. Not so much burning the candle at both ends as dropping a small nuclear bomb on it. I got to Saturday morning and knew that I still had a couple of days work to do. I was on 64.5 hours for the week at that point - just under the contracted hours for two people… at about that point overtime turns to “stupid” time and is decidedly unhealthy.
I wasn’t going to go to the party due to the remaining workload, but I needed a break. So I got dressed up, put on the silly party dress and high heels and drove over. The party itself was the relax I needed and at about 11pm I decided that I ought to head home before I started to get tired. On the drive back, the roads were quite greasy - a combination of rain, leaves and other general rubbish. The steering felt a bit light and I slowed down considerably. Coming up to a roundabout the steering went altogether, I don’t know whether I aqua-planed, hit a patch of diesel or whether it just plain broke, but I did find myself heading for a corner and unable to turn. With the looming bollards I stamped on the brakes - high-heeled party shoes not allowing quite the same control as my Doc Martens! As the inevitable impact approached two thoughts went through my head. 1. This is going to hurt. 2. If this doesn’t hurt then I really hope I don’t have to change a tyre in this silly dress and these silly shoes. I was fairly fortunate in that the impact wasn’t as big as I’d feared, my airbag didn’t go off an my seatbelt hardly tensed. Getting out of the car to see the damage, it did seem mostly cosmetic, although trying to drive off I noticed that the left front wheel was no longer attached to the steering at all. My first accident in the three years I’ve been driving and over 51000 miles. Had to happen sooner or later, but I can’t help thinking that I could have avoided the impact had I been less tired. I’m still waiting to hear back from the garage to see if my car will get written off or not, but in the meantime I guess I’m back to being a pedestrian.
The clients came in on the Monday and were happy with the system, which somewhat justifies the extensive work I had done, although I’m gutted about my car.
Insomnia
I’ve never been able to manage well on less than 8 hours sleep. Less than 4 (without any interruptions) and I’m unable to function - I can’t drive and am uncharactistically tetchy. Now normally, I could sleep through a nuclear blast: I can usually nod off regardless of noise, light and even comfort. Even when I’m ill I just “sleep through it” (albeit slightly more figity than my normal corpselike stillness). So what happened last night? I slept for about an hour and then was very, very awake. After watching the clock tick ahead minute by minute (no easy feat when you have a focal distance of 4 inches without glasses) for an hour, I decided to get up and have a drink and read for a bit. After another hour I was more awake, and also grouchy as the incessent random blue flashing of the Wii in standby mode was driving me up the wall. Back to bed and I was still no closer to a blissful slumber.
Of course, by that stage, I’d wound myself up so much that I had no chance. Part of me considered getting up and going to work, or working on my thesis. I think my brain was too active :(. I finally manged to get about 3 hours but am in a miserable mood and very tired. I guess there’s far too much going on in my head to relax properly and it’s all work related… but that’s a whole other post waiting to happen….