Friday 4 February 2011

just let me sleep

Big plan for the weekend is, to put it simply, to relax.

Today is the 12th straight day that I've been at work and I have to admit I'm loosing the plot a bit. What really hasn't helped is that the stuff I've been doing during these days at work is quite stressful.

Having worked last weekend in order to finish one bid for a framework, I've then shifted onto another bid for another framework. This one is nearly as important as the last one, and I've been feeling really worried that our offering may not past muster.

See, the problem is that this is effectively a re-compete for a framework that we used to hold, and I'm not at all sure that they want to give us a slot on the new version. My worry is founded on the fact that we didn't win hardly any work last time we were on the framework, so they may want us off to try and give someone else a shot at it.

So I've been really worried.

What doesn't help is that I'm now really tired and getting very inefficient and sloppy. I'm quite sure if I hadn't been here last weekend I would have finished this new bid by Wednesday, but I've really been struggling.

Hopefully I should finally cross all the i's and dot all the t's today, and then I can have a proper weekend of sleeping and (shock, horror) not working.

I might even take the opportunity to finally set up my Blu-Ray player and experience the joys of High-Def.

Thursday 3 February 2011

cream cake? don't mind if I do... several times...

Yes, as I hinted on Tuesday I had a seriously bad week, last week.

No, that's not actually true. It started off as a spectacularly good week - I stuck 100% to my diet and have also worked out a way for me to do a reasonable bit of walking during the week and I took full advantage of this.

See, I had that goal of finally hitting my first target weight and it was my initial aim to loose the four pounds needed to in one week, rather than the two dictated by my new plan.

The trouble started on Friday night. See, having had a super start to the week, from Friday night until Sunday night I totally fell of the wagon. And I really do mean that - when alcoholics use that phrase, you know it means that they didn't just have 1 pint, they went on some huge bender.

In my case I consumed several cream cakes and supermarket sandwiches (which are always deceptive as you tend to think sarnis are healthy, but they're not) and even several packets of 'normal' crisps.

It really was similar to a binge. And what made it worse was because I was spending all my time at work, sat on my arse, I wasn't doing any significant walking either.

The net result of this was that when I weighed myself on Sunday I hadn't actually lost a single pound. In other words, all that being good was then counter-balanced by my being bad.

To be honest, I've actually a sneaking suspicion that I would have lost one pound if I'd been able to muster the energy to go for a walk first thing Sunday morning. Normally, first thing Saturday and Sunday morning I like to go for a walk, but this last Sunday I was sufficiently shattered that I just laid there until it was apparent I needed to get up to go to work.

Previously when I've failed to do the Sunday walk I've then lost a surprising amount the next week, backing up my point that weighing yourself in exactly the same circumstances each week is highly important.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

saw vi

The saw franchise seems to have disappeared right up its own fundament.

The problem is that over the series it's tried to develop a story, but in each film it also tries to have a twist. This stems back to the first film, where at the end it's revealed one of the people in it isn't quite what you thought he was (avoiding spoilers).

The problem with the first twist is it wasn't really that good a twist. It's actually hard to really call it a twist - it was more like a surprise than a twist. But the presence of this surprise seems to have led the makers to put in one or more twists in all the subsequent films.

But each film is actually a proper sequel, supposedly revealing more about Jigsaw and the saw world, so by this film we've ended up with a back story that's so convoluted it's gone beyond confusing. I mean, it's even gotten to the stage that Jigsaw almost doesn't appear in the films - he's certainly not the man directly responsible for a lot of the traps.

It also seems to have lost site of what the traps are supposed to be about. They're supposed to be trials where people's will to live is tested and thereby they become reformed - learning to treasure life because they see it's true value. In later films they seem to become more about pitching people against each other.

There's much more of a strand of people deciding each other's fates, rather than their own. And many of the traps seem unfair - they're either escapable or, like I say, pitching two people against each other with the outcome that one of them must die due to the others actions. In earlier films it seemed more like the weight of responsibility was on your own choices affecting yourself, rather than other people.

But as I say, the real problem is that the back-story has gotten so convoluted and complicated that unless you're a really big fan or you happen to have watched the earlier films recently, you don't really know what's going on. Certainly I've been getting rather confused by it all.

What makes this all rather understandable is that in the commentary for one of the films it's revealed that actually there wasn't any sort of a grand plan. Instead, they write the films as they come and either leave open bits for other films to pick up and do with what they want or they try to take a different view-point on something that's already happened in order to generate their twist and to layer the films in together.

You can therefore see how things have gotten so complicated - without that overall plan, they've written themselves into a bit of a muddle.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

butterfly

My boss - the one I have to say I'm still rather resentful of for not letting me go home early yesterday - described the cause of a lot of the last week's stress as a "butterfly".

What she meant by this was that whenever something new and shiny came along, he was off, following it, rather than focusing on the things that needed to be done. So basically, instead of finishing off a job he was doing, or setting a prioritised list and running down it methodically, he only focused on the things that interested him or that appeared in his inbox.

This was a real problem, because the job he'd been brought in to do was work on a big new framework that could potentially be worth a lot of money over the next few years. So in other words, we want to win it and to do that you need to answer all the questions well.

So last Monday we had this session where we went through and looked at what was left to do. And there was loads - any question he hadn't fancied the look of he'd left and so we ended up divvying the work up between us.

And so I ended up having to come in to do loads of stuff over the weekend.

The thing is though, he didn't actually seem all that bad with the technical stuff, it was more that he just wasn't up to the job of holding multiple streams of activity in his head at once. He wasn't a manager, in other words.

Which was a shame, but also horrible for me as I spent huge chunks of the weekend working where I could have been doing other stuff.

I also seriously "fell off the wagon" in terms of my diet, but I'll talk about that later in the week.

Monday 31 January 2011

more work? what a nice surprise!

A big part of me didn't think I'd be here this afternoon.

This part of me is rather optimistic.

It's the part of me that was hoping that, having worked all weekend, my boss would turn around and say - "Mark, why don't you pop off home a bit early?"

This part of me's optimism has come crashing up against the reality that my boss isn't that sort of a person. The other person who's sort of my boss is that sort of person. As soon as the last i had been crossed and t had been dotted on the bid we've been working on he would have sent me on.

This is because he trusts me and he knows how to manage people. He would also have us working flexi, since he knows that it's results and output that counts, not the presence of a bum on a seat. My boss doesn't. My boss doesn't have that level of trust or that level of understanding. To her if the bum isn't on the seat during the allotted hours, you're slacking.

And unfortunately the understanding boss isn't here today, so here I am, having worked something in the order of 15 hours over the weekend, still sat at work, waiting for 5.30 to roll around so I can finally go home.

Well, actually, I'm writing this blog entry. And I'll probably pre-write several other blog entries too. That's how I get my own back, you see - I do other stuff during the day. If I was able to work flexi, and my getting in at 8am meant I could go home at 4:30, then I wouldn't. But it doesn't, so I do.

What's made this all rather annoying is the fact that I shouldn't have had to work this weekend.

This is where I get onto what I was talking about on Friday, but more on that later, as I'll end today's blog post here.