Hoteling

The only drawback to the cubicle-oriented office is that some employees develop a sense of "home" in their little patch of real estate. Soon, pride of ownership sets in, then self-esteem, and poof - good-bye productivity.

But thanks to the new concept of "hoteling," this risk can be eliminated. Hoteling is a system by which cubicles are assigned to the employees as they show up each day. Nobody gets a permanent work space, and therefore NO unproductive homey feelings develop.

Another advantage: Hoteling eliminates all physical evidence of the employee's association with the company. This takes the fuss out of downsizing; the employee doesn't even have to clean out a desk. With hoteling, every employee has "one foot out the door" at all times.

Hoteling sends an important message to the employee: "Your employment is temporary. Keep your photos of your ugly family in the trunk of your car so we don't have to look at them."

- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle, 1996

Wednesday morning I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep - stressing about work.  Said goodbye to our floor at 4:30 and went to the pub.  As you do.

Thursday morning I woke up at 2am and couldn't get back to sleep - stressing about work.  Got in early, but of the three sections (sections, not teams) in our home zone, one section had spread themselves out along most of the windows, splitting the rest of the teams up.  Very unsettling day.  Went to the pub.  As you do.  But as I was leaving, I was convinced I heard them talking about me, and so I had a full on meltdown when I got home.  I haven't cried that much about work since my very first night on 5 November 2007.  

I read The Dilbert Principle probably twenty years ago, and that section above has stuck with me all these years, as it resonated with my feelings about working at OzEmail back in 1996-1997 - where I would get into work an hour early just to get the same seat every day (Como to St Leonards to arrive by 7am - was pretty awful).  But now I just can't get in that early, as the sweetie can't (unless I catch a 6:30 bus).  Which means ongoing stress every single fricken day FOREVER.

This morning I spent nearly forty minutes feeding the fish, watering the plants, putting washing away, dusting, vacuuming, taking out recycling, and didn't even get as far as cleaning the kitchen before I gave up and scanned some photos.

Tonight I labelled photos that I didn't get to labelling last night.  And finished the Wasgij jigsaw.

Stop the world, I want to get off..

Mornings I spend at least half an hour on house work type stuff, and only if I'm lucky do I have time to scan photos.  The evenings are dinner and watching tv with the sweetie and then I only get an hour or so before knock off time at 8:30 when I can do a jigsaw or some other hobby for an hour before collapsing into bed.  Tonight's hour got taken up with scanning photos that I didn't do this morning and backing up my phone/camera/computer.  Didn't even get time to label any East Asia photos.  

On top of that I'm feeling super anxious about impending changes at work.  It may suit some people's brains, but not my asperger's brain.

Where were we?  A week and a half ago..

Friday afternoon I took an early mark from work and came home and watched The Lion King while finishing off that section of the jigsaw.

Saturday was alternating between housework, photo labelling and photo filing.  Stu went to Damien's for a war game.  In the evening we went to Laziza House for dinner, which was ok.  Went back to Damien's to finish the game.

Sunday Stu went to work; Chrissie came over and we grouted one of the walls in the shower.  Also photo labelling.

Early this week I finished labelling my New Zealand photos - only took two months! (normally it takes years).  I also calculated that if I label 500 photos a week it'll take me about five years to label all my holiday photos.  Doable I think..

Wednesday I had to come home so Rheem could look at the broken valve on the hot water tank (remember I noticed it was broken one year and twelve days after the tank was installed).  The guy took one look and asked "is that all that's wrong?" heh.  Two minute job to put a new valve on (and he left me a spare in case it happens again).  *Hopefully* they don't charge me for the callout, on account of it's the second thing to go wrong with that heater in its first year.

Had dinner with the whole N Gang at Malaysian Chapter which was pretty cool.

Friday I went over to Chrissie's for gozleme for dinner.  We were going to watch a Lego movie but it got too late.

And yesterday was pretty must just cleaning and tidying the house all day, on account of having all of Stu's family over for dinner.  It was all very nice, except for Violet being super stressful jumping all over everything and everyone and touching and poking everything. Had lots of pizza and watched Austen Powers.

And so ends the first half of the year.

Where were we?

Friday night went over to Chrissie's for a roast chicken dinner and lemon delicious for dessert which was lovely.  I can't believe Nathan is four months old already.. I've barely seen him!  I'm such a slack friend...

Afterwards we were invited over to R&F's for supper which was nice as well.

Scott brought these.  Can't remember what they were called, but they had little syringes of frangelico you injected into them.

Saturday I hopped in the car and headed for Sydney.  Made it in time for lunch at the New Golden Emperor Chinese Restaurant in Kirrawee for Mum's birthday lunch.  It was pretty average.  You know you're in a western Chinese restaurant when you don't even get chopsticks.  Still, the $8.30 lunch special which included chicken and corn soup was pretty good value and the serving sizes were huge.

The other Karen and I got the $9.30 satay chicken and satay vegetables and mixed the two to get a better mix of meat/vegetables.  This is just the chicken dish.

After lunch we went back to Mum's and Aunty Di and Uncle Graham (not my uncle/aunty) and June came over as well and we had a couple of games of Five Crowns which was a bit of fun.  

Everyone left around 5pm and we were like "now what?".  So we went to Vivid.  As you do :)  I'll put pics for that in a separate post.  It was pretty crowded and the sweetie would have hated every second of it, but it was good to go be a tourist in Sydney again and get photos of pretty lights.

Sunday morning we went to church, where there were cakes for Mum and Elizabeth's birthdays.

Then headed an hour and a quarter across the other side of Sydney to Uncle Ken and Jeanine's place for lunch to celebrate Ken's birthday.  Various members of Ken and Jeanine's extended families were there - over twenty people outside for lunch!  

All the news reports and locals (except Ken) were complaining about how freezing it was, but it was an absolutely glorious day and NOT cold ;)

Then we went back to Mum's and I came home.

Monday I was pretty depressed because I didn't get any down/home time over the weekend.  It's only Wednesday but this week has felt *very* long :(

Yesterday was nothing exciting, just photo scanning, sorting, labelling, and jigsawing.  We did pop out for a walk at one point because Stu wasn't feeling very well and thought some fresh air might help.  Pizza for dinner instead of the roast veggies I was going to do because he needed to collapse after handing his essays in. 

Today I was asked to find some photos of someone at work, so spent the evening searching through nearly ten years of photos.  Whoops.  I did do some sorting of all those too, with the idea of labelling them at some point - before I forget who everyone is (that's already happened, will be doing some crowd-sourcing methinks).

Yesterday was pretty much rinse repeat of Saturday, except we didn't go out.

At one point I was filing some of Stu's photos from a couple of our Hong Kong trips.  For some reason I'd just dumped them in my "in tray" but never actually put them in with the holiday photos.  So was trying to sort out that mess.  And of course those photos haven't been renamed, resized, rotated or geotagged so there was all that to do.  So there I was geotagging our 2016 trip and got into a total mess on Peng Chau.  Some of the photos from that day seemed to be five minutes out, so adjusted the tagging accordingly.  But then later photos were in the wrong locations for those times.  And then it seemed that some in the middle were out of order.  And in fact they were.  When I'd renamed them based on their timestamp it'd placed later photos before earlier photos.  It seems that the camera was on long enough to get a GPS signal, and adjusted its time from being five minutes fast to being the correct time.  Will have to exif-adjust the first lot, and rename them with the correct timestamps.

In the middle of all that drama, I thought I'd compare those photos to mine, that I'd already geotagged.  Except my photos didn't have any geodata! Horror!  Turns out I'd geotagged the actual masters, rather than the resized masters.  So none of the photos I use for distribution (blog etc) are geotagged.  Sigh.  I might try and find some scripts to export and import geodata.

Did a lamb roast for dinner, and left the sweetie to work on his essays while I went down to Kit's for a while.  Slightly late night.  Whoops.

So Wednesday kinda felt like Monday which meant the week did go by a lot quicker.  

Today I window shopped while Stu had his osteopath appointment, Gus's for brunch (no hair in my food this time, but one of our water glasses was all sticky), then we did our food shopping.  Powered my way through scanning the last album of Mum's that I've got (aside from the wedding album) so can return the batch of five and get some more.  Also New Zealand photo labelling.  And jigsaw.  

Cooked Alan's beef stroganoff (minus the sour cream) all afternoon.

Last week I was scanning Mum's photos of their trip to Queensland in 2002 and came across the sculpture of the rescue of the Stinson survivors in 1937.  So tonight I watched The Riddle of the Stinson, which I saw once on tv many many years ago.  Mum even has a copy of Green Mountains signed by O'Reilly!  One of these days I should read it..

Had a pretty quiet weekend.  Just plodding through the todo list and jigsaw.  Finished season six of Homeland (Quinn can't really be dead can he???).

Sunday evening headed down to Melbourne again for work. Took off to the south so the view from my left-side window was just of Queanbeyan, and nothing exciting from the northern approach to Melbourne.  Had dinner with Daniel, Ray and Tony at Platform 28.  

Then two days of discussions and some planning, although not as many decisions made as we would have liked.

This was pretty random.  I was just brushing my hair on the last morning and a hot air balloon drifted overhead..

Then home again.  Again I failed, due to a left-side seat on the plane but an approach all the way around Canberra and in from the north.  If I'd been on the other side I would have seen all the lights all the way around.  Le sigh.

Have finished labelling to the end of day two of New Zealand photos.  Getting there.. oh so slowly!

Less than a month.  Twenty three days in fact.

That's how long it's taken me to get my New Zealand photos geotagged, selected for a slide show, selected for the blog, and blog updated with the photos.

That is an all time record for me.  Usually it takes a couple of years (and then some!).

Of course it helped that the holiday was only five days long!

Check out my New Zealand 2018 blog.