Category Archives: Work

Procrastination Problems

Language, Life, Work

I am currently (and with great interest) watching the man trimming my front hedge. He’s doing a good job, except that as usual he’s trimmed it too short and now the world and his wife will stare into/throw things into my garden. However, there’s nothing I can do about it because he’d started before I realised, and anyway it’s up to the landlord.

What I’m meant to be doing is my degree work. That consists of analyzing some poems, and switching between Spanish, French and Portuguese metric schemes is headache inducing and I don’t want to do it. So here are the things I am doing to procrastinate today:

  1. Watching the man and the hedge
  2. Writing a blog post about procrastination
  3. Doing Duolingo practice (which is basically my degree, slightly a bit)
  4. Tidying the house
  5. Watching a gadget thing on TV
  6. Doing work for my job (yes, I am doing job work rather than uni work, on a day that I am not even being paid to do said work. Perfect employee, I think so.)
  7. Browsing reddit (root of all procrastination evil)
  8. Planning more things to do which will make me feel OK for not having done uni work

So that’s all going well. In fact, it’s keeping me quite busy, so I’d better get back to it all…

Cake or Death?

Life, Rant, Travel, Work

A post about Eddie Izzard you ask? No.

If you offered half the students in the Hyde Park area of Leeds the option of Cake or Death, they would (in my opinion unwisely, but who am I to comment) choose Death.

I know this fact, because twice a week (at a minimum) I drive through Hyde Park at about 7pm on my way home from work. And therefore twice a week (at a minimum) I nearly kill someone. I don’t mean to, I have no violence or malice in my heart – not before the incident, anyway – but despite this fact, I almost always nearly kill someone. And that is because no-one has explained to students that the rules of the road still apply even if you’re living away from home.

Yes, I know that there are millions of students who live in Hyde Park and that most of them walk and that a lot of the roads are clear a lot of the time. However, sometimes they are not clear, and it is genuinely not up to me to perfectly time when I drive through so that I don’t inconvenience someone on foot by making them pause for oooh, five extra seconds before crossing the road.

I’d be apologetic if that wasn’t such a stupid feeling to have.

Students, please. Learn that you have to look both ways before you cross the road. Please, please understand that you are in a fragile vehicle made of only flesh and blood, and I am in a scary metal box of death. Super extra please remember that there are even larger, even scarier metal boxes of death than mine, such as buses, and if I’m fed up of your antics, just imagine how the bus drivers are feeling.

How 10 people a day don’t get mown down thanks to their own sheer stupidity is beyond me. We let these people into higher education. What is happening to the world.

Have the actual Eddie Izzard video while I disappear into my own personal little middle-class rant.

People who speak loudly on phones

Rant, Work

I recently got a new workspace, working in a co-working centre in Headingley. I really like it because it is a better headspace for me to focus on work than home. I also love how light it is, and that the desks are a good size.

Most of all, I like all the people. I’ve not met a single person who hasn’t been absolutely lovely since I’ve been here, which is miraculous really, because I spend the whole time being really antisocial with my headphones in and the radio on. There is, however, a really good reason for me being like that.

Everyone in this office is SO LOUD on the phone.

I totally appreciate that being in a shared space means that you’re going to lose out on a little bit of privacy and you’re going to have to experience the way other people work, but honestly, it’s getting a bit silly. I’m certain most companies would prefer if their private calls were not aired to the nation, and I know that humans, as a species, can change the volume at which they speak. Except apparently not around me.

It’s a problem I often find. Frequently when walking home I find myself heavily engaged in someone else’s personal drama, just because they are speaking so loudly on the phone. Maybe I just have sensitive hearing, but I’m sure my family would beg to disagree on that point. I just feel like now that we’re in the era of the smart-everything, surely phone microphones are equipped to pick up a lower volume. Surely we don’t actually have to yell?

I am lucky though, because I have good headphones which block out most if not all of the office noise while I’m here. So I’ll have to be content with seeming incredibly anti-social, but at least I’ll get some work done!

My New (old) Job

Work
So I was looking back over my old blog posts (from YEARS ago. Actual years.) and I noticed that just before I stopped blogging back in 2011, I’d just got a new job, at Mad Science.I don’t work there any more.

It was an amazing job, don’t get me wrong, and I loved working with the kids, but it’s not the kind of thing that fits neatly with a changing university schedule, and fairly early on it became clear it wasn’t going to be the ideal job for me. After I came back from Spain I went hunting and got a new job.

Obviously, as I came back from Spain over a year ago, that means I’ve been doing my new job for over a year now, making it my old job really. I work for two small internet companies on all of the secretarial and administrative type stuff, and I have to say, it’s worked out wonderfully for me. I get paid nicely for what I do, work between 3 and 4 working days a week, and get to chat to people all over the world.

Of course at times, people all over the world are stupid, but every job has moments like that. The internet is an amazing tool,  but if there is one thing I’ve learnt in the past year, it’s that a whole lot of people have no idea how to use it, or how to use computers. Which in itself isn’t a problem. Mother and Father both struggle with technology to some extent, and while my wonderful Grandmaman is incredibly tech-savvy for a woman her age, that really isn’t the norm in our family. For the older generation then, that’s a respectable and expected position. I’m not about forcing people who have coped perfectly well for most of their lives without computerised assistance to suddenly start coding.

What worries me is that there are people around my age and younger, who are using computers daily and don’t really understand them. I don’t claim supreme computing knowledge myself, but I’m not entirely lost when I’m on here, and if I’m not, then no-one else should be either.

I’m not sure I’m expressing this point well, but someone who has is a guy called Marc Scott, and for your viewing pleasure, his blog post:

Kids Can’t Use Computers – Coding2Learn

I warn you now, it’s long, but it’s definitely worth it. Plus you can test yourself against some of the scenarios he explains, and see whether or not you can use a computer.

Working 9 to 5

Life, Morocco, Work
I am not making any money from my internship, so the song stops there.What I am doing, is having new experiences and meeting people. This week has been full of that, meeting top Moroccan academics, and people in the world of international development, as well as an English scholar from Edinburgh (who I interviewed, get me) who is an expert in one of the fields of Middle Eastern Studies which interests me the most, Muslin-Christian relations.

Also I’ve done lots of typing.

So, I’ll continue this when my hands recover.