Two weeks

It's been about two weeks since my last blog post, and that's a bit rare for me to let as much time go by between posts. In reality I've been quite annoyed over the last two weeks, especially annoyed over the last week. But there is a bit of good news, and we'll open with that.

The Good: my job has been retained at my employer and I have survived the latest round of job cuts. I haven't been doing much singing and dancing about this, especially at work and that's because this was a deep cut and a lot of really good people lost their jobs, and this includes several people I could call my friends. It's a difficult position to be in, really. I want to be excited but I feel so badly for them at the same time. Had I lost my job, well, that would have completed the Great Circle of Crap for 2009 with everything that's happened in my personal life (and it would have likely dictated that I would have had to leave the area in search of employment). But thankfully this has not come to pass and I'm going to start at the current company for the for as long as they'll keep me.

The Bad, or really, the annoying: One of the Philadelphia crew came down for a visit and I met him at a local pub one evening. For reasons that I can't yet figure out my credit card (actually my check/ATM card) was given to another patron who left with said card and did not return it. Luckily I only had to deal with that single erroneous charge but I had to cancel my card all the same. This left me with no access to an ATM and only a credit card to purchase anything with. This was very annoying. I now have my new check/ATM card but NOT my new PIN hence if I need any cash it's a trip to the bank, and forget about getting any cash on the weekends! It's like a trip back to the 80's I tell you. ATM access is something I just take for granted! My credit card has a PIN but I have no idea what it is, in fact I purposefully forgot what it is because it's just such a costly way to get cash. Back when I was married (well I'm still married, but I'm not living at home) I could just get Kelly to get some money from the joint account. No such luck these days! Anyway, I hate to gripe about something fairly minor but it really has been an inconvenience.

Next annoyance: lack of money. I had two unexpected rather large expenditures over the last couple of months and it really took a bite out of my cash reserves. I'm now in a spendthrift mode of living and hoping to make a fair chunk of change with some extra overtime, at least that's the goal. We'll see how well that works with the company currently complaining about the amount of OT money they are paying out. In fact one of the Philly managers told me that the extra work I'm doing above and beyond, at night on my own time should be comp "pay" not OT. And technically this work isn't OT at all. Basically how it works is if I work an extra two hours after normally working hours on projects that are not part of my job description I get a decent chunk of change. if I do that three times a week for a month it works out not to be equal to an extra paycheck but it's close, and it's a fantastic way to build the bank account back up. With that in mind, and the fact that I'm still not making what I was in 2001, I think it's a good deal for both me and the company. I'm a cost-effective employee to begin with and the work I'm doing won't get done otherwise as the other members in the group (some) have no interest or technically can't (a couple others).

*****

Ok, this just in. I should not let two weeks pass before my next blog post. I'll likely ramble on pointlessly as I have just done. Lesson to me, less pain for you.