Here's to the end of a pretty ordinary week. Mr P had to give bone marrow sample and has had appointment at Peter Mac. We're waiting to find out if he has blood cancer, leukaemia or whatever they call it now. Elder minipeeler is still having major issues with anxiety and school refusal. My MIL offered to pay for him to go to a private school she thinks would be better for him.. would've been nice to offer that last year, when I was having to enrol him in the only (really big) public school in our catchment and I was saying that I didn't have a good feeling about it, that I felt that there'd be problems for him given the issues he'd had in the past, but had no choice financially. I was equally anxious and bummed out about it and she knew that back then. Now she wants to sweep in with her money and save the day, by uprooting him and plonking him into a new school‽ I feel bad for being ungrateful. Miniest is going through a very testing rebellious and wilful stage. I'm trying to give her as much of myself as I can and my patience, as she is jealous of Elder and her dad being home all the time, which is perfectly understandable. She is academically gifted but puts in a bare minimum of effort and is wasting her awesome potential and it's hugely frustrating, but she doesn't give a shit. I am feeling older and more tired in my body and it's depressing. I've been bingeing dystopian shows on Netflix and find them comfortingly awful. I gave up on the "comedy" category.. maybe Americans just laugh at different stuff, but I found little humour there. Thankyou for reading my grumbles.
Kinda just laying here in a stressed out but exhausted state from the week. Had a bite to eat but too tired for much else. Think I am gonna pour a drink and make a list of the work life things that have to happen next week then go to bed. I hate feeling like I left everything in a mess but nothing seemed to get finished this week and I can already feel the wave building up for next . Gah hopefully it's just grey day blues
Ted bitted me, I held him. You would think I was torturing him the noise he made. 😹
Physio visit today to ward off any future migraines this weekend. Need the study time.
Expensive insurance, but hopefully worthwhile in the end!
Half my team is out with the lurgy. Week got derailed by random urgent requests and bugs and feels chaotic....
Need a strong coffee and a list I think. Flu season/COVID return seems bad and early this year. And the general level of unhingedness and stress is high out there
Feeling sick still today from the migraine yesterday so am chilling in bed with fluffy butt. Might get some music done today because the weekend is all IT learning time.
As an aside, windows server seems pretty straightforward. Nothing too crazy as yet.
I seem to have flipped my sleeping around to the other extreme. Now rather than sleeping at 6am, I'm sleeping at 6pm. God at this point I feel like the only time I'm happy sleeping is if I'm bucking social norms and sleeping like a madman. Besides it being an odd time to go to sleep, it hasn't been working too badly for me, especially since it's dark by those times these days. Unfortunately I forgot to tell Alexa that I took the bins out so she started making noise at 8:30 yelling at me to take the bins out (bin day was yesterday, but the reminder goes off every 24hrs til I mark it complete)
Can't get back to sleep, but I'm too tired to get up and try again in a couple of hours
Re-watching The Expanse...such a good show.
Really keen on adding Belta-lingua into my everyday's vocabulary.
Belta-lingua is the language spoken by those born and raised in space aka Belters, for those who aren't familiar with it.
It's the Klingon of the 2010's
I have been looking at a lot of real estate listings recently and was complaining about too much grey. I think I found an antidote.
Fuzzy girl is still a bit quiet and was fussing about something unknown last night, but she had a midnight snack and has eaten her breakfast. She's under the doona sharing the hot water bottle
Mr Woof pushed me into second walkies. It was the right call, but it is definitely on the chilly side tonight.
My work week is finally done.
And what a cluster fuck.
While the department that I work in is profitable, overall our organisation is set to lose money this year.
Bad decisions made by the "manager" have been a contributing factor.
But.
The "manager" has gotten it in his head that if only our organisation can send an email to everyone on a partner organisation's mailing list, sales will boom.
A couple of months back, he convinced the partner organisation to send a small segment of its list an email offering them one of our organisation's products for free.
And to be fair, a reasonable number took up the free product.
This has convinced "manager" that if the partner organisation sends an email to its entire mailing list offering them a discount for buying our org's products, thousands of them will take it up. Even though many (most?) of their customers have never heard of us before.
The "manager's" boss is new in her role (she moved into it after a restructure earlier this year), and trusts what he says.
Here's where it becomes a trainwreck.
The past two years, our org has run an end of financial year sale aimed at consumers. Both times, it has increased sales a bit, but nowhere near enough to meet targets.
Marketing have tried different promotions and shown they work better. They want to run a marketing campaign to business customers for the end of financial year, and use a different approach with consumers in the new financial year.
They did a whole preso to "manager" showing that a different approach will generate more sales overall — but a lot of that revenue will fall in the new financial year.
Manager overruled them. His official reason is that he doesn't want to try anything different to last year, because that's risky.
(The real reason is he wants as many sales as possible this financial year, so that the losses from his bad decisions are as small as possible.)
So marketing are stuck with a campaign they know won't work.
"Manager's" brilliant plan is to use that campaign strategy that hasn't worked, but then to get the partner organisation to email everyone on their mailing list, which he thinks will mean thousands of people will buy products and that will make it work.
(And yes, partner org mailing everyone on their mailing list is something out org hasn't done before. But this isn't seen as "risky" by "manager" because it's his idea.)
Of course, this pissed off the business salespeople.
So to keep them on-side, he's also making marketing run the business promotion as well, even though they don't have the staff or the budget to do both.
He's only just approved all of this now, and both promotions need to start on 1 June, so the graphic designers basically have two weeks to get everything ready.
It gets worse.
The partner organisation has already explicitly told us that e-mailing everyone on their contact list during June is a hard no.
But "manager" has sold his boss on the idea, and she's said that she expects partner org to email everyone on their contact list.
Following a string of meetings, my boss is now stuck with making that happen. Even though it's a hard no from the partner org.
So I was stuck in a string of meetings today where my boss was desperately trying to find a reason to tell her contact at the partner org why they should change their policy other than "Manager" thinks it's a good idea (there isn't one). Or some fact or piece of information will persuade "manager" to see reason (I'm honestly not hopeful).
Sorry for the rant. But it's been a week!
There's a new Mercedes parked in the 5-minute zone outside one of Perth's city stations. It's been there a couple of days. On the first day, I thought it was a case of rich jerk parks wherever they want to and just pay the fine.
Now there are several presumably expensive tickets on the windscreen and a notice it'll be towed soon.
I wonder what the story is? Presumably if it had been stolen, police would have notified the owner by now. So has it just been abandoned? If so, why there? It's very mysterious.
Wrestling with the idea of heading off for a weekend adventure. Staring at the map but can't think of where to go.
I feel like something in the mountains would be nice but only if I can find a good book to start on because I'm currently between books. I'm not sure if I loved the first Discworld book I read.
Is anyone here a teacher/recently completed their education degree? I have a question about practicum placement.
This may be only applicable to Swinburne Online but figure I'd ask anyway.
Currently, I do 2 units a trimester and find that comfortable enough with balancing a full time job and a part time child. I'm planning the next few years to get an idea on course work, which units are available in which trimester, etc, and in between all that I have the practicum placements.
Regarding the placement, I'm looking at the unit info and its a full 12 week unit, with 20 days placement and 2 assessments (with 0% weighting - makes no sense, typo or whatever) and was wondering how intense this unit might be because I was thinking if I can squeeze it into a trimester and have 2 units plus the placement unit I can shorten my study plan to get my degree from mid-2028 to early 2028 or even end of 2027.
Hopefully this makes sense.
(also no idea how I am going to get 20 days off x 4 placements with work but that's another matter.)
Trying to find some small comfy masks to wear at work all day. Was surprised how little there is available at chemist warehouse and Priceline.
Rain incoming - the good thing is that it won't last all that long - today.
Little things that make you enjoy life more?
For me right now, it's movies.
Watching Crackerjack in light of participating in a potential lawn bowls game next week.
Playing gin rummy. Me winning 3 - nil.
Playing 10 cards each. If you pick up from the middle, you gotta pick them all up. Don't need to put down. If you do, big mistake. As the man found out.
Edit 4 - nil
I wonder what kind of music Falco would be releasing if he were still alive. I reckon they'd be absolute bangers like Rock Me Amadeus.
Gosh, I love his song Egoist.
now for an old old song
winchester cathedral -csny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI7phwtRjUA
