I totally sympathise with this report that mentions that 12 million european workers have asked for a cut in salary or work shorter hours due to the amount of stress they are suffering and the lack of a quality of life in their (permanently shrinking) personal life. Now I wouldn’t have thought people would have been asking for a drop in salary OR shorter hours – I would have thought it would be both. At one point a couple of months back I was seriously considering reducing my hours by 10% by requesting to take every other friday off. That would mean a drop in pay and it would be really hard if I ever needed to go back to working 5 days a week again.
Sometimes I wish I had the guts to answer the phone like they do in this BOFH piece
I submitted my cv online this morning to a company that sounded like they had an interesting job and I wanted more information on it. By the end of the day I had 7 emails to the same address (with the email I used this morning) with the same subject “Personal details update link” from 7 different companys with 6 different email names (and 7 domains). All of them welcoming me to their company and asking me to update my details with a unique userid (all different) and telling me how my data is stored under the data protection act. I don’t remember accepting to have my details passed on and I certainly didn’t want that much spam! Say away from jobboard.com
I’m fed up with having my lap heat up every time I use it at home so I’m on the lookout for a decent laptop cooler. The ByteCC looks good and has had favourable reviews but it doesn’t look like it would be any good on the lap, but good for a desktop holder. The Acrylic cooler looks a better choice and similar to the CyberCooler. The Laptop desk does not need any power as it doesn’t actually use fans so I’m not sure how effective it would be. I really need to see/try one before I purchase it. I wonder if Argos do one? (no they don’t)
I’m staying at Jamie Oliver’s parents pub this weekend. When I found that out I knew the food was going to be delicious. The first night I had swordfish steak – and that was massive! Really tasty too. Last night I decided to try ostrich as i’ve heard a lot about it, but never had a chance to eat it. It doesn’t taste like chicken though! It is a very dark meat, hard to describe. The taste is very powerful though. Although I enjoyed the steak I don’t think i’d have it again though. Tonight is the Sunday roast – mmmmmmm!
I went into Cambridge yesterday and did a bit of walking around the city. One of the colleges was graduating, so there were loads of people in gowns, and some in tophats! I just wish I had brought the camera with me, but I was expecting to be working the whole weekend so hadn’t bothered 🙁 The college buildings are really impressive and looked really good, although I don’t think I’d want to study there – too posh for me. The daft thing is that the Park and Ride that I took into the city centre stops at 6pm so I wasn’t able to go to the cinema as the bus would have stopped before I got out the cinema 🙁