Looking for the silver lining

Something I don’t discuss often here is work.  You know I’ve had jobs that I’ve loved and made some fantastic friends in the process.  Well, I was expecting to be out of work right now.  I’m a contractor - not by choice - and I was told in July that my contract wouldn’t be  renewed when it expired at the end of September.  Looking the inevitable firmly in they eye, I polished up my CV, consulted a friend who wrote CV’s for a living, and started applying for jobs.  I even had an interview.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Over the August Bank Holiday Weekend, one of my Finance colleagues had a serious accident and spent three weeks on a ventilator in Intensive Care.  (She’s conscious now, thank God, and breathing on her own, but weak as a kitten with a long recovery ahead.).   When the news broke, I messaged our Financial Controller, “If you need another pair of hands, count me in”.  The rest is history.  I’m now responsible for the cashbook, credit control, cash flow reporting, work-in-progress reporting and trade debtor reporting, together with half-a-dozen balance sheet reconciliations.   With the help of some lovely colleagues, I’ve just survived my first month end. They’re talking about extending my contract to March.

I’m lucky.  I know that.  It doesn’t mean I haven’t faced tough times.  I’ve had to work hard to build a career and a good life.  “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” has long been my philosophy.  It’s how you face the bad times that define you. You make your own luck.  When I was made redundant in 2016, I gave myself a week to wallow in self-pity - oh how it hurt - and then I deliberately chose to act positively. “Pick yourself up.  Dust yourself off, and start all over again.”    I choose to keep trying and keep seeking ways to do better.  

Everything life throws at you, gives you choices. You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react to it. You may be the victim of something horrible, an assault or long term bullying, but you can choose whether you define yourself as a victim or as a survivor.  You control the messages you feed to yourself; that’s what defines your self-worth, not something external.  Sure, people want to be liked and valued by their peers, but if they don’t like themselves then they’ll never be happy.  How many people do you know who are still beating themselves up over something that happened 10, 15, even 25 years ago?  I can name a few.  They haven’t forgiven themselves for an event that everyone else has forgotten.  It’s just another reason to hate themselves.

There are so many people who measure their self worth by Facebook or Instagram, needing the constant affirmation of “likes” to feel whole. The most self-obsessed people are usually the most insecure, too wrapped up in what is happening inside their own head to notice what is happening to the people around them.  A year ago, someone complained to me that their boss never spoke to them and how hurtful it was.  Knowing this person, I wondered how many times they’d actually initiated a conversation with their boss and asked the boss about themself.  (I occasionally give this person a lift to events.  They never ask me about myself or events in my life, and I’ve known them to sulk if they don’t get complimented on their outfit.)

You always have a choice.  You choose how you face the day.  Another thing I choose to do is to treat other people with kindness.  They may be really grumpy, but I’d rather think that they were having a bad day and treat them with civility and kindness.  No, I am not a doormat.   Anger and aggression are defence mechanisms born out of pain.  Sometimes just asking “are you ok?” can diffuse a situation and, if you are prepared to watch and listen, you’d be amazed what you can learn about someone.

- Pam

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

On the Road Again

Another evening; another hotel.  

I’m sure I’ve started a blog post with that line before.  I’m travelling for work, visiting the SAP project team in their home office and staying in a nearby hotel.  It’s cut-over weekend and I’m down here until all the data is loaded.

Tonight’s hotel is yet another example of why I prefer either owner-run hotels with lots of character or the big, commercial chains like Premier Inn, where at least you always know what you’re going to get.  You may remember a weird hotel I stayed at in Manchester in March 2016:  so modern and trendy that there was no wall between the bathroom and the bedroom.  

Ring any bells?  To be honest, I can’t remember if I posted my grumble about that hotel here or on Facebook.  At least it had space, even if you could watch the tv from the shower. 

This hotel is worse.  When I stay in a hotel, I usually play a game with myself:  how would I furnish/decorate my room if it was converted into a studio flat.  The modular chain hotels are usually best for that game since their rooms are usually quite well thought out. If you ever want to convert a Holiday Inn into studio flats, I’m you’re woman.  I’d keep the bathroom where it is, put wardrobes along the wall by the door and, on the wall that backs onto the bathroom/faces the main roo. I’d build a small U-shaped kitchen less than 2 metres deep.  Throw in a sofa that converts to a bed, a small table with chairs  and plenty of shelves and, bingo, you have a space you can live in.

Not in tonight’s hotel.  It is another over-decorated, modern room, small and rather oppressive.  They have squeezed as much into it as possible,  There is nowhere to put my open suitcase if I don’t want to use the bed.  In the worst possible sense,  someone let an interior decorator loose.

At least, this time, there’s a divider between the bedroom and the bathroom, even if it does dominate the room.

I’ve just had  room service*, which I ordered over an hour ago.  It took 5 minutes to figure out how to place my order on the smart-phone-gadget the room has instead of a phone.  Call room service?  Only if you know which symbol to hit.  Naturally, the tray did not fit onto the one-and-only table top.

This was the best I could do.  That white thing at the back is a Dyson fan.  Why do you need a fan in an air conditioned room???  (The other side is a Tassimo coffee machine.)

Please God, I don’t get nightmares from the stripes!

- Pam

* Yes, I ordered room service.  England were playing** in the World Cup and, of course, I wanted to watch.  Also, the bar/restaurant downstairs were heaving.  Was it worth it?  No.  I’d have had a better meal in the Subway down the street.  Only the G&T was worth the wait.

** They lost to Belgium.  

Bibs-n-bobs

To bring you up-to-date with my life would be nigh-on impossible.  However, there are a few things I can share, so here goes.

I started a new job in March.  I’d been with the last company for 18 months and there was no hope of a permanent role emerging.  To be honest, much as I like certain people - and most people are lovely - I long ago reached the conclusion that I did not want to work there. For most of the last 18 months, I didn’t have a role - I never knew what I’d be working on from one day to the next.   I joined a project but kept getting hauled back into the forecast process.  Last summer, I started job hunting.  I had a few interviews, but nothing came of them.   It was only in the autumn that I was allowed to settle into the project and, in November, I decided that I’d stick things out until the project was finished. I stopped job hunting.  Naturally, that’s when things started happening.  My new employer found me via LinkedIn - they approached me.  It’s a 12 month, fixed term contract and I’m staff for the duration, not a contractor.

(I promise to write chapter and verse on what I’ve learned as a contractor over the last 18 months, but not tonight.  I started writing this post 2 months ago, so time to get it published.)

The new job is helping a business unit with their SAP implementation.  I’m not part of “the project”; I belong to the business’ finance team.  I’ve done the odd bit of “Finance” - balance sheet recs and the like - but my main focus has been on collating data for the Full Dress Rehearsal and Go-Live.  On Wednesday, I’m off for two days of UAT training, followed by another two next week.  It’s not end-user training, just enough familiarisation with the system to get through the User Acceptance Testing scripts but, as far as I’m concerned it’s wonderful.  I’m getting trained!  And I will be participating in UAT testing, which will help me familiarise myself with the system further.   

The Project team are aware of my precarious position as not-quite-staff and have promised me that I’ll do the full suite of end-user training.   That’s very kind of them.  While I was a JD Edwards One World trainer for 4 years and an Oracle end user for 10 years,  I’ve never touched SAP.  The chance to get another string to my bow, cannot be sneezed at.

- Pam

I'm a contractor - get me out of here

It's two months since I started my new job.  On the plus side:  it's closer to home so my mileage/fuel consumption is considerably less, they're paying me a reasonable rate, the job is (finally) keeping me busy and they are really nice people.  It's also very obvious that the Big-Boss-In-Charge-Of-Everything is not an absolute bastard.  There is considerably less stress floating around than in my previous company.  No stress puppies here.

On the downside, I'm a contractor.  I have no job security and I don't really have a role.  I'm picking up the pieces of things that others in the team haven't had time to do.  It took weeks for me to get busy and I don't know how long it will last.  I have also been battling a series of almost-colds - mainly sore throats - for the last six weeks, which makes me paranoid about getting something more serious because the job could evaporate if I got really ill.  (Yes, I have had this year's flu jab.).  At least my company now has money in it.

Yes, I now own a company.  In the UK, you have to contract through a company - either your own or an employment agency's.  It's the law.  Setting up a company is easy and cheap. The Companies House website will guide you through the process and charge you £12 for the privilege.  (We used to charge £200 for a company when I was in practice.)  Registering the company for corporation tax can be done at the same time.  Even registering the company for payroll taxes is a piece of cake (although I'm still waiting - a month later - for the payment docs so that I can actually pay said taxes).  HMRC even offer free payroll software that reports your numbers automatically to them.  

Setting up a company bank account, on the other hand was a a palaver that I would never want to relive.  It took over a month.  And that was to open an account at a bank with which I have had a 25 year relationship.  (I even own their shares!)   In the old days, you'd rock up to the bank with your company's Certificate of Registration, some ID, have an interview with the manager and that'd be it.  These days, everything is handled  online and by a call centre.  Nowhere on the paperwork is anything that asks you about your prior relationship with the bank; as a result, I had to prove my identity and my residency status twice.  To do that, I had to go into a branch and get them to photocopy my docs before they send them off via their internal post - a process that surprised at least one branch employee.  Why the hell they couldn't just do the vetting and the forms in the first place is beyond me.  It would have saved so much time and effort.

I finally got the bank account set up in time to pay myself my first salary at the end of October, and I'll pay myself again next week.  The payroll docs situation is equally frustrating, because I'm currently relying on guesstimating how much my take home pay should be, with a bit of help from the folks at https://listentotaxman.com .  Included in my calculations is an employee contribution to a pension fund* that equals what I paid in my old job and I'd like to bring that up to £1,000 a month, with the employer's contributions, but until I can run a draft payroll and test everything, I won't know for certain whether that is too much.  As well has having enough left over to actually pay the Taxman, I have to leave sufficient cash in the company to pay myself holiday pay and sick leave (if necessary).  And, of course, keep paying me after the job ends. Yes,  I can't claim unemployment benefits if the job ends, because I'm still an employee of my company.  (Grrr..... I can only go "on the dole" if the company winds up.).

The other reason I'm undecided about whether I like being a contractor is IR35.  IR35 is the Inland Revenue regulation governing "personal service companies" like mine.  The basic principle behind it is that directors of these companies are effectively employees of the companies with which they have a contract so, therefore, they should pay payroll taxes to the same level as if they were directly employed, instead of paying out their earnings via dividends at much lower taxes.  This is my first close contact with IR35 -  it was implemented in the year 2000, so post-dates my time working in the contractor unit at SL.  (Twenty years ago,  I spent a year doing the VAT and accounts for 300-odd computer and engineering contractors.  This was my first job as a trainee accountant.).   I think the rules are quite straightforward but, we'll see if I get tripped up.

In the meantime, I must be the only person in the country who is looking forward to a letter from the Taxman.  Come on HMRC.

- Pam








* UK equivalent of an American 401K or Australian Superannuation.

Tales of the Unemployed

If we aren't connected on Facebook then, chances are, you won't have heard my latest news.  My job finished on 5th August.  I was "restructured" out of the company.  It wasn't my choice;  I wasn't given much notice; and the business I looked after didn't have any say in the matter.  In fact, I had to break the news to their senior management.  (Being Finance, the line management that determines your fate and the people for whom you are actually working are frequently totally disconnected.)

Dark, God bless him, came down from Manchester to ensure I wasn't alone on my last day, took me out to lunch and made sure my sense of self didn't feel too battered. He is the most wonderful friend.  With his unerring sense of timing, he'd phoned me just after I'd got home on the day my boss broke the news to me and I cried all over him.  

It was the end of a brutal couple of weeks.  Definitely, the hardest part about leaving was saying goodbye to people.    Because I'm me (and conscientious), I wrote handover notes for whomever will pick up the work afterwards, and I made sure my business boss (Our Man in the Middle East) has copies.  I handed over my projects to someone I can trust to look after them properly.  I couldn't just walk out the door, leaving people who depended on me in the lurch.  (My line manager, on the other hand....)

Since then, I've spent the last two weeks licking my wounds and trying to figure out a way forward.  I have never not worked.  The plan of attack has been:-

1.  Update my CV, which I hadn't done since 2011.  It's been drafted and redrafted, and then summarised.  (The latter was the hardest part, so I enlisting the help of a friend who writes CV's for the National Careers' Service. Thanks Eva.)  
2. Updated LinkedIn.  At some point over the last few years, they deleted the job details I'd laboriously put up in ?2012, leaving only the headline job titles.
3. Signed on with the DWP/Job Centre.  No, I don't need the derisory £73 per week they'll be paying me as contribution based Job Seeker's Allowance but this was a point of principle.  I've paid into the system for 27 years, I'm entitled to the money.  Also, I want the NI "stamps" that come with it, which will go towards my state pension.  (I will probably rant about this in another post, later.)
4. Contacting agencies.  I have contacts at several so have been gradually dropping them all emails.   Two are putting me forward for jobs as I type;  a third, I shall see next week. I spent Friday morning meeting with three recruiters at the one agency, who were really positive about the job market for accountants in the Thames Valley.
5. Working out how to eek out my payoff.  I've got savings and a reasonable payoff coming to me a the end of the month, but my "hope for the best, plan for the worst" conscience tells me it could take considerably longer than I expect to find a new job that will pay me what I think I'm worth.  I've shut down everything I can think of:  the ISA savings; the share investments; the money being set aside for holidays; Audible subscription, etc.   The only things I'm committed to contributing to are the joint account for the mortgage/household bills and the housekeeping.  I reckon I can eek the payoff out to last a year without having to sell off any shares or raid my existing savings.
6. Working out what do with the money.   Beyond picking a savings account into which to shove it all for now, this is still at the daydream stage.  Each month, I'll transfer back the minimum I need to pay my share of the household expenses.  As to whatever is left after I get a new job, well, at the moment, I'm tempted to put it all into an FTSE100 tracker.
7. Spending my profits from the Employee Share Save Scheme.  Under the rules of the scheme, I had to either sell or transfer my shares from the scheme manager when I left the company. I'm currently sitting on a 44% profit so have decided to sell.  As agreed with DH, this profit will be my "mad" money, to spend without inhibition on whatever I fancy.  I'm thinking of spending it on a multi-fuel stove for the lounge, a new "fake Aga" for the kitchen (my beloved stove is 16 and showing its age), and getting my sewing machine serviced.  Probably not what he had in mind, when he suggested I have some mad money, but hey...
8. Figuring out what to do with my days.  This is actually quite hard.  I don't know how to be "a housewife".   I have never been unemployed.   I've been in continuous employment since 1992.   Even when I didn't have a job before then, I did agency nursing.  Without the Olympics or the European Football Championships to keep me entertained (as they did when I was stuck at home with my foot), day time television is mindblowingly boring.   I've started a daily To Do List, just so that I don't become completely zombified by TV and, instead, actually achieve some things.

- Pam

The myth of multitasking

I was on the phone to Our Man in the Middle East earlier in the week, discussing something in a spreadsheet, when the cheeky sod sent me a text message, conveying the sort of gossip you can't say out loud in the office then following it up with a question as to why I didn't reply.  "You know I can't multi-task!" I told him crossly.  He just laughed.  

(Our Man in the Middle East is the colleague I talk to the most from the new business I look after.  I'd already told him that when I read something, my ears shut off.  I don't think he quite believes me.  Anyway....)

As far as I'm concerned, multitasking is a myth.  I can only concentrate on one thing at a time; most people can't concentrate on two.  Oh, I can mimic multitasking with certain amount of planning, but it isn't real.  Take yesterday afternoon when I did two loads of washing, baked bread (in the bread maker), and listened to the cricket while cleaning up the kitchen.  That sounds like multitasking, but it's not.  It's just doing things in an efficient sequence.

Any project manager will tell you, the secret is in how you program the work.  I reckon that this is what women have always done, which is why the myth of multitasking came about.  For thousands of years, we watched the kids while growing the veg, feeding the chooks, tending the fire and cleaning the house, probably while figuring out how to make the end of a loaf of bread and 2oz of bacon feed a family of 6.   

It's not that we're concentrating on two (or three or four) separate things at once, rather we're working through activities from a mental list.  This is what women have always done and continue to do.  Fast-forward to the 21st Century and we are still doing it, only now we're planning dinner while waiting for the MFD to spit out our printing.  Nothing's changed really.

Multitasking?  Not me.

- Pam

Career girl? Who, me?

In the beginning, I didn't set out to have a career.  Initially I just wanted to take care of people, travel and get paid a living* wage.  Later, after I fell out of love with nursing, I added the requirement "to not get treated like a slave".  After a couple more years, I added "and not be bored" to the list.

For a while, when I first became an accountant, I did get really ambitious.  I wanted job titles, promotions, to get away from the tedious stuff, and to earn big money.  If you'd asked me then what I wanted to be doing in five years, I'd probably have responded with "I want my boss' job" or "I want to run the company".  The blazing ambition faded as the years wore on and realisation dawned that I'd never really got onto a path where my career could follow any sort of trajectory.  I'd chosen tax as my speciality and then discovered it wasn't for me; got rescued by a finance systems project but became a systems trainer, not a systems accountant (another blind-ended career path).  When I did, finally, make it out into the business as a management accountant, I got made redundant 18 months later, having still not achieved what I considered to be the necessary step on my career path: Assistant Financial Controller.  After a few interviews, it became blatantly obvious to me that the dream job wasn't going to happen - I'd have to settle for having a job, not a career.

When I interviewed for this company in 2006, I was asked what I wanted for my career.  I remember looking at Simon and Mike and considering telling them  "I want your job".  Instead, I told them that I just wanted to do something interesting - that I didn't want to be bored - and that I wanted to be part of a team.  I must have said something right - they hired me.  Since I was hired for one specific project, I half expected to be made redundant 2.5 years later, when it was due to cease.  The project eventually ran for 5 years. Occasionally, Mike and I would have a chat about what I'd do next, after "The Project" finished. (Worst case scenario was project controls.)  When things did eventually start winding down in September 2010, I was poised to become his assistant when I came back from a long weekend in France, got dragged into a meeting room and was told "I'm sorry but we're going to have to change to Plan B".  "What's Plan B?" I asked.  "Sergey's resigned.  You are going to have to take over Buildings Group"!

I took on Sergey's projects and responsibility for four project accountants.  I had a shiny, new job title "Project Accounting Manager" (later changed to Finance Manager) but it was apparent that the business didn't need me - they had never received much in the way of financial management support from Finance and had set up its own internal support systems to cope.  Anyway it was another 9 months before The Project finally left site and I had the time to consider the non-project aspects of my job and wonder why I wasn't involved in the business in the way that my peers (the other Project Accounting Managers) were involved in theirs.  

It was then that I got to know Tall and Dark.  At that time, Dark was the project controller on Sergey's two projects; Tall was the business' Commercial Director.  Since my month's work was front-end loaded, once that was done both of them would regularly receive emails from me: "I'm bored.  Do you have anything I can do?".  I lost count of the times I sat at my desk trying to figure out a way to do something which would add value to the business, something which would help me make my mark, convince the Powers That Be to involve me and use my skills.  I gate-crashed the monthly Project Accounting Review meetings ("PAR") - Mike had been invited to them, but I never was.  None of the business' senior management team were based in my office, so unless I made the effort, I'd never meet any of them.

Tall became my ally - often, the first I knew about the time and date of the PAR was when he sent me slides; sometimes, it was when his hand would appear in my field of vision, between me and my computer screen, holding a cappacino for me. Later, I would learn that he'd reference me in management meetings, saying "Pam and I investigated this..." or "Pam and I did that...", even regarding things where I thought my contribution was minimal.  (Not that I was at the meeting, you understand - I was never invited to anything - but information would drift back to me.).  Tall ensured that I got copied into internal reports/introduced to people/informed what was going on.  He mentored me; my job changed and grew.

I can date exactly when Tall and I became real friends and not just colleagues to a working lunch where he explained the arcane workings of the forecast file.   In the course of three hours, we shared a lot more than just his forecasting methodology.  We clicked.  

Work meant that Dark and I had to talk several times a day.  Early on, I went up north to meet him and we became firm friends. We'd talk about life, family and football, not just work.  Later, I discovered that he and Tall were best mates and, at some point, we became the "three amigos". A unit. A team.  We'd exchange hugs when we met, find excuses to socialise, use each other as sounding boards.  When Tall was shoehorned into Sales and Dark got promoted, our roles changed but our bond didn't.

Do you remember this lunch?  At some point during it, I told Tall that I was very contented with my lot, that I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing the job that I was made to be doing. 

It was the truth.  And it has remained true for most of the last two years.  Sure, there have been times when I have been driven almost to tears by the frustration of dealing with certain people in Glasgow - and there were other times, early on, when I drove home crying over how unfair it was that Tall was no longer Commercial Director while Dark was doing the work but not getting the recognition - however there was never a day when I wanted to work somewhere else.  For two years, my only ambition has been to be Tall's Finance Manager when he gets promoted to Vice President, with Dark as his Commercial Director.  I just want to work with my mates, my amigos.  I was really happy when Dark got promoted to Commercial Director in the summer - he deserved it.  When we were given a second business to look after - a new one, just beginning - it was fun scheming about how we'd make it work.

Since I only have the one ambition, I thought I was in my job until it either came to fruition or the three of us came up with a viable business solution and jumped ship.  I never expected the conversation I had a month ago with my new line-manager** - a conversation that froze me to the core at the time and has driven me to tears since.  His grand plan is to move me away from the business I know, away from my friends and support network, to take on a smaller business while at the same time taking over some of the corporate work that has been neglected/ended up on his desk because there was nobody else doing it.

Since when has a possible promotion felt so much like a bereavement?

It wasn't sold to me as a promotion. What I was told that day on the phone was that there might be somewhere else in the business that could better use my services while the new-to-us-came-via-a-merger-finance-manager was a better fit for my business(!) because he lives in the same city as Dark and the business' new VP.   (Somehow that logic only works when applied to Newby - it doesn't work when you consider that the business I now know i'm getting has its senior management in Glasgow and Manchester.)

Initially, I wasn't even being told what I'd get or when.  At that point, I was being asked to consent to something that was all hints without substance, without being told the details.  All I knew was that they were taking away my toys! It took another three weeks before I was told the details and longer before an announcement was made.

How on earth am I going to handover everything I know about my current business?  I can't just download my brain. This is not one of those companies with standardised processes for everything - where you can just slot in and out of a finance role - every business does things differently and I don't think we have ever completely followed the way our current region works.  (I don't like the flavour of some of their Kool Aid.)  Newby hasn't even been here long enough to grasp the few things we do have standardised.  We are too far into the Q1 forecasting for me to just do a handover and walk away.  Plus he had leave booked, right in the middle of it all.  Meanwhile the Finance Manager of my new business is handing over responsibility as quickly as he can... Which  leaves me with the lion's share of three forecasts to prepare, plus review meetings to attend, and the certain knowledge that I don't have enough hours in the day to do everything to my exacting standards.  (Oh yes, and from the kick-off of 10 days ago, when we got the timetable, the bulk of the work has to be done before the end of the coming week.)

So where the hell does this leave me?  I am exhausted, stressed out and pulled in at least four different directions right now. I've spent the last two days in forecast review meetings with Dark - a bittersweet  experience since a) it's for the last time (probably) and b) he keeps telling people to send me stuff/update me as part of the process, demonstrating how much he relies on me and how hard it will be to let go.  

I do not know what I am going to do.   I spent the week in France trying to come to terms with things, deciding whether I should stay or go find a new sandpit to play in.  In the end, I decided to stay for at least another six months to see how it all plays out - at least here I know ground rules - but I feel besieged on all fronts.  I don't want to fight again to become part of a business, nor am I certain that my boss will back me over the things that I think add value to the job (he doesn't like bespoke reports and I've always been left with the distinct impression that their way was the only way).  

Dark feels like his right arm is being cut off; frankly, so do I.  Tall is having his own work nightmare at the moment (not mine to tell).  I just hope that when the three of us go mad from stress, the PTB's put us on the same ward.

I'll let you know how this plays out.

- Pam

* A living wage by my definition includes earning enough to pay for a nice home in a reasonable neighbourhood, a car, books,  the odd meal out, one or two concerts/plays/operas a year, and not having to worry about how I am going to put food on the table or pay for my train fare to get to work.

** Yes, another one.  Long story.  Suffice to say that this one was number 2 in Glasgow and got promoted. I used to bang heads with him over stuff when we joined the region and it would annoy him that he didn't control me or my team.  I also used to regularly be surprised when I'd pop my head around his door to ask a question/say hello and find myself still there half an hour later, listening to him vent.

Another Airport; Another Trip

Heathrow.  6.30am.

I'm heading "up north" for my seventh Forecast Review.  No travelling companion this time - my business Head of Operations is flying from a different airport and Tall hasn't been invited to play.  (Dark has never been on the invite list.). While there are friendly faces in the office up there, my favourite Cheeky Chap had his job terminated a week ago.    For this three day trip, I am berift of playmates.

Bored, I am left pondering the inexplicable:-

1). Why had the flight time moved again? I'm catching exactly the same flight as on all other trips, but the departure time has changed for the third time.

2). When did businessmen stop wearing ties as standard?  I can see one man in a tie on this plane.

3). Why is that man on the same flight as me, again?  Must be the third time I've travelled with him.  I'm 99% certain he is a journalist (or some political talking head), which is why I recognise him.  Can't remember his name - think he's from ITN, which we rarely watch.

4). And, finally, the most inexplicable:  why do I always get one tiny drop of make-up on my tee shirt whenever I wear a white one?  Also, why do I never notice until it is far too late, even when I've checked immediately after making up?

- Pam

PS:  half way into my flight and I have another question:  why do BA's insist on teasing me by showing destinations in Africa and Europe as part of the cycle on the inflight map?  I'm only flying 300 miles north. [ pout ]

Is this thing on?

[ cough ]

Hello?  Is there anyone out there?

OMG!  There is!  [ Jumps up and down ]

Hello, how are you?  What's been happening in your life?  How is work for you?  And the family????

Errr.... The Blog?  Well...err... I didn't mean to go silent...Um....I lost my mojo.  It's not that I didn't want to blog - I just couldn't put one word in front of the other and...well.... time just got away with me.  (What do you mean it's April?  Surely, we're still in February?)

Sooo.... What has been happening?  When I look back over the last few months, all I seem to do is work, eat, sleep, go to the odd football match and occasionally knit.

The kitchen is finished.  And I love it.  And I need to take some photos to show you.  It is a joy to cook in.  Seriously, even washing up is a pleasure.  Did I tell you that it's got underfloor heating?  Sheer bliss to walk on at 6am.  As part of the work on the kitchen, we've installed an outside light on a movement sensor.  I walked into the kitchen one morning in February and saw a local black cat get the shock of his life.  He was walking across the patio and must have seen movement in the kitchen, so walked towards the picture window and triggered the movement sensor.  Poor cat look stunned when the light came on.  (Very funny though.)

What else? I'm still singing every Monday. My choir had a very successful performance of Bach's B-Minor Mass at the Cadogan Hall back in March.  It was so intense that I didn't register we'd finished when we sang the last movement and was expecting more music.  Our next concert is on 14th June, a mixture of Tippett and Benjamin Brittain.

As to everything else... I've played a couple of rounds of golf with my good friend, AJ - we're managing to get in a round a month.  That's probably the most frequently I've played in years.   I do think I need at least a couple of lessons - my swing is dreadful and my grip is all over the place but I don't mind playing embarrassingly bad in front of AJ - we don't keep score and really just use the golf game as an excuse for a chat.  (It's lunch, followed by a walk with golf clubs, followed by coffee...)

On the work front, well.... I joke that it is "all about the social life, really..." but it isn't.  I'm averaging 50 hour weeks.  During February and the first half of March, there were a few that were 55 hours.  My pregnant colleague's maternity cover lasted a week before he jumped ship and I had to throw my toys out of the pram before the situation was sorted.  I was still not allowed to hire anyone, but there is now someone responsible for her work in Glasgow, who I actually trust to do the job.

On the work social-life front, I did get to play in Glasgow with Tall when I was last up there for the quarterly forecast review.  Surprisingly, he got an invite to the meeting, too. (It was just like old times.)  We travelled up together, went out for drinks and a meal afterwards and talked until 2am.  A couple of weeks later, we teamed up with Dark and had another late night drinking chatting session, followed by meetings the next day.  We are a great team; we work really well together and we're friends.  If only the three of us could come up with a viable business idea....

- Pam

Don't Brood

If I have rules that I live by, then one of them is "Don't brood on the might-have-beens".  I have never seen the point of constantly re-hashing events in your mind, wishing the outcome was different to reality, while just reopening old wounds in the process.  After the first or second time - when you might possibly identify any mistakes made and figure out how to correct them in future - it seems to me that brooding becomes more about reinflicting pain upon oneself than a learning process.  Ultimately, it gets to the point where you think so little of yourself that you consider yourself such a loser, such a failure, that reinflicting old pain is deemed appropriate. (Or so it seems to me.)

So what has triggered my rant?  One of my team is starting maternity leave shortly and two weeks ago, I conducted interviews for her maternity cover.  Three interviews in, I found the perfect project accountant - absolutely wonderful, would hire her in a heartbeat.  Then my line-management pulls the plug.  Can't be done - we have spare capacity in Glasgow that has to be utilised first, etc, etc... 

I argue.  I lose.  I speak to the boss's boss.  I still lose.  I wander around furious for a few hours.  The implications to me are clear:  ever since we moved regions there has been a looming power struggle over my project accounting team, because we aren't based in Glasgow and not part of their project accounting hierarchy.  I know this.  I have always known this.  (I also know that regardless of what happens to my project accounting team, my job is safe because my business will still need a Finance Manager and that role is outside the power struggle.)

Reluctantly, I break the news to my team and deal with the fallout.  Suddenly, I have three people worried about their jobs and a battle of attrition as work drifts north.  If I have any say in the matter, that won't happen, but I know it is a battle I won't be able to win if the bosses decide it is to happen.

Firmly, I remind myself that there is no point brooding.  Brooding over whether I will eventually lose the team is just counterproductive - it won't help me stop it.  I can't control what will happen; I can only ensure that I do my best to demonstrate why it is important to keep my team together, by providing the best support for our business.  With that in mind, I consciously turned my thoughts firmly to how to best maintain business as usual.  The job goes on...

You can't always control what happens to you, but you can control how you think about it and how you deal with it.

- Pam

View from my commute

Thursday was a long day.  Thanks to two meetings, I had to work in our London office,  so left home at 6.30am to get the bus then the Tube.  The view on my walk to the office certainly made up for it...

That's right.  I spent the day looking out if the window at Tower Bridge, with the Tower of London in the background.

Sometimes, I feel very lucky living on the outskirts of London.

- Pam

Categorise us

These things are givens: my blue-green eyes;  the brown curly hair that refuses to be tamed (I joke "it wears me"); that I am a musician; that I'm Mensa-level bright; that I like puzzles and solving problems but can't do crosswords; my need to create and craft; that I'm a damn good cook and love entertaining;  that I am a bookworm; that even though my father worked in a factory and my mother trained as a dressmaker, I am inexorably middle-class.

While some a physical attributes or accidents of history, many of the above are labels I stick on myself.  The human tendency to categorise people always amazes me.  As a species, we are awfully judgemental. We go about consigning our acquaintances to labelled boxes, e.g. "shelf stacker" or "nice but dim" or "arty" or, my favourite from a friend, "so common they'd make TOWIE look posh".   It can be funny watching the reactions when the labellee doesn't conform to the labeller's expectations - have you ever had someone protest to you, "But you're not like that!" when you do something that doesn't agree with their preconceptions? 

I've mentioned before that I hate to be labelled, hate the assumption that just because I like one thing, I will dislike another. In any given scenario, you can only possibly present part of yourself to the world.  The core "you" will always be present but it's highly unlikely that your closest loved ones will see the same version of you as your colleagues.  I am aware that pretty much everything people might know about me depends upon where and how we met, for example, at work most of my department do not know that I play RPGs on the weekends. I'm not ashamed of it but it's only ever come up in conversation once, at which point, I out geeked the guy who thought he was the resident geek. They know I sing in a choir but it's taken some of them years to reconcile my taste in classical music with going to rock concerts.  Wonder what they'd say if they knew the last band I listened to live played bluegrass and the one before that played skiffle?

On the flip side, if you knew me through role-playing or choir, it is unlikely my profession would have an impact on you.  At most, you'd know I'm an accountant in an engineering firm.  If pushed, I'd tell you about the business I look after now, possibly about the project I looked after for 5 years. There are days when I re-read some of the emails I've sent at work and think, "my God, I'm good at what I do" but, outside the recipients, only another accountant would get the impact of what I've written.  Maybe that's why many of my dearest girlfriends have a connection to my profession and the job I do.  When the "Ladies of A" get together, we trade war stories about segmental analysis, complain about revenue recognition, share the triumph that comes from finally being able to take the static figures from the management accounts as presented in Hyperion and drill all the way down into the ledgers to find the primary transactions.

If you were watching us from a nearby table at a restaurant, you probably wouldn't notice until after the second or third cocktail since the conversation is always interspersed with stories about husbands and children and football and holidays and houses and hobbies and homemaking.  Until that point, from the outside, we probably look like any other group of middle-aged "ladies who lunch".  After that point, when the alcohol  loosens the volume controls, you might notice the lack of conversation about hair and make-up while we dissect the technicalities of the accounts we manage (although we might make the occasional detour into shoes...).  Another case of appearances deceiving.  Not fitting in to neatly labelled boxes.

I am not a stereotype.  Don't try to make me one!

- Pam







(Incidentally, one of the funniest assumptions that has ever been made about me is when my Head of Project Controls and I went to check into a hotel in Glasgow and walked up to the reception desk together.  Having told the desk clerk that I'd booked two rooms, indicating my male colleague as I did so, the clerk promptly asked me if we'd like two keys to my room! J's face was a picture.  I hate to think what mine was like.)

Stopping for breath

Hello.  How was your weekend?  Mine was very productive.  This is the first weekend since the start of May that I didn't have work to do, and I made the most of it.  Friday, I finished work at 12, then met a friend for lunch and a very l-o-n-g chat (lunch finished at 6pm!).  Saturday, we went to the farm shop, the supermarket, then hit the garden.  Today, I collected Howard from the airport, cleaned the house, cooked up a batch of base, prepared dinner for tomorrow night as well as tonight. I even snatched an hour or so sitting in the garden today, knitting and listening to the cricket on the radio.

It might not sound like a completely fun weekend, but compared to the previous few it was bliss.  I've spent so much time working in May, that just getting a few hours to potter around the house was lovely.  There are two bank holidays in May, after the first - Monday 6th May - I worked 50 hours in 4 days.  You know how I normally work half days on Fridays?  Well, I left the office that Friday after 9pm.  We went on holiday on the Saturday - Malaga in Spain, I may tell you about it sometime - got home the following Saturday at 4pm and by 6pm, I was back logged on and worked until midnight.

And so the cycle continued. Early mornings.  Late evenings. Back and neck rigid with tension. Two more weeks. Two trips to Glasgow.  Two reviews with the Big Boss.  Final submission date was Thursday.  I went home on Thursday night, leaving my work laptop in my desk, feeling lighter than I had even while on holiday.   And being able to take this weekend off was a joy - housework or not.  We haven't quite finished, tomorrow has the potential to be nasty but, thanks to this weekend, I can face the day relaxed.

I hope your weekend has left you in a similar state.

- Pam

Office memo

To:  Tall and Dark

Cc:   Handsome

=======================

Chaps

You come under the collective banner of "the men in my life". One way or another, I spend a considerable part of my waking life either talking with you or doing something with you in mind. There are days when I feel that I've acquired two more husbands: Tall and Dark (I'm married to Handsome). You two are my "office husbands", to listen to, cajole and worry over as necessary.  I do appreciate being your sounding board. And I'm very fond of you both. (Right now, with all the changes that have gone on at work, I feel like I've also acquired an office "Dad" - our new Commercial Director who is responding to things in a bewildered, "Father of the Bride" kind of way.)


How did it all get to be so complicated?  I remember at Christmas telling Tall that, daunting as the learning curve was, I'd loved every minute of the months since we'd changed regions and "long may it continue".  I was considerably more involved  in supporting Tall and it was fun.  I did wonder how long it would last before something came along to spoilt it all because, as I said then, "I'm not that lucky". And I'm not.  Turns out, the answer was less than six months.

It's been an interesting month since Tall, Dark and I met in Manchester (the "three amigos").  I can't talk about most of it on a blog - that would be both unwise and unfair - but I think that, if he is allowed, Dark will become a worthy successor to Tall in his (former) Commercial Director role.  While I have a very similar relationship with Dark as I do with Tall, unfortunately, Dark hasn't been allowed to take over all of Tall's role. (It's been split, which is how we acquired Dad.) But, just as I did with Tall, I anticipate finding myself sitting on a hotel bed in the late evening somewhere in Glasgow, in my best Dana Scully mode, typing up debriefs to Dark on my laptop:  downloading my brain into an email, setting out who said what and why, and trying to identify the relevant (and the logic) in what was discussed during a day of meetings.

I can't thank you enough, Tall and Dark, for the glimpses you've given me into the commercial aspects of running our business.  Since our business had no financial management support until I came along 2.5 years ago, the majority of your colleagues just view Finance as transactional with nothing else to offer (and that includes your big boss).  You know I've tried to change that - and you've tried to help me - but it's been like being stuck outside an invisible force-field, watching but unable to hear or participate in what is occurring inside.  Dad was certainly of that view when he took over his new role, but you have both tried to persuade him that it is a mistake to exclude me. It may be working - at least he's decided we need regular, fortnightly meetings.  We'll see what happens with them.

Will Dad succeed in his new job?  I don't know.  He seems to look at me (and you two, too), like a father confronted with his teen-aged children, wondering what-on-earth they're talking about.  He hears the words, but they aren't making sense at the moment.  Can we help him to understand?  I hope so.  But he has to put us in a position where we can help him.  Keep me or Dark out of the information loop and there's not a lot we can do to save him when he starts to drown.

Only time will tell.

- Pam

Cheers!

Cheers.  Such a simple word to say but one with so many meanings.  The British use it as a toast when they clink their wine glasses together, presumably derived from the old toast "be of good cheer".  They use it to say thank you, ("Cheers!" I said to the man who held the door open for me in Glasgow today).  They use it to informally sign off emails when "Kind regards" is too formal to convey the level of friendship involved.

Today, at lunch, we used "Cheers" to say "Thank God that's over and didn't it go well?" when we clinked our wine glasses together.  We'd survived our first quarterly forecast review with our new Bigger Boss and it was far less traumatic than we'd expected.  Seriously, at 10.30am, we were expecting the worst:  some unexpected, unprepared-for question that knocks you sideways and results in a Sir-Alex-Ferguson-hairdryer blasting from the Bigger Boss. 

It didn't happen.  No difficult question.  No hairdryer moment.  Instead the meeting was relatively convivial and reasonably relaxed. I doubt all these meetings will go that way, but it was a good start.

Cheers!

All change, please. All change...

Work-wise, the last month has been a bit of a whirlwind.   At the end of October, I had an email from my Commercial Director, "In view of the recent announcement....[blah, blah, blah]...".

"What announcement?" I replied, ignoring the rest of the email.  (Curiosity should really be my middle name.)

He phoned me.  One of the PTB's* was about to announce that our Business was moving from one of the non-geographic UK regions to the other.  Since Finance sits outside the businesses we look after, that could have all sorts of consequences, ranging from business-as-usual to redundancy for me and the members of my team.  While he certainly didn't want the latter to occur, not belonging to the business means that our fate was completely out of his hands and he couldn't control it.

Hanging up, I turned around to see if my boss was at his desk then went over and dragged him into a meeting room, demanding if he knew what was going on. "I'd heard a rumour this was going to happen..." he told me but, as far as he knew, nothing had been finalised.  He'd take it up with his boss (who's responsible for the finance teams of both regions).  Big Boss was due in our office tomorrow.

The next day, I stalked Big Boss's usual desk.  When he hadn't arrived by 10am, I asked Boss whether he was actually coming in.

Errr.... No.... Boss had got his days mixed up. 

However, this wasn't something I could leave alone. It wasn't just about my job or future - I have four people reporting to me who needed to know whether or not they had jobs, preferably before any official announcement was made or any gossip had reached their ears.  Had Boss and Big Boss discussed it? 

Yes.

Big Boss's response could be summarised as "if it ain't broke, don't change it".  So business-as-usual, then. We'd be moving to the other finance team and I'd have to report to another financial controller.  We broke the news to my team. Two days later, I spoke to my new boss on the phone.  Definitely business as usual.  I'd keep my team, keep the projects that I look after, and keep my management accounting responsibilities.  (Actually, I'm not sure even now that New Boss knows about my projects.)  On top of that, I get a shiny new job title:  Finance Manager.

I broke the news to my (relieved) Commercial Director, "Sorry - you're stuck with me", and we set about determining how life would work in our new world.  Tuesday's business trip was about that:  meeting the new management; working out who are the influencers; going over the budget and other numbers with my new boss and trying to figure out whether we're providing all the information they want from us in the format they need.

Our next big hurdle is Friday.  Friday morning, we'll be back in Glasgow and up before the new region's management for our rolling forecast review.  Keep your fingers crossed for us, please.

- Pam   (Oh, yes.  And that announcement?  It was finally made this week, over a month after the whole process started.)










* Powers that Be

Another Opening, Another Show

Or, in my case, "Another suitcase, another hotel".

I'm in Glasgow tonight, staying in a new-to-me hotel around the corner from the office. It's a nice place. My most pressing desire, right now, is to figure out how to switch off the air-conditioning. Yea gods! Is it noisy!

I have two more weeks of flights and hotels. It isn't like the "old days", when I'd turn the Toy right at the end of our street, then head west or north for a hundred miles or so. Air travel has certain constraints: the two items of cabin luggage rule (which means packing my handbag in my case); the 100ml liquids rule (which leaves me hoping the hotel has decent shampoo, since I left mine at home); and the take-your-laptop-out-of-your-bag-at-security rule (which inevitably means juggling multiple belongings like an apprentice octopus).

This definitely isn't the glamorous side of business travel. Certainly, it's more fun when you aren't travelling alone (this trip, I'm travelling with my commercial director), but glamorous it isn't. Nothing is glamorous about being up at 4am to get to the airport before 6. Nothing glamorous about never seeing the city outside the office you are visiting. (Although you know when you've done a flight too regularly when the cabin crew know you by name. (Ahem. Boss.)) Still, I had a friendly greeting from several colleagues and that is worth it's weight in gold. It is nice to know you're liked by people you only see a couple of times a year.

Now, if I can only figure out how to switch off that damn fan....

- Pam

Excuse me, I'm lost.

Somewhere in Paris near the Sorbonne, 10.35pm.

Sounds so glamorous, doesn't it?

Telling your business unit management, "Sorry, can't make your meeting. I'm going to Paris for a training course" has a certain ring to it. It conjures up the Eiffel Tower, the Seine and the Isle de la Cite. Just shut your eyes for a second and picture it. Beautiful, elegant women in chic clothes; handsome, charming men.

[Sigh]

The reality is so different.

Paris, like other large cities, has its posh, glamorous bits (where the tourists go), and its hard working, commercial centres (where visitors only go if they have to for work). Just as I wouldn't expect a tourist to go to Dandenong or Slough, you won't find them anywhere near our Paris office. Unless they were lost.

The office is out by the Peripherique, miles from anywhere that you may have seen in the movies. It could be anywhere in the western world - you wouldn't know until someone spoke. I've spent most of today in a sub-basement meeting room. No window. No view.

Welcome to the real Paris. About as far from glamour as you can get.

-Pam




PS: On the bright side, I have some great colleagues and I've enjoyed catching up with them. We're voting to have a project accounts meeting in Barcelona (no chance of that but one can dream).

Bed finally

At midnight. Twenty hours up and counting. Grrr....

Did I mention I am tired and sleep deprived? Hope I didn't accidentally insult anyone at dinner in my sleep-deprived haze.

[sigh]

Work functions.