Work

The view…

Worn.. Is how I feel following an 8 hour grilling by the regulator… I could use winning the lottery after all…

4.30pm, after what has been one of those hectic days from which I am only too happy to be saved by the end of my work day. Today though, the sense - for the first time in a long while - that I have been productive. #Content

A Guinness for the pain…. and to kick off the weekend #TGIF

Yet another day spent in a workshop, hammering out the finer details of the support we’ll need to provide for an upcoming project. This time away from the office; sequestered in a building on the corner of Market Street and North Esplanade West. I could get used to this; talking about work as opposed to doing work…

Detailed, intense, technical conversations debating the finer points of a certain choice of material of construction. Worn, drained and tired at the end of it all but with all that comes a sense of satisfaction at making progress. Better to be busy than out of work I suppose, particularly given the state of the commodity market at the moment. #Thankful

Watching Whiplash again reminded me of the power mentors (or more correctly in this case, people who we look up to and whose opinions we cherish) can have over us, driving us to become singularly focused on achieving, thereby impressing them. The merits and demerits of the influence of Fletcher on Andrew may be open to interpretation - the methods certainly are - but the intensity with which that final scene was delivered might make up for every thing. ...

At the coffee machine, catching up with the new, younger engineer who shares my first name, he asks me what my surname is. I give him the anglicized, easy to pronounce version which doesn’t satisfy him. He asks me how I would pronounce it - cue five attempts, after each of which he fails colossally to reproduce the sounds I make somehow ending up adding, subtracting and transposing syllables through his various attempts. ...

Each year, on the last day before work officially resumes, I pop into the office to clear my desk. Something about the emptiness and the quietness allows me to, as I put away the detritus of the past year’s work, progressively bring myself to a place where I feel prepared to face the new work year. A large part of that is about trying to ease myself into the routine of work, acclimatising to my work space again after what usually has been two to three weeks of absence, and a food fuelled haze of sorts. ...

I came into church on the 10th of May feeling deeply distraught, the overwhelming sense being that all was not well. Two main issues drove the sense of disjunction I felt; uncertainties around work and an inner turmoil around a decision in my personal life I had wrestled with for nearly a year. The message on the day was by Rev Charles Achonwa - one of the first things he said being about surrendering to grace. This spoke directly to where I was at the moment, as I had taken time off a month before to come up with what I felt was the perfect plan with multiple backups and redundancies but had made little progress which fed the sense of frustration I felt. ...