Inconceivable

The other day after work I was sitting on the couch and Emily decided that she wanted to teach me a new game. It was something that she’d learnt at kindy called sleeping tigers (lions or some other sort of big cat).

The idea of the game was to lie down very still and very quietly and not wiggle. If you wiggled you had to sit up and be a sitting tiger (or appropriate variant).

This idea puzzled me somewhat because the person that was suggesting that we play it was Emily. This is a little girl that can’t sit still to save her life, possibly second only to her eldest brother Michael (though his recent discovery of reading a good book has issued something of a challenge to his never ceasing activity). I mean if I had been told that she wanted to teach me a game where you ran screaming from one end of the house to the other and back again over and over and over … well that would have made perfect sense.

I never quite got around to playing sleeping tigers (or variant) with her because I was too stunned by the news that Caroline then provided me with.

The reason that she’d wanted to tell me about the game so much was that she’d won it earlier in the day at Kindy! Emily. Laying still! Longer than a heap of other kids!

Inconceivable!

Owa ta goo siam

So this weekend was the end of daylight savings. There's always stories about people that are an hour late or an hour early for various things and I always laugh at them.

Well Friday night I had a really crap night's sleep and kept waking up. At some point during the middle of the night, whilst awake I thought, “Oh well, may as well change the clock.” So I moved it back an hour and thought that at least there was an extra hour for me in which to try and sleep.

I was aroused from my slumber at 0730 (by the clock which I'd changed) by Caroline telling me that I had only fifteen minutes until I was supposed to be at Sam's cricket.

I told her to relax because we had an extra hour because of daylight saving ... and got about that far through the sentence before it clicked in my mind that I had to change the clocks Sunday, not Saturday.

And so I leapt from bed, readied myself bullied Sam into being ready and off we rushed to cricket ... only to find on arrival that there was no game this week! Arrgh.

Anyway, having changed all the clocks this morning, this afternoon, I drove Michael to a birthday party. I checked my wathc and we were on time, but strangely there wasn't anyone there when we arrived. “Odd for the people having the party to be late,” I thought (unless they're like us). I went inside and asked the woman that runs the sports centre where the party was being held.

“Yes, but it doesn't start until 2,” she told me. I looked at my watch. 2:15. I looked at her clock ... 1:15.

Yep, I had forgotten to change my watch. See the title of this post? Say it out loud.

Four

Today my little girl turned 4. It is hard to believe that its so long since I stood in the delivery room and heard a midwife say, “He’s a bit stunned … he’s a she!”. It was a day that exploded the house into pink and although it was only four years ago, she’s been such a dominant force in the house, it seems as though she’s been there fore ever.

Apparently yesterday was a day full of anticipation for her meaning that there was none of the usual afternoon sleep, just lots and lots of excitement.

And of course, attempting to get her to sleep last night was a bit of a challenge too. So this morning, on the big day itself … she slept in. Not a long time, but enough that I was ready to go to work before she emerged.

I was lucky enough to be coming down the passage as she wandered bleary eyed from her room, clutching the ever faithful blanket mkII. Obviously she was yet to come to terms with the fact that waking up meant that all those big sleeps that she’d been waiting for were gone and that this was the day.

I wrapped her in my arms and picked her up in a big hug as I wished her happy birthday and as the realisation dawned upon her, her face lit up with joy. By the time that she’d gone the extra 5 metres to see Caroline in our room, she couldn’t keep the grin from her face. Especially because she could see presents sitting there ready for her to open.

Once she’d extracted birthday hugs from all of her brothers, it was present time. The boys handed over the goods and as the wrapping fell away from the first present, she exclaimed, “This is my favourite, I really wanted one of these!”

I think it was Sam who asked her, “What is it?” given that they’d not seen what we bought for her.

“I don’t know!” She replied happily as she continued to tear away the paper. But she was happy anyway and that’s what its all about.

Busted

I had a phone call from Caroline then other week to say that the police had been around to the house looking for me.

Fortunately it wasn't anything too serious ... I'd gone through a red light camera. I knew that I'd done it, but given the time since, I had hoped somehow it would have magically gone away.

We were in a turn right lane and I wanted to go straight ahead. Despite waiting for the traffic to go from the lane to the left of me, I'd been creeping forward. When the lane was clear I pulled out through the intersection to go straight ahead (with the green light) when *poof* the intersection lit up like daylight. I'd entered the intersection in the turn right lane against the red light to turn. Busted.

I'd probably rant about how good it is that our police are spending their time chasing these things down whilst people are trafficking drugs to our children or something if I wasn't quite so aware of the fact that despite good intentions I was in the wrong.

Still, $200 is an expensive lesson that I really didn't need. Its not like I was trying to rush through at the last minute or anything!

Take your seats please

In the last thing that I got around to posting here (yes, its been a while) I mentioned the kids that I was ‘lucky’ enough to sit next to on the plane. It was something of a mystery to me as to how the hell they worked out the seating, but I’ll come to that.

When I first started doing a lot of flying, when I was working off-shore out of Singapore, I decided that my favourite seat was the aisle. I was much happier standing up to let someone out to go to the toilet than I was being the one that had to ask someone else to get out of the way all the time.

Recently, I’ve decided that I like the window seat for domestic travel. The trips aren’t long enough for me to need the toilet and you get that little bit of extra room from the curvature of the fuselage. Not to mention not having people reading from behind you when you’re working on the laptop.

I’ve not had much luck in recent times though as I always seem to get stuck in the middle of the row of seats and that’s the place that really gives me the shits.

I was happy on the flight to Brisbane last time to find that I’d managed to get an aisle seat for a change. Of course, there’s always the pot-luck of who you end up next to, but at least with the aisle seat, you can lean out somewhat (as long as you’re not getting bashed by the trolley).

On the day in question, I was sitting waiting and a family made their way onto the plane. Mum, Dad and two kids about 10 and 13. Glancing around, I knew that I was safe as there were only two seats next to me … so why were they slowing down as they approached? And why the hell were they stopping?!

I’m not quite sure how the seating of passengers on aeroplanes works, I’ve always assumed its something of a first in first serve basis, but apparently there’s also a little contribution from bastards incorporated.

Because Mum and Dad (or Mum and partner as I suspect was the case, given I never heard a child say Dad) climbed across the guy on the other side of the aisle and took the window and middle seat on the other side of the plane, whilst the two kids took the two seats between me and the window.

At least I had the window to lean into. Of course, we weren’t even off the ground before it started … “Mum, can I have … Mum, can we …” and of course every time that they wanted/needed something, they had to lean across in front of me.

I gritted my teeth, hoping that they’d settle down once we were in the air. I jammed the headphones of my ipod in my ears and turned up the volume to drown them out. Then I pulled out the laptop once we were up in the air and started tapping away, keeping myself entertained (because this was lucky enough to be a Jetstar flight where there is no free entertainment to keep pesky kids from shitting one.)

That kind of worked … except for the feeling that the kid next to me was reading everything I was writing (which at the time was my entry titled, Blood Sucking Vermin).

Of course, then the boy needed to go to the loo. I stood up and let him out. He came back and I was ok for 10 minutes until his sister had to go. Then of course 15 minutes after she came back he had to go again. When he was gone this time she sat with her parents as the guy on the other side of the aisle had had the foresight to move to the only other vacant aisle seat on the plane (and despite my desire to move, I didn’t want to move to a middle seat!) so when the boy came back he could at least move across and sit in the window seat away from me.

She didn’t stay there though and towards the end of the flight we were back to our original seating positions. Eventually the reading of my writing started to piss me off and so I inserted a sentence that went something along the lines of, “Its very rude to read what someone else is writing when they haven’t invited you to …”

That ended that problem.

On the flight home, I was about 2 hours early in getting to the airport and thought that at least getting there that early would ensure that I would be adequately seated. But when I checked in, there was only a choice of 5 seats on the entire plane … everyone of them in the middle of a row.

Those bastards incorporated had shafted me again.

But this last trip I beat the odds. Online check in is my friend. Both trips I checked in first thing in the morning before I left for the airport. Not only did I score window seats, but I had the added and these days rare fortune to have an empty seat between me and the person in the aisle.

Happy days.

Blood Sucking Vermin

One of the things that I inherited when I moved to the new contract was a contract employee whom we had engaged to provide services to our client. He hadn’t started and so I was left with the task of taking him on when he arrived at the contract

I’d had nothing to do with the interview process and I’d had nothing to do with the preparation of the actual contract either. That was all completed prior to my own arrival on site.

He was on a fly-in fly-out arrangement and from day one he started to give the impression that he was there to make money off us.

One of the first discussions that I had with him was that whilst we had him in a hotel where his meals were covered, I would like to move him to self-contained accommodation, figuring that he’d get sick of the restaurant food pretty quick. But no, he wanted to stay in the hotel.

Things really took a turn for the worse when he submitted his first invoice. He was working excessive hours, without having been through relevant approvals and had also booked the time that he spent flying back and forth and claimed all his taxis. Now the contract was silent on this matter but he claimed that it had all been verbally arranged with my predecessor.

Lucky for me, I’m on good terms with my predecessor and called him to confirm. He denied that this was in fact the case. Strike 1.

The next little bit of carry on was the chair. He claimed that due to having had an accident some time ago, he had a bad back and therefore needed a high-backed chair with arm rests for OH&S reasons. I wasn’t about to just go out and buy him a chair, especially when our client is moving premises soon and not taking any of the existing furniture with them. I suggested that I’d talk to someone about swapping chairs with him to avoid this.

The next day I came in to discover that after the person in question had gone home, he’d decided to help himself to the chair, before I’d even had a chance to talk to them about it. Needless to say the chance of a chair swap after that had plummeted in the probability stakes to chances equally those of one Mr Buckley.

It wasn’t long after that that we started to get complaints from the people that were working around him about thelow productivity and the amount of time that he was spending on the internet and making personal calls.

It was starting to piss off a lot of people that someone that had been brought in as a contractor, at expensive rates seemed to be getting away with all this crap whist they just sat down, heads down, bums up and got on with the work at hand
Then came the bit where he spoke to me about the food. He was sick of the restaurant food, was he allowed to eat anywhere else. I told him that if he kept receipts and presented them and stuck within the company’s guidelines, he’d be reimbursed (what a generous fool I was).

Having he outlined the dollar amount in line with the policy it was a matter of only 20 minutes or so before he came back and asked whether he could just get the money from petty-cash! Now generous fool I may be, but I do recognise a rort when I see one. I knew what would happen … take the money from petty cash, buy a $2.50 pie or something and pocket the rest. Not on my watch.

Of course, when he submitted his invoice the money worked out to just about exactly what it needed to to maximise the return to him each night. And to top it off, every receipt was from the same Indian Restaurant. And though there was an ABN on the receipt, it wasn’t clear where the restaurant was, so I had to hold off on investigations as to whether he was doing what I suspected (which was that he’d come to an arrangement to get a receipt from them to maximise his return regardless of whether or what he ate).

It was enough to tip things over the edge, so I arranged a review of his contract and cut off any food reimbursements. I changed him from the expensive hotel to a self contained apartment.

Then of course he had an issue with the fact that he’d been “far away” from work. So far as North Adelaide in fact. After telling me about the fact that he was going to have to swap the car that he had in Adelaide with the one that his wife had in his home state, he asked how he was going to get to work?

I told him that there was a very efficient bus service that ran into the city from there and that I’d even pay for his ticket. But he doesn’t catch buses, he doesn’t like them. So I mentioned that he’d just told me that he had a car in Adelaide ….

“Oh you must be forgetting that I said that …” he started. But I got him out of my office.

Then, following further reports that his performance was inadequate, we pulled him in and gave him a dressing down, telling him that unless things improved, we would have no choice but to terminate his contract.

I waited to se whether he would actually manage to do this. But the next little step was the one where I got an email from HR where he was asking about the out clause in his contract. The writing was certainly on the wall.

But drama being drama, it would have been too good to have just ended at that point. I received a complaint from the client for whom he was working. One of the other guys in his area reported that this contractor had offered to pay him to complete the work for which the contractor had been engaged!

No more straw on the camel please, this ones f&%^ed!!

So this morning we went down the path of terminating his contract. He claimed it was no surprise, denied that he’d offered to pay someone else to complete the work and accused us of failing to meet up to conditions that had been verbally agreed prior to taking on his contract (despite me telling him to his face that the person that he said had made the agreement with had no knowledge of it!)

There’s going to be a couple of legal issues to resolve around what he expects to be paid and what we’re prepared to pay that I have yet to resolve due to the fact that he was never going to agree with our position and that I wanted him out of the building.

I escorted him down to the ground floor and left him at the lift well. I thought that that would be the last I’d hear of him until he was back in Sydney and chasing the extra 7 days payment that he was saying we would have to cover to terminate him.

I myself had to get to the airport to board the plane that I am currently sitting on to get to Brisbane.

As I wandered down to the gate to await my plane to take off, my phone rang. It was one of the girls in the office.

Apparently this blood sucking, oxygen wasting, not fit for the sole of my boot vermin had fallen down some stairs and was in an ambulance on his way to hospital!

Now where I left him, there were two steps down to street level. I had the girls check whether there had been any report at the reception desk or via security as to whether someone had fallen. There were none, but it was indeed those steps that he claims he managed to fall down.

Last report that I had just before boarding was that he’d gone back to the accommodation and that an ambulance had taken him from there, but that he had a suspected broken rib and wouldn’t be able to fly out on the plane that we’d booked him on this afternoon.

I’ll have to get an update when I arrive in Brisvegas...

And the kids that I’ve been so so very very fortunate as to sit next to on this bloody flight are a matter for an entirely different post!