Day 12 - Thou shalt remain hopeful when the world is topsy-turvy

My goodness, fellow Bloggerchums, what a week this has been.

Birthdays, injuries, abusive train-platform drunkards, cat spew, sunshine, storms, fire-drills, new friends, macarons, and now.... a job offer.

After completely talking myself out of getting my hopes up on Wednesday, I received news from my referees yesterday that they had been called for questioning in the morning. That completely knocked me for six - I had, up until that point, been preparing myself for the "rejection and constructive feedback" phone call.

So, there we have it. I now have a decision to make. My almost-new supervisor voluntarily (and very kindly) offered me some time to "have the chats" with my current employer and husband before responding to the offer, which is lovely.

The difficulty is that I love my current job - I am challenged and I learn new things on a weekly basis. I still have so much more room to learn and grow, and so many new skills I was looking forward to developing. But alas, budget-tightening and job insecurity has increasingly dimmed any prospect of ongoing employment in the team - and unfortunately for me, it's the team where I finally re-discovered confidence in myself to learn new things and to present that confidence to the outside world, where I made amazing contacts and developed relationships with a strong foundation of mutual trust and respect, and where, more importantly, I looked forward to going to work each day, even after long weekends and holidays.

I have worked in plenty of toxic environments, where I dreaded going to work, where I felt swamped by emails and phone messages and a million things to do, the majority of which I knew I would never get around to dealing with. Where I had vile colleagues, bullying supervisors, and obnoxious students to deal with, and it always came down to me having to rise above it all and be the "bigger person" (aka Punching Bag). Where I would desperately hope to get hit by a tram on the way to work so I could have a good excuse not to show up. Where I would be practically catatonic with depression on Sundays and at the end of holidays, unable to speak due to the dread of returning to work the next day.

Not that I'm expecting the new position to be anything like that, but it was my current employer who rescued me and to whom I will be eternally grateful. Out of the toxic swamp I was headhunted, I was appreciated, I was empowered, and I was welcomed with open arms. I had never known anything like it before. But, on a fixed-term position, and with permanent-staff departures leaving holes which will now never be filled, it has reached the point where I'm not sure that gratitude is enough to keep me there.

Take care, my Blogosphere Buddies. Until tomorrow...

Louki xxx

Day 11 - Thou shalt pick thyself up and dust thyself off

Hello fellow Bloggaloonies!

I hope this post finds you all well and happy. :-)

Today was hubby's birthday, so after taking him out to a lovely new pizza place at lunchtime (we work at the same campus) and coming home with every intention of having a yummy (but slightly experimental) dinner ready for when he got home from cricket training, it ended up with him coming home to find me lying flat on my back on the kitchen floor unable to move.

During dinner preparations, I dropped a piece of zucchini on the floor, bent to pick it up, and got stuck halfway down. My back completely seized up. I couldn't move up or down, so ended up just dropping myself onto the floor in agony. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened, although more often than not, it's when i'm doing something extreme and athletic, like getting out of bed, sneezing, or getting up off the loo.

At the risk of being tasteless, dear readers, I once had my workmates in stitches with the tale of having just been stuck in a toilet cubicle at work and having to walk my hands up the walls in order to lift myself up off the seat. Once I'd managed to be almost fully vertical, I looked down... only to realise that my pants were around my ankles where I couldn't reach them. So, after a few Mr Bean-like efforts to squat down and reach my pants, I had to lower myself down (again, with the aid of the walls) and start all over again.

Fortunately for my colleagues, mobile reception is extremely bad in our building, otherwise one of them might have been summoned for a special workmate-bonding activity of having to pull my undies up for me! Yeah, it was probably for the best that it didn't come to that!

Anyhoo, thought I should share that with you all - hopefully you've got a nice picture in your minds now!

After plenty of ice, pain killers and tears, I'm now lying comfortably and hoping that I'll wake up feeling better and that a proper celebration tomorrow night instead will do just as well.

Happy Birthday, Gorgeous Husband!!

(FYI, Husband did very kindly point out that one of the hazards of having birthdays and getting older is that your wife becomes an injury-prone old fart alongside you!)

Day 10 - Thou shalt dunk thy tongue in thy brain before thou speakest

OK, I don't often talk about politics. I hate it. I hate listening to politicians speak, I hate the way they lie, the way they sneer, the way they smirk, the way they use disguises of humanity and sincerity to peddle any old crap that will get them the largest number of votes when the time comes. I hate them.

I turn off the news when the current Leader of the Opposition is interviewed, I hit the "mute" button when the Prime Minister is speaking. We appear to have no Australian political leaders in whom we can have any faith at all. So, as a general rule, I figure there are better ways to spend my time than listening to creepy people who don't represent my interests, and who just piss and whinge at (and about) each other.

Our previous PM was an articulate intellectual who worked people to hard and made enemies by appearing smug and overly aware of his own intelligence. However, I never actually felt that he would ever put the welfare of his people in jeopardy to serve his own political needs. As the daughter of an academic, and as a graduate and long-time employee of a tertiary institution, Rudd and so much about Rudd was familiar to me. But, you never know what goes on behind closed doors.

Today, despite my desolate feelings about our current Prime Ministerial options, I found myself quite moved by footage of yesterday's Question Time in parliament, which has today gone viral.

For the first time in a very long time, I saw humanity and genuine raw emotion in a woman who has been looking hard and cold - and more than a little bit lost - of late.

The video is here (it's long, but worth sticking out to the end for her closing line): Julia Gillard Destroying the Joint

(For anyone who is not in Australia, or who may have avoided all news over the last few weeks, our PM's father died recently, and one very charming radio "personality" decided it might be appropriate to state that the Prime Minister's father had actually "died of shame" as a result of his daughter's political performance... and he said this in a speech to a dining-room full of young Opposition supporters and media representatives)

Anyway, not wanting to get preachy and political-like, but I really just wanted to record here and now how this video made me feel.

Take care and be proud, my lovely Bloggamigos.

xxx

Day 9 - Thou shalt not fret about things over which thou hast not control

No news on the job yet, so I'm thinking that it's going to be a "thanks but no thanks". Whenever I start feeling a bit miz about likely rejection, I remind myself about the list I made - for exactly this purpose - when working on my application.

The list had 2 columns: If I Get the Job and If I Don't Get the Job.
Under each, I wrote down all the good things that will come of each outcome.

The first list item under If I Get the Job was "It's ok to be sad". Basically because I really do enjoy what I'm doing now, I get a lot of satisfaction from this job, and I love the people I work with. I've never ever left a job that I didn't WANT to leave before!

The first list item under If I Don't Get the Job was "It's ok to be disappointed". Even though, ultimately, it will be nice to be able to stay where I am, it's always a bit poo to feel rejected.

Ultimately, I've done all I can do, and it's in the hands of others now. If I'm not what they're looking for, that's ok. Might turn out they want a doormat, or a bully, or a hard-arse, or even possibly just a BLOKE. And, frankly, I wouldn't want to work in a place where I'm not going to fit into the position or the environment.

So either way, it'll work out for the best!

Happy thoughts, fellow Bloggeramas. And when all else fails, go for the cookies!

Louki xx

Day 8 - Thou shalt not be a dick on public transport

OK. It's time for a Public Transport rant.

And, just for something different, it's NOT about stupid Metro Trains and their ridiculously bad service, and the fact that they run nowhere near enough trains to get home between 5 and 7 pm, and you can't even get on the damn things let alone sit down and then they go ahead and bluddy cancel the fugging things at 5:30 right when everyone wants to get home so you just stand there on a platform for an hour wanting to cry because you feel like you may never get home again and why oh why is it so difficult to just get home at the end of a horrible day and you end up getting home after 7pm when you just work a stupid 9-to-5 job and that just SUCKS and then you send them complaints and get some indifferent revolting mail-merged standard letter telling you basically to get stuffed because they don't care that you pay over one hundred bucks a month NOT to be able to get home.

No, for once, it's not about that at all.

This time, it's about PEOPLE on Public Transport.

Quite often, I listen to my iPod on the train. As a considerate human being - with, y'know, EMPATHY - I always check that my music isn't turned up so loud that other people can hear it leaking out the side of my earphones. You know, just being human and not really wanting to piss other people off when I can avoid it.

BUT, without fail, there's always some complete knob-jockey who has their music on SO loud that I can hear it OVER THE TOP of my own music (which, let's face it, is about as close to my ear-drums as it can possibly get without having the speakers surgically implanted inside my head).

Sometimes I even just end up taking my earphones out and turning off my iPod, because it's just not worth trying to enjoy my own music with someone else's second-hand shit playing through it.

But, despite this massive unforgivable assault on the senses of everyone around them, nobody asks them to turn it down, probably because they don't really feel they can, just like me.

Only a couple of times, when the culprit actually looks NICE and seems unaware of the noise, have I tapped my ears and then pointed at theirs as if to say "oh golly gee, you know what? silly me, but i'd quite like to be able to hear my OWN music and enjoy it, just like you are listening to and clearly enjoying YOUR cacophonous shit, ta."

My question is: Why is it so hard for us to ask people to stop being dicks on public transport?

Is it because we don't believe it can actually be so necessarily to point out to grown adults that they're being so repulsively obnoxious?

Is it because we think that they MUST be aware of the impact of their behaviour, but they must be doing it on purpose, in which case...

Is it because we're scared they'll get shitty and knife us?

Whatever it is, I'm goddamn sick of it.

And that's my profound rant for today. Thanks for listening, fellow blogga-liciouses!

L x

Day 7 - Thou shalt not fall behind on your blogging

OOPS.

Day 6 - Thou shalt pay attention

So.... I'm sitting in Dorkestra rehearsal, not paying attention to the boring committee announcements and blogging instead. Is that bad? Blah blah blah, something about concert ticket sales being down, yep yep blah de blah de blah.

If anyone's interested, our next concert is on 27 October!