Things That Happened & Things That Didn't...

Beginning with the latter, I had a rather weird dream on Thursday night, which took some very clear cues from things that I'd heard about during the week. Essentially, what happened was this:

My former boss and I were pulled back in to work for the company which made us redundant a couple of years ago... though this time we were temps covering some of their full-time staff. I arrived first, and basically hung around the wrong part of the office (the old office, but slightly different) because it wasn't clear where I was supposed to be, and no-one was telling... About an hour and a half later, my former boss arrived, breezing through to the right part of the office (possibly she'd been back working there longer than me), and I followed her through to a dim, sealed-off room on one side of the office, containing a team of about a dozen 'creatives' and their computers. She took her seat, and I cast my eyes around the small, suddenly well-sunlit room with a massive window in one wall (far more accurate to the real building). There weren't any (complete, operable) machines near her, so I ended up sitting on pretty much the other side of the room.

Starting up my machine, I found the operating system messy and largely unintelligible... it was the kind of OS you tend to see in movies - a colourful mixture of MacOS and Unix/DOS, as favoured by all fictional hackers... But that wasn't all of it... I soon realised that a good portion of the difficulties I had using it was that it was set to operate in Portuguese.

The next bit may have been a lunch break or a totally different dream, but I was back outside in a semi-recognisable section of town near that old office building... There may have been a market, there may have been lots of hiding... not entirely sure.

So, the analysis: My former boss had emailed me, mentioning that one of our old colleagues, a guy employed to train the Salespeople, had been offered a job back with that company... and he'd suggested that they were considering offering her a job too. We discussed what it might actually take for her to go back, concluding that, while it was fun to discuss, almost nothing would actually convince her.

The overall situation clearly derives from Temp Anxiety, brought out by the fact that I'll be unemployed again around this time next month. The Portuguese operating system? Well, one of my former colleague was Portuguese, and we did clash over something computer-related...

In other news, work looks to be pretty busy while it lasts... One show guide done, another in progress (though I'm only dealing with the advertising on that one), yet another starting next week... plus another printed supplement and my regular digital magazine. It's still never quite so busy as my former full-time job, and a lot of the problems I've had with it are due to me becoming a little complaisant and rather too relaxed in the role. The rest tend to relate to things that were never explained to me... and they're far more frustrating. I guess, having worked there so long (basically a full year, but part-time for a lot of it), they have some reason to expect that I know how things are done... but when things don't happen because one of the full-timers assumes I'm doing it, and I'm assuming they're doing it because they haven't discussed it with me, there's clearly been a breakdown in communication.

When I got home on Friday, there was a letter from my managing agents announcing that the period of gathering quotes for replacing the roof of the flats is now over... Four companies were approached, two declined to tender (including the one who put the tarpaulin over my roof!), and the two quotes are different by something in the region of £10,000... Whichever company is chosen, I know I'll only be expected to pay a small portion of the bill (which is substantially more than it would have been when I first moved in, when the job was already years overdue), but it's still a worrying amount of money, when my income is far from certain.

On the upside, the day before, I received notification from HM Revenue and Customs that almost £600 was being refunded to me... That nicely pays for some of my recent extravagances, but it's strangely little comfort.