Longform
You’re standing on the wrong side of the escalator
You know the person, the one who looks up an escalator and sees everyone standing on the one side but chooses to stand on the opposite side. The side to stand varies from country to country.
There’s a solution to this problem. A sensor in the step detects when you’ve been stationary for too long on the wrong side and a little cattle prod comes out and zaps you. Maybe a disembodied voice which says “move” if the budget stretches to it.
My response to a crank challenge by Deborah.
The time all three emergency services were called to work
I’ve been accumulating various lists of blog prompts to help me get into a routine and was just looking at the one from Lou Plummer and my eyes landed on “What is your all-time favourite story to tell from all the jobs you've held?”
Without hesitation my brain went “the time all three emergency services were called to work”.
The area I worked in had an annual Christmas party on a Friday night and invited a lot of external stakeholders and ensured the alcohol and food kept coming. My then boss and I, being a bit experienced by then in how these things went, had a conversation around 8pm and agreed it was probably time to depart so we could say “I’d gone home by then” if needed. It was.
Emergency services (1) - the ambulance
Security discovered someone collapsed in a bush. Concerned as they were unable to properly wake them the ambulance was called. Nothing medically wrong, too many drinks. The person came to and proceeded to abuse everyone and insist they were fine.
Ambulance left, security filed an incident report.
Emergency services (2) - the fire brigade
A staff member had too many drinks to safely ride their motorbike home but didn’t want to leave it in the carpark overnight. Another staff member, with a similar number of drinks under their belt, suggested the bike be brought upstairs in the lift and locked in the boardroom. Sounds okay you think. It was until the owner of the bike started it up, spun the wheel, which burnt the carpet, which created smoke, which resulted in the fire alarm triggering and the brigade arriving in two big red trucks.
On arriving, the fire brigade were met by Security who had quickly responded to the alarm given they’d just been nearby dealing with the collapsed person and the ambulance. On entering the area where the alarm had gone off the brigade discovered a motorbike with a warm engine but no rider to be found. The owner and erstwhile assistant had bolted.
Fire brigade left, security filed an incident report.
Emergency services (3) - the police
Security have no idea how the bike made it into the building so they call the police to find the owner of the bike. The police sent a nearby car to investigate and looking up the registration revealed the owner was a staff member. The police tell Security it seems like a problem for them and depart the scene.
Police left, security filed an incident report.
The aftermath
Come Monday, the Security Manager arrives to see my boss in person. There’s a very detailed and lengthy security log from the Friday night. My boss calls me in and we both confirm “I’d gone home by then”. After all three of us had stopped alternating between shaking our heads and laughing, the Security Manager informed us he had to send it up the line. Our boss gets a call from the number two in the organisation, who you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and gets told to investigate, reprimand, and issue formal warnings.
It wasn’t hard to work out who was involved. They all filed one by one into the office to get a verbal reprimand. They were handed a formal written warning on the way out. The executive assistant had used the nice thick paper and the boss had hand signed it. One of the three framed it and hung it on the wall of their office.
If I don’t get started I never will
I’ve been writing some blog posts for the last few months but not crossposting them anywhere. I really just wanted to get some thoughts out of my head but not into a journal.
I’ve been intending to crosspost for some time but as inevitably happens, I was distracted fiddling with the settings rather than actually writing. So enough is enough, time to stop tinkering and pondering is this colour better than the other one, time to write something and hit publish.
I’ve seen others using Pika so decided to look into it and turns out it’s just what I needed. A platform I can write without being distracted by a timeline. Minimal settings to distract me.
To take directly from the About page of this blog:
I had a domain I wasn’t using for its original purpose.
I wanted a place to write longer thoughts where I didn’t see the noise of a timeline to distract me.
I tend to see something happen or read something written by someone else which sparks my thinking.
So here I am on Pika with Nothing Original Here.
Today was to get me started, get one down, and then looking at a sole solitary post will hopefully prompt me to write more and increase the list.
I think I’ve set up crossposting the way I want it using the excellent Echofeed so maybe you’ll see this appear in your timeline somewhere. Fingers crossed it’s not a mangled mess of formatting!
I keep stalling
Do you have a folder full of drafts? Thoughts started but not finished.
I don't mean those emails we all draft to get the real response out of
our system before writing the polite version. I mean the longer thoughts
that belong on a blog or as a longer mastodon post.
My draft
folder is getting larger because I seem to be stuck in a place of not
being happy with what I've written and leave it there to come back and
review and redraft later. Then I see someone else write on the same
topic and do a much better job so I decide I need to refine even more.
It's a circle I keep going round and round and I need to stop stalling
and start posting.
The 150 best science fiction movies list from Rolling Stone 🍿
Rolling Stone recently published a list of the 150 best science fiction movies of our time. As with any list, it’s subjective and comes from the author’s point of view. There are some movies I wouldn’t have included and others I would have.
I’ve seen a lot of these movies but not all of them and some I haven’t seen in years. I’ve decided I will work my way through the list starting at 150, the 1995 Tank Girl, and eventually reach number 1, the 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey.
No idea how long it will take me and I might skip some that I didn’t enjoy the first time round but instead of doing the flick around trying to find something to watch I’ll have a starting point.
An early morning bike ride 🚲
I haven’t gone for an early morning bike ride in years. I prefer to do my exercise at the end of the day.
I have a friend though. I’ve tried many, many times to say no to her in the nearly 37 years I’ve known her. My success rate is probably 1 in 50, she is very persuasive. I think it’s the red headed Irish girl that lurks beneath the surface ready to pounce if there’s a hint of resistance. When that girl is in full flight you get onboard or get out of the way.
We had lunch on Saturday and she said she was going for a bike ride in the morning and I should come. I can’t was my reply, I have a pre-existing plan for breakfast.
Let’s go before, you can work up an appetite she said. I’ll call you and get you moving in the morning she said. I’m good I replied, let’s do it another time.
No, we’re going and I won’t take no for answer. It was at that point I knew I was riding in the morning but hoped she would change her mind.
She did not change her mind.
At 5:45am my phone rang. Her number is one of the few that I’ve set to allow to ring at any time. I might need to review that setting. It didn’t wake me, I’m generally awake by 5:30am these days.
Hello I answered with a tired sigh. Was there a reply? Did she apologise for the early call? Not at all. Instead, all I heard was part of Mad About You by Belinda Carlisle playing.
Something about you right here beside me Touches the touched part of me like I can’t believe Pushing the night into the daytime Watching the sky’s first light While the city sleeps
Then she says, we’ve missed the first light but the city is still asleep. Let’s go riding and wake up.
We went riding.
Phasing out the Apple Watch (sort of)
Towards the end of 2023 I started to make a pivot towards removing some of the digital from my life. I love my tech and shiny gadgets but I’d started to think maybe I didn’t need so much of it in my life.
Coincidentally, a watch I was given for my 21st birthday had recently stopped working, so I bought myself a new one as a birthday present in January.
I’ve had an Apple Watch since 2016 and always ensured I was closing the rings and keeping streaks going. Trying to make sure I scored those monthly awards. It was convenient for checking notifications and messages without needing to use my phone, tracking exercise and sleep patterns, using the timer and stopwatch, and gave me quick access to weather details (a minor obsession).
I’ve now spent two weeks wearing my new watch and only putting the Apple Watch on at night to track my sleep or when I exercise. I genuinely thought I’d miss the Apple Watch more than I have. There were a few times in the first week I swiped the watch face to check for notifications before I remembered it’s a normal watch, no data other than time and date.
It turns out the main thing I’m missing is the timer. I used it whenever I made a cup of tea. I brew tea as I don’t like teabags and the timer on the watch was perfect for a quick three or four minute countdown.
I’m pretty happy with going back to just a normal watch. It’s an automatic mechanical watch so no battery involved, just a spring that winds itself while I wear the watch. No need to charge it or replace a battery every few years.
As I said to a friend the other day, I’ve read enough end times fiction to know I can also trade it for supplies when the world starts collapsing around us.
Turning 55. Is that retirement slowly becoming visible on the horizon?
I recently turned 55. I’ve now moved into the next age range on surveys and forms, no longer in the 45-54 it’s the 55-64 bracket for me. The slide towards retirement.
I have a plan for when I’ll retire that I have no intention of sharing with my workplace. I have to give four weeks notice and that’s all I owe them. Don’t get me wrong, I like where I work. It’s big enough I have been able to change positions over the years and do new things without leaving the university. I’ve been there for approaching 32 years in a succession of positions and on the whole it’s been a good employer.
None of that means they need to know exactly when I want to pull the pin or if a request to reduce to a fractional appointment is the precursor to retirement. Succession planning is something that gets referenced in conversations at work when people are approaching retirement age but why do I need to worry about that, I won’t be there. My employer could make me redundant tomorrow, with the requisite payout, and there would be no succession planning then. I’d just be cast adrift. The restructures, redundancy rounds and change processes I’ve seen in the last decade has emphasised to me more and more it’s important to remember your employer pays you in return for doing a set of tasks. You don’t owe them anything more than that.
As an aside, join your union. They care more about you than your employer and will be on your side. Don’t talk to HR about your plans. Their primary goal is protecting the employer and you can be assured they will be telling your boss about your retirement questions.
I took a bit of time in early January to think about how I might approach the remaining years of my working life. Transition to retirement is important. Once you have less years of work ahead than behind you is probably the best time to start. The Fair Work Act in Australia means I can ask for more flexible work arrangements now I’m 55. What would that be is something I’ve been thinking about. Do I want to work from home three days a week instead of two? Do I want to have a nine day fortnight? Do I want to start earlier so I finish earlier? All questions I’ve been turning around in my head for a few weeks now.
I’m at the point where I’m happy with the level I’m at. The salary pays my bills and the position gives me the flexibility to turn off for the day and live a full life in my personal time. I’ve reached my plateau if you like and don’t want to do the extra unpaid hours or give up my weekends to work on something so I can chase that next promotion. My email and Teams notifications turn off at 5pm and turn back on at 8am. They’re off all weekend. It’s not that I lack ambition, it’s that I’m perfectly happy with what I have.
I’m also mindful that I had what the doctor euphemistically refers to as “the cardiac event” at the end of 2020, a hypertensive episode due to undiagnosed high blood pressure and a bit too much stress on the heart. It helps to reset your approach to life when you reflect on the fact women are long lived in your family, the men not so much.
A long way of saying I’ve had a lot of introspection over the last few weeks and I think I have a rough plan for the years ahead. That said, you never know what’s coming. There’s a 200 million first division prize in the lotto tonight, my retirement plans might change tomorrow.
The joys of body corporates
Body corporates are a legislative necessity in Australia. They have similar counterparts in other countries around the world.
Someone has to be responsible for the building, collective responsibility in an ideal world. In reality it falls to a small group of people that want to have input into how the place they live is maintained.
Some residents will have no clue on who or what the body corporate committee does other than those notices that appear in the lift. Other residents might complain they interfere too much or have stupid petty rules. Some will get the body corporate committee, the body corporate manager and the building manager confused. It all comes down to down to how the committee operates and how visible it wants to be.
We have six people on our committee and five of us live in the building so can have easy communication. Except we now have two new people on the committee and they want to have preliminary meetings to discuss what will be talked about at the formal meeting. I spend way too much time in meetings at work, I’m not going to have extra meetings in my personal time. Unsurprisingly, the two people keen to do this are a retired person and someone who works from home a lot. People who have time in their day as they don’t have to travel to work and back.
Looking at the items they want to discuss I can see it’s going to be a long road. Trying to resuscitate an issue we’ve dealt with and don’t have money to do and also trying to ask what we’re doing about flood mitigation measures. One of these people opposed the special levy we implemented for flood mitigation works and managed to get enough people onside to spread over a two year period. We don’t have all the funds yet. Are we paying with bottle tops as my Nan used to say?
Collective responsibility, what a wonderful concept. Pity it rarely works where it’s imposed rather than organic.