And so it be begins.
And so it be begins.
It begins.
And yeah, a long-haul in a mask is no fun.
Jim listening politely to grandad reeling off his favourite clunge tales
I hope you let your neighbour know you're going away Jim?
Although, thinking about it, your car isn't there this time, so she'll probably think you've been Nicola Bulley'd. I await your channel 5 documentary with interest.
The interview with the arab will be epic.
The security features are pretty common across the entire continent.
I would have lost my mind if they made us wear masks when I went home in November.
How's this going?Originally Posted by Offshore Toon
I've landed a new job and I'm genuinely DELIGHTED. 65% pay increase and I'm no longer allowed to express my political opinion publicly. Dream job.
I'm a twit
Nearly three weeks in and it's great, cheers la. Got a 7.9% pay rise before joining and flexi time is incredible, plus it's genuinely interesting and very relaxed. God has blessed me with this one.
You've smashed it out of the park there.
Great stuff, nothing like actually loving your job or at least wanting to go to it each day,
I think the weirdest thing about Colombia (a very pleasant country full of pleasant people, as far as I can make out) is that the coffee is absolute shit. I've had about 10 cups and all taste like dishwasher tablets dissolved in wee. I woke up at 5 this morning, spent 9 hours with a customer going through the product line in incredible detail and 98% in Spanish, it's now 7.20pm, I'm meeting the old fella again at 8pm to write up our reports to be sent back to England before they get in tomorrow morning, I guess we'll be done about 9.30pm, will get about 6 hours sleep and then up at 4am for a flight to Ecuador that takes off at 7am and seeing the next customer at 10am.
Only 2 weeks and 2 days to go.
Our assessments close and go over to the DWP automatically now. Slip of the pen errors are (potentially) going all the way through the process.
Although I think the most annoyed claimants are the ones DWP repeatedly misgender.
It's amazing and it'd take an awful lot for me to move to a job without it I reckon.
Do you lot have core hours you need to keep?
At my spot we are contracted 37.5 hours a week and our boss expects us to be available between 10-3 most days (aslong as you aren't wandering off in those hours every day it's fine).
Since we went to flexi time, everyone in our team with children / who lives more than half an hour away has gone on to early starts/early finishes, and I am the sole person who doesn't care and sticks to 8.30-5.00.
A foolproof system that never goes wrong.
In my case, without checking in with a manager to work around this, you:
- either have a start or a finish to stick to (8am, 9am, 5pm and once in a blue moon 8pm) to make sure enough people are about across the day.
- shouldn't work less than half your shift if you're knocking off early / starting late
- shouldn't owe or accrue more than three days.
So in my case it's not total free rein but still more than enough to get lots of early finishes and build up some days off.
Got to work and Children's A and E is closed because there's sewage coming out the sinks.
An hour later, someone's drilled through a pipe in the drug room in the Paeds ward and flooded it, destroying all the drugs in the process.
Absolute chaos
Flexi-time with us is core hours of 10-4 but you’re supposed to work 7:24 minus at least 20 minutes for lunch. Same as Ian’s place, we can’t go beyond minus 3 days. I don’t know if there’s an upper limit. People with no lives start at 8 and finish at 5 every day and make at least an hour of flexi. It’s absolutely mad. That’s on top of having about 30 days holiday (plus public holidays) if you’ve been in the organisation long enough.
My job started out as flexi time and it seemed mega but then switched to “agile working” and there’s definitely no going back from it. No core hours, so long as you aren’t noticeably never around.
Sure I don’t get the flexi time buildup back to book additional annual leave, but I more than make up for it on going out for breakfast and doing school runs.
Also just banged out a 22 page service spec from scratch (well, plagiarised one I found online for Hertfordshire) and feel like I’ve just shagged Nicki Minaj.
I'm a twit
You can either accrue overtime as hours banked to take back or cash. I get mine paid but there's a guy I know who goes to New Zealand for a fortnight every year purely on his banked overtime hours, no holidays used.
Christ, when I said we're on flexitime I mean we can start 1 hour earlier or later than and it has to be balanced within 2 days. True luxury.
The idea of accruing time or taking extra whole days would make this lot keel over with shock. We don't even get TOIL (he says, typing this from fucking Quito at 6.30 in the morning).
I dunno, it rather sounds like you get to toil most of the time.
I do half-eight until four and take my break at the end of the day to go home slightly early.
The sewage is radioactive. Not joking
Looks like the UK office is immediately going to rack and ruin in my absence.
As many of you are aware, there will also be a Ping Pong Tournament held in Unit 2 which will be a great opportunity for members of staff to come together - details of this are to follow from xxx.
I also intend to try and organise some 'Social' lunches each month which can include a group walk, a crafting lunch, a card game lunch etc if people are interested in joining.
I've predicted a number of twists, but not even I saw Baz becoming Jimmy's new boss coming.
Any work activity featuring "lunch" that isn't just having your lunch on a work day can fuck off.
Current job and last one have loved doing what they call a 'lunch and learn.' Absolutely fucking not.
My work have tried to make it fly a few times and got the huff when only a couple of tragic cases have turned up.
Leave employee's alone at lunch time. If you want to do some boring bonding shite, do it during your time, not mine.
Nah I don’t get involved with force networking/socialising in the workplace. I’ll go for drinks outside of work with the sound ones but everyone else knows not to approach me with shite like ping pong, well-being walks and the town businesses sports day they did.
I'm a twit
You lot work in some bizarre places. Between liberal flexi time and lunch time orgies, no wonder the country is fucked.
We've got radioactive shit coming out our sinks but it's Flexi time people think is MENTAL.
Last edited by randomlegend; 22-02-2023 at 06:22 PM.
I'd swim in radioactive sewage before I took part in a "crafting lunch".
Even if we get food brought in to the office for lunch I won’t have any. That way I owe them absolutely nothing more than my actual job that they reimburse me for.
What if they offered you a financial bonus?
That would be for reimbursement for my actual job.
What if they offer you a burger for a job well done?
Depends if the bank will accept it in lieu of cash.
Then they’re being cheap.
Anyone have to do a self assessment tax return?
How much of a pain in the ass is it?
I might have to this year and trying to work out whether I should shunt a bunch into pension in March to avoid it (I might already be too late).
You aren’t too late and you probably should hung it into your pension especially if you are a higher rate tax payer. Needs to be done by the 5th April thoug.
What’s the tax return for I assume for stocks and shares income?
Sex services.
My accountant does it for £100
Yeah going to dump some into pension.
Promotion plus large bonus expectations will see me into “high rate tax payer” but I’ve sold a shit load of shares (below capital gains allowance) but filling in the tax form could be a fucking nightmare for that, so I’d rather avoid that hassle.
I’ve made £0 from sex services, but my net expense for sex services is also £0.
I'm an equity director so need to submit one for dividend payments. So a relatively straightforward process.
Having done it, if it was more than dividends then I'd farm it out to a pro.
Unusually it's my job to lighten the tone. This morning we flew from Quito to Guayaquil, which is a 55 minute flight within the same country but in terms of climate it's like flying from Edinburgh to Marrakesh. Gone are the spectular high mountains, fog and altitude sickness, and in come palm trees, crunbling colonial edifices and the general sense that the place has at one time been fertile hunting ground for a military coup involving blokes in dark glasses and peaked caps.
We head off to see one of our three customers in the region, who I will call Sr. Xavier, for that is his name. We get to his office quite near the centre of the city and as so often in these places, we are welcomed into a bustling engine workshop, with our boxed product conveniently front and centre all across the shopfront. Out comes Sr. Xavier and his brother, Bolívar, and they invite us into the honcho office upstairs. Suddenly the vista is transformed from concrete workshop with sweaty blokes everywhere into a pseudo-plush office with mahogany walls. My usual strategy in these situations is to look for a football team colours and point them out (people in little countries are always stoked when the English know their football teams) but the colours are blue with a light blue sash and not even years of FM has taught me enough to know that.
Sr. Xavier is a man with a similar hairline to me but whereas I've gone number 3 all over, he has taken a different approach: grow the front hair island out to its absolute maximum extent and then comb it all the way back. It's like a hybrid of Bobby Charlton and Pat Perez. This man owes us $30,000, which the old fella pushes home in really quite aggressive terms (I can't imagine myself ever showing such emotion), and eventually he signs a letter saying it will be paid within a month. Relations then thaw and after about an hour of tough negocios he says 'almorzamos', and we leave with the current Mrs Xavier (he has been married 4 times) and his boy - not son, but a young man from the shop - drives us all to the banks of the Rio Guayas where there is a row of restaurants. Here we all order 'Moro' which is apparently an Ecuadorean favourite involving a sort of rice mixture alongside your chosen meat and (as seems to appear with every course on this continent) fried bananas
The Rio Guayas is a very very wide river, maybe 4 times as wide as the Thames, and has a lot of vegetation floating in it as flotsam, presumably washed in from far upstream. The old fella tells Sr. Xavier that he wants a Stella Artois, which they are serving in this particular place. Sr. Xavier, having never heard of Stella Artois, agrees. (side note: one of my favourite things about South America thus far is that the beer glasses, as well as the beer, emerge ice cold. I haven't seen this in Europe before).
The rest of the afternoon descends into a right mess. Stella proves to Sr Xavier's taste and he just keeps ordering the fucking things, more quickly than we can drink them. In between he keeps asking questions about the same topic that has fascinated all our customers so far: how come el Principe Carlos is el Rey de Inglaterra mientras que ya no está coronado? Just getting through that constitutional explanation gets us through another couple of Stellas, but Sr. Xavier does not stop. Tres mas, he keeps saying, when the waiter comes anywhere near. Tres mas, tres mas, like a death rattle every time. I think we ended up having about ten and then he clicks his fingers and his office boy - who, I must say, was muy muy guapo - drives us back to the hotel. However, this was not before a promise that on Friday evening we will go to his house for more booze and some kind of food, which sounds a horrendous idea to me as this guy drinks for Ecuador, but uh, I dunno. We're here.
Throughout the entire day I just kept thinking: how the fuck have I ended up here?
Sr. Xavier
What a man. I can't wait for the house party.
Food is not that good in most of South America and the Caribbean. Ice cold beers are quite excellent though.
Come to think of it, whether plantains are involved is a great predictor of whether a Latin country's food is worth your time.
I’m here for the Jimmy <> Office Boy love tryst.
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