Well, I got an email from work the day after I came back from my holiday. 'Hope you had a good holiday, we need to catch up, can you come in for a chat on Wednesday'. That was ominous! Barely a word for 5 months, so I sort of guessed what was coming and I wasn't surprised when it came. My job/role is one that has had to be culled. To be fair, I knew that most everybody else has gone back to work and the longer I was the only one not in, the sooner I was going to find myself out of work. I knew that my colleague in the warehouse was coping and my delivery work was being shared round or being done by someone with nothing else booked. 11 years, the longest I have been in one job and not bad as I only went there as a fill in whilst I looked for a job the last time I was made redundant!
So now I'm still employed until mid November and on full pay, but it means that I can't start looking for a new job for a while, but I can start getting on with stuff without worrying that I'll get called back in half way through something. If I get a job before my notice finishes I can lose some or all of my redundancy pay. The thing to do is to try and find something with two or three weeks to go, which is enough to say to someone that you can start in a couple of weeks as opposed to I can't start until the middle of November.
The next thing of course, is what do I want to do? I worked for 30 years in Civil Engineering but couldn't get a role when I was last looking for a new job. The last 11 years I've been working for a Removal Company; mostly deliveries and collections all over the Home Counties and North London, working in the Archive storage warehouse retrieving boxes and files for delivery as well as organising a bar coding system. All this interspersed with household and commercial removals, packing customers house contents as well as moving them. Very varied, almost everyday different, very interesting and on the whole, very enjoyable. When I got the job, we had to make some adjustments at home, but my work/life balance was much better. I was leaving for work at the same time, to get to work an hour earlier and if I left work on time or 10 minutes later, I was home an hour earlier than before! Gave me more time with the family.
Do I want to do deliveries? Do I want to work in a warehouse? I don't really want to do removals, not that I think there'll be much chance of that. I don't think I could go back to Civil Engineering, it's all moved on so much. Standards change, all the software will have changed beyond recognition, and it would mean sitting in an office 8 hours a day, don't know if I want to do that again. Thought I could be a YouTuber, but then I've only got a face for Podcasts and I don't think there's the same sort of money in that. I think I'll keep looking to see what's out there and go from there. The only downside (I'm sure it's not the only one) is that lots and lots of people are now in the same boat, and many of them are already looking!
We had all the palaver with the fireworks a few weeks ago, which I put down to Eid. Apparently some people didn't restrict themselves to that and carried on for days and weeks, and some of them very late into the evening, so much so that there has been a bit of a thing in the local paper. People have been phoning the Police to complain, only to be told that it is nothing to do with them and the people should phone the Council. The Council have replied by saying that it is a Police matter if it after 11pm, as fireworks are only allowed after 11pm on Bonfire night and New Year. You can be fined if caught (that is if anyone can found out who is setting them off, unless of course it's your neighbour, but usually it's kids/youths in the street, so by the time anyone has complained, they have gone!).
The wallpapering! I've got it all down, most of the holes, gaps and dent are filled but it's ground to a halt, little progress over the past few weeks. A number of other remedial things need doing before I crack on, namely, I think the outside wall would be best if re-pointed as the stairway often appears a little musty. The glass screen on the bath really needs replacing or a new seal on the bottom, as occasionally when showering, water goes down the side of the bath and through the floor and down the hall wall and I don't want that on my new wallpaper! Although trying to find a screen anything like the same is of course not two clicks and there you are!
And to top it all, the washing machine has broken. I think that it is a screw that has come adrift on the spyder that holds the drum in place. I'm confident that I could take it apart and fix it, failing that, you can get a new complete drum for just under £100 and it would only take a morning(!) to fit. I spoke to the local repair shop and he told me that you can't fix them, it comes as a sealed unit and their £170, plus £100 to fit making it almost uneconomical to repair. I didn't want to tell him that I'd just watched a YouTube video on how to do it. So we are buying a new one! I've fitted a new drum to the Tumble Dryer twice, I'm pretty sure that I could do the Washing Machine, but the wife needs the washing machine before the weekend, so she can get our sons stuff ready for him to go back to University!