NO ROOM AT THE INN

Immigration case I’ve been working on since almost exactly a year ago has finally gone kaput with devastating and life changing consequences for the person involved. They’ve lived here since they were eighteen. They volunteer to run a wellbeing cafe in a local church. They applied for grant funding to keep the cafe open over winter. We wanted to employ them as a community development worker. They now have to leave the UK by the day of our office xmas lunch or face deportation.

Years ago, I would grab a Greggs sausage roll every morning for breakfast on the way into work.

ON THE BALES

The recent farmers' protests in the UK and a comment on micro.blog about old style rectangular straw bales reminded me (again) of my own farming history. @Miraz It has taken me many years to get used to this way of packing hay. I grew up with the old rectangular bales that we had to fill the loft with for the horses' winter. What do they call this big rolls of hay?

WFH SAVED MY LIFE

I’ve worked from home since the end of February 2020. I transferred all my work and systems online to do so, and while I’m still part-time, in practice I’m now available 24/7 for every conceivable administrative emergency (“Hi David. Please order me some large coloured post-it notes and have them delivered to my home tomorrow” or “Hi David. Please bring £200 in cash to my house this morning so I can pay for my lunch meeting today.

Finished a grant application with a colleague just in time to meet tomorrow’s deadline. A massive relief, and hopeful for success. Had hoped to get it done sooner but my covid hangover put paid to that plan. Fortunately we’d done most of the groundwork in advance, but today was intense.

CHASING YOUTHS WITH CARVING KNIVES

How my journey into care work was a serendipitous outcome of my search for meaning and purpose beyond the confines of traditional work. At least, that’s according to Google NotebookLM, based on my Curriculum Vitae series of blog posts.

Transcript

I can’t opt-out of LinkedIn’s new AI data gathering exercise, and neither can I delete my account, because I can’t login (got a new phone, 2fa linked to old phone, fucked). Hopefully their AI will be richer and more fully rounded as a result of my content.

OFFICE ABANDONED - SUN STOPPED WORK Today’s office.

• davidmarsden, https://davidmarsden.info/2024/05/08/todays-office.html

Today’s office.

Nine year old said he wanted to grow some potatoes, so we planted chitted seed potatoes in bags tonight. He said he didn’t know it was so much work!

THRIVING?

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed. I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story. She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so.

CURRICULUM VITAE (HOCUS POCUS)

Inevitably, my time as a Manchester University player came to end, and I left the club by mutual consent when my contract ended. Somewhat bizarrely, looking back on it, I joined what appeared to be an obscure and tiny religious cult in the middle of nowhere (deepest, darkest Lincolnshire), dabbling in some rather questionable therapy / witchcraft. My role was primarily as Administrator with responsibility for making sense of the almost entirely lacking paperwork, contracts, and financial arrangements of the company (?

CURRICULUM VITAE (AD ABSURDUM)

I spent most of my three years ‘working’ in Manchester down the pub. When I was in my shared smoke-filled office, I was more often than not playing a very early demo of football manager (four free seasons, on repeat), or compiling a regular comedy fanzine for the five-a-side footy team I helped to found and run. They were crazy and fun times. Every other weekend, I got a train back to Lincolnshire for band rehearsals, recordings and occasional gigs.

CURRICULUM VITAE (AD NAUSEAM)

After failing to become the next George Harrison, I spent three years idling around, getting into trouble, and generally not knowing what to do with myself. I had some summer jobs working on a local farm stacking straw bales on to lorries from Cockermouth, feeding turkeys, and working in the grain barn (doing what I can’t remember, although I do remember not being able to breathe because of all the dust).

CURRICULUM VITAE (REPETITUM)

Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels. Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths.

CURRICULUM VITAE

I’ve had a long and winding career in the fields of work and education. At one time, I was doing quite well, but it all got a bit too much and it’s been a bit of a struggle since. Which is a shame, because it would have been nice if things had turned out better. I was never really suited to work. It’s almost always felt like a real imposition, a drag, and a massive downer.

ERROR 55 - INTERNAL COMMUNICATION PROBLEM

Boss: Can you order a new printer for the office? Me: Sure. orders a new printer for the office Office: Did you order a new printer for the office? It’s arrived. Me: Yes, I’ll come over and set it up. Office: No need, we already moved the printer from the other office. And we have a tech person coming in Monday to set it up.

IMPOSSIBLE JOB

Last week, my boss asked me to produce a professional looking ten page job profile for a potential new appointment. He provided me with an example from another employer, and asked me to use the same format. He wanted me to find some suitable photographs “online” to use. This was all outside of his skillset. And mine. He wanted it “by tomorrow” (Wednesday), and gave me the text he’d written for the first page, as well as the headings he wanted to use for the remaining pages.

PAY RISE

I haven’t had a pay rise since April 2017. Taking into account the cost of living increases year on year, and especially in the last year or two, I’ve effectively taken a pay cut every year. To be fair, I was thankful to have a job at all during and after covid. Thanks to Kate Morley’s historical UK inflation rates and price conversion calculator, I now know how much I should be earning if my pay had kept up with inflation.

Waiting for account verification emails from Companies House is like the proverbial waiting for a bus. Nothing for ages, then four come all at once.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

In my work email. As part of our Corporate and Social Responsibility, we are running a digital poverty mission to “Connect The UK”. We have already purchased 40,000 brand new Tactus GeoBook laptops and have donated over £2.5 million in device discounts. These laptops come fully loaded with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Education, a 3 year warranty and are discounted to just £84 per device. They’re £80 each on Amazon.

RETURN TO WORK

I returned to work last week after my extended absence due to respiratory illness, which may or may not be related to three years of breathing the poisonous gasworks' air. I find I now have to literally climb over two rough sleepers camped outside the door of my workplace in order to get in. There is no more space in the nearby doorway, and the doorway around the side entrance is similarly occupied.

3 days into my new job. Company policy says staff must remain upbeat. Loving every single minute of my return to wage slavery.

NO ONIONS, BUT PLENTY OF FIREWORKS WITH BIER

Abstract: Gertcha by the wiener. Tags: fireworks, photos, video, bier, Chas ‘n’ Dave, hot dogs Last night, eight of us from Enfield Clubhouse went to Alexandra Palace to see London’s largest and most popular fireworks display. Here’s a video I took. The fireworks were pretty and spectacular - worth seeing, if you like that kind of thing! After the fireworks, we climbed up the hill to the Palace itself and queued to get into the German Bier Festival.

TWENTY TEN (THE PREQUEL): THE CHEESEMAKER

Originally intended as a follow-up to part one of my milk-based food product styled personal review of 2010, this post quickly regressed into a metaphorical guide to the cheesemaking process, as you will see. By the end of the first week of March 2010, I felt like I was several thousand feet above sea level. High up a mountain, again, perhaps mostly due to the ever-decreasing capacity of my right lung, but plummeting to new emotional depths thanks to the leaden weights of my ever-increasing self-doubt and sense of despair, perhaps partly as a reaction to stopping taking my antidepressant medication (although I stopped because I was feeling worse, not better).

TWENTY TEN (PART ONE): HARD CHEESE

Abstract: Thankfully, there is no Part Two. Tags: snowcock, nanowrimo, manflu, cheese, depression Note: probably none of the links work now. I began 2010 by wishing everyone (except fascists) a Happy New Year and a promise to blog my reflections on the naughty decade in due course. Well, that will have to wait for another time, but here - thanks to my identi.ca memory aid - are my reflections on 2010.

WATERBOARDING ON THE NHS

Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat On Another Planet this week: controversial new government plans to tackle ever increasing worklessness using waterboarding. Techniques refined and perfected by secret military personnel known only by their codename ‘Our Boys’ are being piloted by the NHS in an effort to ‘encourage and empower’ people claiming statutory sick pay to return to work. One persistent malingerer, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he was subjected to an horrific ordeal at the hands of his torturers and says he was tricked into believing he was just playing a game of ‘doctors and nurses’.