the blog that never blogged

So there's clearly been no blog for a couple of weeks.

There's not any particularly good reason for that - I've not been ill and the contracting position technically demands less hours from me per week that my normal position.  There is a reason for the non-bloggage, though... sort of.

Basically the difficulty I'm having is that my "interweb life" (if you will) was so well integrated into my normal day job that this move to the contracting position has almost expunged it.  What do I mean by that?  well, my normal job we have internet at desk and my desk isn't particularly overlooked, so I can basically surf the web at work.

That means that all my daily blog posts were pretty much written at work, I surfed the forums I visit at work, I did internet shopping at work, etc, etc.  Now don't get me wrong - we all did that, and part of the whole inflexibility of work hours where I usually work is made up for by this relatively relaxed attitude.

When you're on contract that's not really the case.  Even if it was possible to do all the surfing I used to (it isn't for a variety of reasons) it would hardly look appropriate to the customer if he watched me spend half an hour buying manga on amazon, even if in reality I was still doing the allotted number of hours of work I'm supposed to.

See, were I'm contracting they work flex and they're only paying for 37 hours of my time per week.  Well in my usual job it was more about being sat at your desk from 9 to 5:30 and in reality I would actually do more like 8:15 to 6:45.  However, as mentioned in my regular job I could spend time surfing the interweb, but can't in my contracting work.

Which is where the problem comes - if I'm doing 37 hours a week then that's a lot less time than 8:15 to 5:45.  Okay, it's a lot longer commute (it takes about 3 times as much time) but still, I should be time rich.  and I am.  Trouble is it's always been the case that, having spent all day working on a computer, when I come home I'm often rather loathe to spend time on it in the evening as well.

And even when I do, the tendency is to want to spend time doing fun stuff like gaming than going through all the e-mails and stuff that I would have ploughed through during my day at my usual work.

That tendency has also always extended to the weekend, where I tend to not spend a huge amount of time on the computer doing things like writing blog posts.  I'm generally doing other stuff or I'm wanting to do other stuff.

I mean, that's why I spent all morning today going through pages of e-mails and newsletters and articles I follow.  I literally spent about 5 hours doing it and still have half of them left.  It's actually quite an eye opener for how much time I must normally spend at work doing all this stuff!

And I've just heard that they might want to extend my contract for a bit.

To be totally frank I'm not massively enjoying what I'm doing.  I mean it's okay and it's something a bit different, but it's really not playing to my strengths and I kinda thought that it would do when I started.