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Out of Sync

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This is why I do love the Koenigsegg line of cars. Sure, I'll never own one - I'll probably never see one - but they're a damned fine vehicle.

Okay, your hotted-up and tricked-up Nissan GTR can smoke the Koenigsegg in the standing quarter-mile...but when your Nissan is tapped out at 250-300km/h and the Koenigsegg still has another 150km/h-plus up its sleeve... :)


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up76Py9DRD8
 
...and...I'm about to embark on a well-earned break.

I've actually had the last couple of days off work, but I've spent it getting the domestic chores up-to-date before we head off: 7 loads of laundry, dishes, general house-tidying, bit of shopping, plus the school runs.

Next up: a week of doing nothing (except for springing a surprise on my kid - a scenic helicopter flight). A good opportunity to relax and do very little...and do some work on my Star Trek TTRPG that I'm running for a group of friends. Plus watch movies and play games with family.

Of course, this means that my slow and haphazard posting rate will be slower than normal (if that's possible).

It'll be good to actually relax and chill.

Take care, BMR.
 
So a momentous day today - 24 years of marriage.

There have been Good Times and Bad Times, Happy Times and Sad Times, Fun Times and Angry Times...but we've stuck together through it all, and I wouldn't change a thing.
 
Okay...one of those random things that just magically appears, out of nowhere, in your YouTube feed...but the guy's right.

(Edit: he's wrong about the pronunciation of the Chicken Parma, though...but he's a Queenslander, so I'll let it slide. ;) )

Because 'Straya! :)


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDm_ZvsoBkk
 
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If you're familiar with New Zealand actor Karl Urban, you've probably seen one or two movies that he's starred in. It's also possible you've seen a movie and gone "isn't that...?"

Here he is talking about a few of the movies & shows he's been in, discussing the characters he's played in those movies & shows.

I love how down to earth and versatile he is.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grsF3UDHFN4
 
Well...March can Go To Hell.

Last year (October) my employer introduced a new, you-beaut, all-the-trimmings Finance System. It was going to amalgamate several different systems into one, allow us to retire several older systems, incorporate new features and tools, and Make Things Better.

Except...it Fucking Sucks.

No-one in the company likes it. It has made everyone's life more difficult, because the processes are so much more convoluted. Trying to get things done in it is like getting an arm sawed off without anaesthetic.

As you may know from previous posts, my main responsibility in the team is the provisioning of new starters - people joining the company. When the company is growing (the numbers show we've got a new growth of about 50-60 heads per year in permanent staff alone), this means I need to be able to acquire equipment, sometimes on short notice. And guess what our new finance system makes it very difficult for me to do...?

So I've been struggling to do my job for the past few weeks, now. In addition, we regularly (every year) run a project to refresh older devices (we run a 4-year lifecycle for computers). We've got one such project in our wonderful and amazing finance system now. In this new finance system, getting orders raise against this project is proving to be very difficult - so far, it's taken about two months to get to the point where purchase orders can actually be raised. In addition to this major delay in ordering against the project, the Procurement team cancelled an order we had to order equipment we desperately needed because the project - the one they're making very hard to order against - has a small allowance for business growth. We don't need to order devices because the project has an allowance for additional devices, but we can't order against the project to acquire the additional devices we badly need. This in no way takes into account the userbase that is screaming for replacement machines because their old devices are starting to fail (in some cases, badly) and we can't get our hands on the machines we need to satisfy the refresh cycle.

It's one giant clusterfuck.

Then you get the team leaders who start poking me for an update on the hardware readiness for their new starter a week before the new starter is due to arrive, and then pester me later because they don't trust me to do my job when I've never failed to deliver on a new starter yet.

[/vent]
 
So...yesterday was my birthday. Yay. Whoopty-do. Boo-yah.

Sure didn't feel like a day worth celebrating.

At work there was recently rolled out - in less than two weeks - an entirely new platform for external contractors to log in to. It went live the day before my birthday. It went live with some testing and checking, but little to no input from - or communication with - the external contractors.

So what happens less than an hour after this new platform goes live? Service Desk gets hit with calls about how things have changed, it all looks different, it all acts different, they can't work the way they used to...and all we can do is tell them "We don't know, we found out about the same time you did". That was Thursday.

Friday - the day of my birthday - I arrived at work and walked into a shitstorm of the same. Fielding calls about this new platform basically sucked up the day. It means that all the things I wanted to get done, and needed to get done, got pushed to the side. The only glimmer of light about the day was that I got to do some decent testing with this new platform to work out some of the functionality of it, and basically managed to write up what amounts to a half-decent user guide for the external contractors.

But the icing on the cake - so to speak - was when I finally got home.

We were booked to go out to dinner for my birthday. I made the reservations myself. I knew I had to watch the clock, and I was watching it. But the way the day panned out, I was late leaving work, much later than I wanted to be. By the time I got home, I had about 15 minutes before we had to leave to go out to dinner.

The wife had planned to have a relaxing time with me before we went out - a bit of relaxing time, a small celebration of sorts, give presents, that sort of thing. But it didn't happen because my workday sucked up more time than I'd intended. It wasn't my fault. If I didn't have to go out to dinner, I could have easily spent another hour at the office getting things done. But I didn't; I left things incomplete (which I hate doing) and came home.

And somehow, I was the bad guy. She may not have meant it that way, but my wife gave me a look that made me feel like my crap workday taking up a lot of time was my fault.
 
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