Oct 2020 – bodecott.blog

Cadged a lift home in a Tesla 3 the other day and came to realise I REALLY REALLY WANT ONE!

They are so well designed and clever – they steer themselves, change speed, automatically capture video all round the car when needed. You can set Valet mode and it will stop if it goes too far from your mobile phone.

But the coolest thing – which also shows that Elon Musk has a sense of humour – is it has a Fart Mode where you can parp out of the speakers to your childish heart’s delight. I have to do it manually in my sad little Leaf.

One more week at the Ministry of Funny Walks before jumping ship, and enjoying the feeling of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Handover is almost complete and I have two leaving meals organised (thanks to Covid work-from-home patterns it’s difficult to get everyone in one place these days).

Apart from having to chase the pimps again it’s not actually been an onerous task locating a new contract, with two promising options warming up at the same time despite the poor timing approaching the Christmas lull.

I’ve decided to go back to my previous employer for a 4 month spell, which may seem like a backward step given how delighted I was to get out of there only 10 months ago. However I’m going in specifically to knock over some juicy projects we’d had on the “if only we had the resources” wishlist for a while. Plus great Manager, good colleagues, catered lunch, shorter commute and Christmas shutdown.

So providing I’m not spending half the day cabling up desks, replacing headsets or fielding complaints like “my keyboard is too flat” it’ll be a spell in safe harbour to help build up the confidence ahead of hitting a fresh place of work next year.

Assuming I don’t repeat the same trick and return to the Ministry of Funny Walks of course ….

Definitely moving towards the right of the diagram quicker than I would like.

Works surprisingly well! One of my favourite 80’s classic films mashed up with one of my favourite 00’s tunes.

Having spent the past couple of months in a perpetual state of “fed up” with occasional bouts of “f*ck this” I came to the realisation that something had to change. And that something was primarily the job. So – yes Dean, yet again – I’ve given notice at The Ministry and have decided to go back to contracting.

Three years ago I made the decision to go permy to trade a drop in income for a better work/life balance. Trouble is I’ve been maintaining a contractor mentality for 20 years and I just can’t shake that way of working; I have to give it 100% – and feel like I’m delivering some value – or I just get stressed. And this place just won’t allow me to get anything delivered without ridiculous amounts of faffing about.

Anyways, from the start of November I start a new 5 year plan; get contracting, get earning and pay off the mortgage so I can buy that bloody bookshop!