Shoes, Lights, Humans.

Well, after 53 weeks of relative isolation, I've returned.

3 days of wearing shoes so far.. ending with the XYL enquiring as to if I'd just taken my shoes off last night as I prepared for bed. They did indeed... stink.

Now I commence the 2 days working from home I do a week. 

I've had conversations with people - face to face. Something of a novelty. Not much positive it seems though. The cleaner tells me he's a few months out from being given a redundancy package; they're being replaced by contractors.  Yes, we really are that far behind the game that we still think contracting out work to an external party will somehow work out for the best when the cleaners we did have were not that well paid, and were given way too many buildings and very few hours in which to clean them, which already results in them being less than properly cleaned.

Other conversations involve marriages having broken down having both parties shacked up together trying to function in the same house 24 hours a day. I get it. Really.

It hasn't been a "bad" week so far. Just different. I've had to deal with overhead LED lighting that is all too bright, going back to working in 21C server rooms with air cons blowing cold air over me whilst it's been raining outside... and the noise.

A lot of that kind of work that I'd put off for the past year needs to be done. Not important as much as it's just now in my way and needs to not be. 

In the middle of all of that are my other duties. Like being a parent. The uncertainty of things means that school pick ups have been returning home to work. Having to do school drop offs has meant going in late. It's all a little fluid. 

I've had an ongoing issue with my pay grade for the past 16 months or so. When I moved into system administration, I was left on my old pay grade as a tech for a while. I understood - the position wasn't advertised and it was a lateral movement; especially given that no one really knew how I'd go taking on the job. I went through a period of working with the chap I wound up replacing. During that time it was largely a "learning" exercise - he showed me what he did and why. My job was to observe and "learn". Eventually he moved on and took over. Then changed everything. There was change coming anyway, but I found a lot of inefficiency and things that I generally didn't like so I brought about change. 

A decision from high above was made that I was functioning at a "senior" level and should be titled.. and compensated appropriately. A reclassification process exists for this very thing. It's mind numbing and geared towards testing whether you really think you're worth it. I was given some advice that we needed to make this document "readable" by a non technical audience. So we made it readable. 

This document took months to write, revise and fine tune. 

It went to the committee that hears this. A committee that "can't be wrong" - any suggestion of this is very, very hard to justify. That committee decided based upon said document that my job wasn't very technical and didn't carry any significant responsibility. They did accept the new title, and decided that I should be classified only marginally higher than my last position. 

Probably not the smartest thing to say to one of the very, very few people who can literally nuke the entire organisation from orbit within a couple of keystrokes and put them back 30 years. 

Appealing such a thing is a moot point - it just doesn't happen. The only feasible option was to resubmit - waiting the required 12 months. So I did. I rewrote the entire 22 page document complete with the technical complexity, risks associated of doing.. and not doing the job and that highlighted the amount of responsibility associated with a job that many organisations would have an entire team performing. 

It only took 4 months after that intended committee hearing to find out that they'd finally accepted the request at the pay grade intended. "Finding out" was initially a quick word and handshake from my boss whilst at the pub for a send off lunch for a co-worker after he'd received a call en route.. followed by an "official" notification 2 weeks later. Back pay would only go as far as the date of the hearing. Pity about the year and nearly $10K before that.

So, finally I'm getting paid on the grade I'm supposed to be on. Which is still about what half of what other organisations pay for the same role. My only real annoyance now is that the back pay was paid with my wages... and taxed with them, resulting in 50% of that going straight to tax rather than the bills I'd actually like to pay. I suspect though that my tax return will probably clean up the rates just nicely this year with change to spare. Which would be nice. I wouldn't mind a couple of 14TB hard disks so I can start spinning down shelves of disk arrays.

In other news..

The "new" Intel NUC I've been using as my desktop PC - I'm over running it out of memory. I gave in and ordered a pair of 8GB RAM modules to bring it up to 16GB. No doubt I'll managed to max that out too, but it might improve the stability of the machine. No matter how I try, I wind up with too much open. Web browsers are so inefficient these days. Just think - we used to be able to open Netscape on a machine with 4MB RAM. Now a Chrome tab will burn 30 times that... to open Google.

I've barely looked at a radio this week. The IC706 has been left on 40m receiving SSTV. With a bit of luck I might get some fiddle time in the next couple of days to try my luck.

6.35am. I really should be getting ready to take one harmonic to kinder and preparing for work.