Starting over

Hello.  Yes, it’s been a long time.  I’ve had very little internet time since I started that job in March.  They didn’t allow access to personal emails - not even at lunchtime - so I used my “internet time” at home for any email that needed a response.  I could go online and shop until I was broke but I couldn’t access my emails..  Not any more.  I finished there on Friday.   I’d completed the role I’d been taken on to do and was beginning to have to ask around for work (which, as you know, I hate).  I resigned on my terms, not theirs.  I’m going back to the Swedes, to rejoin the project that I left in March.

What happened?  Mid-August, we had a fridge disaster - it died -  so I had to work from home while waiting for the replacement to be delivered.  Part way through the day,  I got a text message from my old project manager:  would you consider coming back?  His timing was perfect.  I was sitting there thinking “I’ve got nothing to do when I finish this....”.  My response was “Possibly” and it snowballed from there.  There were a couple of contributing factors - I watched one of my colleagues cringe in fear when dealing with one of the bosses and I do not want to work in a place where that happens - and, at several points due to the lack of work, I half expected to be told that I didn’t have a job after my current holiday (Normandy this week) or the one we’ve got booked in November (New Zealand for a wedding).   This has nothing to do with my immediate line manager.  Resigning to him felt like kicking a puppy.  He’s a nice guy and I like him a lot.

The final straw, however, was SAP.  Frankly, I don’t like it.  As finance systems go, it’s probably cheaper to implement than Oracle, but it’s far less flexible and far less user friendly.  It might be ok for factories producing widgets, but it’s quite clumsy for companies selling their labour in time based projects and using percentage complete as their basis for recognising revenue.  It’s also bloody annoying.  There are multiple system standard “reports” (layouts really) that are common to all SAP users everywhere, but not one that lists the vendors names and numbers beside their purchase invoices.  Believe me, I tried everything.  The best I could do was obtain the vendor number in SAP, download to Excel and do a v-lookup to a list of vendors.  This is basic information and you can’t extract it from the system in an easy to analyse format.  

I start back at the Swedes on Monday.  I will be a contractor again, but that’s OK.  I can deal with the administrivia now.   I’m rejoining The Project and will be spending at least half my week sitting in a portacabin in a highways depot.  My plan for Monday is to arrive laden with chocolate chip cookies, knock on the portacabin door and go “Hi Dad.  I’m home!”.  :o)

- Pam