Twelve of Twelve

Well another year is almost over, with this it'll be 11 from 12 this year, which I don;t think is half bad dor my first year at this. Hopefully I'll manage a full house next year. I can certainly promise no more "Cremation" pictures next year. I start my new job on January and that'll just be doing work for the "water" companies. So from Fire to Water, there's definately an elemental nature to all of my jobs.

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1. 07:15 Approx
At this time of year, the sun gets more of a sleep-in than I do. So I wake up to this grey half-light when I look out of my window on a morning.

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2. 07:30 Approx
No you're not having a flashback. This is honestly yet another different picture of my breakfast (museli and banana). Thinking you may be getting bored of this by now, I decided to spice it up by taking the picture upside down. Maybe next month I'll set it alight or something.

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3. 07:45 Approx
As well as being dark it's also bloody freezing this morning. Not only am I cold enough to bump into a Yeti, but it was also cold enough for the windscreen on my car to freeze up. I hate scraping the ice and frost from my windscreen. I just want to get from my house and into the car (with a heater) as quickly as possible.

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4. 08:30 Approx
First things first when I get in the office, get the kettle on. The office hot water urn is currently broken so we have to share this kettle for the water for our tea/coffee. I try and get at it first before the queues form. I need a cup of tea when I get in to help me warm up.

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5. 10:00 Approx
The office outside door security system is playing up again. We have a number of doors into the building that can be only accessed by a swipe card. We built the system ourselves as my boss didn't want ot pay a professional company to do it. So when it goes wrong I have to fix it. Today the cards either won't let anybody in, or the doors are letting anybody in off the street.

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6. 14:00 Approx
It's 2pm in the afternoon and I still have the heater on underneath my desk. I hate the cold weather.

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7. 15:40 Approx
Nearly 4pm and the security system is finally fully functional again. As I've been so bust this is only my second cup of tea of the day. What is the world coming too?

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8. 17:15 Approx

This year at work we all decided rather than give out christmas cards to each other, instead we'd donate the money to charity instead. But as the number of ever increasing cards on my windowsill shows, some people have gone ahead and done it anyway. I always feel the need to reciprocate, so I'm having to up the estimated number of cards I'm going to need this year.

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9. 18:40 Approx
At home any recieved cards sit on my fireplace. I haven't yet had any cards land on the doormat just yet. All of the one you see here actually turned up at my old address, luckily my parents still live there!

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10. 18:55 Approx
These are the first and last of the christmas decorations that need to go up this year. It may not look it, but within the hour this'll be my christmas tree.

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* 11. 19:30 Approx
The tree's finally up. It's like one of those Rubik's puzzles, there are a number of different pieces that can only fit together in one way. Needless to say when I first put it together, I had the middle and the bottom the wrong way round. Apart from looking a little lobsided it's managed to survive a year in the back of the garage.

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12. 20:00 Approx
The finished product. I initially the lights wouldn't work, but after replacing a bulb, htye look like they'll be good for another year. They actually twinkle once they've warmed up, but I can't make em twinkle in a photo unfortunately. I did try taking some photo's in the dark, but they all turned out green as if they were taken through night vision goggles.
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So that's it for another month and for another year. I hope you've enjoyed the 132 pictures that have made up this year. Next year maybe 144.

If you have read all of this and have no idea why I did this, then pop over here and read Chad's blog.

Clearing my Head

Can you believe it has been nearly 3 weeks since I last posted? I can! It has been, well lets just say it's been quite an interesting time.

Now, you've all heard my various storied from my job. Some interesting, some gory, but most of them seem to have gone down well. You've also probably heard me complaining numorous times about certain aspects of my job. Well, it's been a good few months since I complained to the hierachy about the problematic aspects of my job and do you know what has happened.

Nothing.

The pressure of supporting customers has increased over the past few months and I have actually done very little of my actual job. In fact over the past few months my job has been almost unrecognisable from what it was when I started. The worst bit was I just couldn't see anything was going to change in the future. In this situation I can quite honestly say I wasn't enjoying my job anymore.

I have always said to myself that when I constantly found myself not enjoying the job, then it was time to consider my options. However this time I didn't really have any options, so I decided to create myself some. I posted my details to a couple of recruitment sites, emailed a couple fo CV's and just waited to see what happened.

And it wasn't long before I had two companies offering me an interview. I arranged both interviews for the same day. The first one was in Leeds early in the morning and the second one was in Nottingham, mid-afternoon. Both were for positions within Leeds, but the company in Nottingham didn't actually have an office in Leeds yet!

Both interviews were actually very similar in tone. Half of the interview was spent with the interviewer trying to sell there company (and the job) to me. As always the interviews turned out to be not half as scary as I imagined them to be. It turns out that there is a shortage of people with my job skills (and my wage bracket). I think being in demand made things easier.

The day after both interviews I was told I had made the second round of the Nottingham interviews and I was offered I job from the early morning Leeds interview. Although the nottingham job was slightly more money and was working from home, I decided to discount that one. It would have meant working in Nottingham for the first few months and then I was unsure as to the support when I was working from home. If they had a leeds base it would have been different, but they didn't so I decided no.

The other job was more tempting, it's actually only a couple of miles from where I currently work, but the job is slightly different. It's actually writing software for the water industry. So going from opposing elements fire to water.

I didn't accept the offer at first. I actually went to my boss and told him I'd had an offer, just to see what would happen. I've never seen the office move so fast, I think the world must have shifted. After I explained my reasons, my boss went to see his boss and then they pulled me up into a meeting to try an convince me to stay. And fair play to them, they have tried to set thigns in motion to try and pul my job back to closer where it started from.

However in the end I couldn't see it changing as much as I wanted it to. So on Thursday I excepted the job offer from the Leeds based company (Saftronics if anyone is interested) and I told my boss I wasn't staying. I intend to hand my notice in officially on Monday.

It's good to have a clear head again. This has been at both the back and the front of my mind for a while now. This has certainly reduced my worries, I think I'm really going to enjoy the Christmas holidays this year.

So this is the start of my final chapter with Facultatieve Technologies. Overall I've enjoyed it and I've definately picked up lots of memories both good and bad, that includes lots of stories to share with everybody. The new story should start in the beginning of the New Year and I'm definately looking forward to it.