and things went downhill from there

It's been more than a week since my last post, but you get the idea.

We were debating dinner plans last night, tossing around cuisines and restaurant names, as well as ideas for things that we could make from home. atara floated the idea of lentil soup, and I commented on how I would not object to adding more lentils do our diet. This led to atara pointing out that I had not made mujadara in some time.

When I pulled it out and dusted it off, I discovered that the recipe called for brown lentils, and we only had green ones. They have very different cooking times, but I made do. I had to put the lid back on the pressure cooker and added another three minutes to the time, but it came out perfect after that. I've added notes to the recipe for next time. Even if we'd had brown lentils, the brown basmati rice I used was still too firm after the 10-minute cook time dictated by the recipe.

We had a bit left from last night, so I nuked it this morning for breakfast. I topped it with a fried egg and a light dusting of habanero powder. It probably didn't need the pepper powder. I added it anyway. It was good.


I got a message in Teams on Friday from the manager who brought me on-board with my current contract. He wanted to chat about "non-work related" stuff. Turns out it was work related to the extent that he is quitting. He has nothing else lined up, and no plans beyond doing a bit of travel and spending some time with his family while he plans his next steps. He's not the first to quit during this project, and he won't be the last.

I suspect very strongly that the recent resignations (and upcoming ones that are planned, but that the company doesn't know about yet) all relate to a toxic bully who was recently promoted. He's the kind of person who talks the good talk in the back rooms. Senior management love him, but anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work with, or for him absolutely abhor him. When my contract comes up for renewal in June, I may make renewing it conditional on never having to interact with this person in any way.

One of the steps I had to take in incorporating myself to be a contractor was to create a corporate bank account. Presumably this means that in order to get paid from this gig, I will either need to put myself on the payroll of the corporation - which gets into the messy realm of payroll taxes - or pay myself dividends from the corporation. Either way, the tax implications are going to be a bit intimidating.

But this is all predicated on me actually getting paid.

The fun thing with this bank account is that because it's a corporate account, the bank naturally needs to take a service fee out of it every month, so each time I checked on the account to see if I'd been paid, I just watched it in the process of going more and more overdrawn. I finally transferred $40 into it from my personal savings account just to stop from being killed by penalties. And I'll probably have to report that as taxable revenue, even though it came from post-tax money that I transferred. Ugh.

Well over a month into my contract, I still haven't been paid, and I began to wonder if I had accidentally signed up to do charity work for my former employer. I mean, I'm enjoying the work, and I get along well with my co-workers, but I've been pouring a lot of brain power and hours into this project, so I was kinda hoping for some kind of compensation.

I started digging around some more - pouring through the terms of the contract, and sifting through other documents on the placement company's website, and the best I could find was that pay day was on the fifteenth of the month. So I waited. The fifteenth came and went with nothing going into my account. They had a lot of "the Monday following" rules, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until the first Monday after the fifteenth. I checked my account on Tuesday; nothing.

I had been submitting my hours faithfully, and I'd been getting correspondence back from the placement company advising me that my hours had been processed, so I began to wonder if there was an issue with the transit number, or bank account number I'd sent them for my account. I also started sifting back through all of the early correspondence I'd received from my boss at the railway to see if there were any clues or gotchas hidden in there.

I looked through one batch of forms he'd sent me, which was mostly to do with confidentiality agreements and the like, and guidelines that were actually for him. In among them was a PDF that may as well have been entitled "Principles of Quantum Entanglement" for all the bearing it appeared to have on me. Its name made it clear that it was for the employer, and not the contractor, but I decided that I should probably give it a read so that I could say that I had exhausted all of my options before sending an angsty email to the placement company.

It was the pay day schedule. There was no hint at all in the name of it that it had anything to do with remuneration, but there it was. It was like somebody had gone out of their way to purposely obscure the purpose of the file.

And when I read the file, I was no more impressed. Any work done in a given month would be paid at the end of the following month. I started at the beginning of last month, but I won't get paid until the end of this month - nearly sixty days before my first cheque. I'm glad that I wasn't depending on this pay cheque. If my account is still sitting at ~$30 at the end of the month then I'll start raising heck.

I received an email from our Employee Services group on Friday, and it was only by dumb luck that I actually saw it. I was entering the payroill codes and hours that our Project Manager had sent me for all my project work this month, and rather than filing it in the usual "everything that lands in my inbox" PST folder, I decided to file it into a more specific folder for payroll-related things. As I was filing it, I noticed that the folder I was putting it in was flagged as having unread messages. That folder should hot have any unread email because it is literally where manually I file my pay stubs, and emails tangentially related to them after I've read them. Either I had been filing things there in my sleep, or (more likely) Outlook was auto-filing things there. Since I have no scripts set up for filing things to that folder, that struck me as odd.

When I peeked into the folder, I discovered that Outlook has been auto-filing any correspondence from Employee Services into that folder. How ... helpful.

The one that caught my eye was a note that had come in earlier in the afternoon addressed to me and my manager, asking, "Why are you still working?" They were very concerned because my retirement date is set for September 1, and at this point I should be sitting at home using up the rest of my vacation time. The fact that I was still at work was causing their system to kick errors."

I sent back a polite, slightly puzzled reply saying, "I m still at work because I agreed to extend my retirement date to January 1st at the request of my manager."

They did not take that answer with a lot of grace, sending back a panicky email that copied in Pension Services saying that I needed to advise them of such changes because both they and the pension department needed to change the dates and fill out the appropriate forms.

I sent an instant message to the author of the email saying, "You should probably talk to [senior department member] when she comes in on Monday because she is the one who handled this back in early/mid July, and both she and the pension group confirmed that everything was updated to show my last day as January 1, 2019."

He replied with an exasperated, "LOL". It turns out that she was the one who raised the alarm, and was panicking over the fact that I was still working, when I should already be on pre-retirement vacation.

If they want to kick me out early with a full pension, I am not going to argue that hard. My department would find themselves in a rough spot since they had planned on me being around until the new year, but I'll happily take money for sitting at home.

Our water heater is acting up ... again. Everything seemed fine when I had a hot shower yesterday morning, but when I went to wash dishes later in the afternoon the water was only hot-ish. I checked the breaker, and all seemed well, so I let it be and by evening it was pushing out hot water again.

This morning atara complained that the shower turned cold on her after a few minutes. This is the same behaviour it exhibited when the lower element died a couple of years ago, which leads me to suspect that the replacement element is likely at fault. It has probably been long enough that it is no longer under warranty, so I guess I'll have to get somebody out this week to replace it again. When they fixed the lower element earlier, they put in a 1500 watt element to replace the 1000 watt element that had been there. It's a 2000 watt circuit, so if anything, the lower element should have been under-driven. If it failed again this soon, I can only guess that it was faulty. Bugger.

The past month has been a series of ups and downs at work. In one week I was informed that I would be required to complete Locomotive Engineer training this year, and I was to arrange the best time with my boss. Later that week I noticed I got a modest bonus on my pay cheque for something cryptically described as a "CEO spotlight". I knew that my name had been put in for an award, but I'd expected to hear something before having a weird line item show up on my cheque.

Last week I had such a rough go of it at work that I had both my boss, and later my director call me at home in the evening to apologize. Then I got a letter from the CEO the next day telling me that I was doing a wonderful job.

I know that they like me there, and I like the work I do and the people I work with but ... I am tired of working for a company where my bosses feel the need to call me after hours to say they are sorry. I've seen this place go from a flawed company that I could still recommend as a decent employer to a place where I actively steer people away from applying. I knew we were in for a rough ride when we had a change of CEOs a few years back, because the guy coming in had a nasty reputation. There was a steady exodus of people higher up in the ranks who suddenly found opportunities with other career paths, or abruptly decided it was a good time to retire. They knew what to expect.

Our new CEO took that as an opportunity to replace them with people who embraced bullying and intimidation as a viable management style. Even though he is gone, his own replacement shows no sign of addressing that. About the only thing he has reversed from his predecessor is to go on a hiring spree to help fill some of our decimated ranks after his predecessor's incomprehensibly deep cuts. Even if we get some of our numbers back, we will never get back the valuable knowledge and experience we lost.

Anyway, as I have said (or at least alluded to) in earlier posts, I am 90% sure I will be pulling the pin later this year. I want out of this toxic environment. I'm too young to just slide quietly into inactivity, so I will have to find something productive to fill my time. Either I will find some part-time work to fill the void, or volunteer to work as a cat cuddler at the Humane Society. I think I would be pretty good at that.

­Tonight's journal entry is brought to you by Tommy Wiseau's brilliant movie The House That Drips Blood On Alex.

It's like The Room, only more self-aware.

I returned on Friday from two weeks at the head office. This time it was not for training though - they wanted to get me out there for project work. My boss has a sizeable number of reports that need to be moved off of stand-alone lab machines into a more stable and supported environment. You can't see me rolling my eyes in the last part of that previous sentence, because when I say "supported", that is with the caveat they are all probably going to be moved to another platform next year. Why would we move them now, rather than wait until the new, even more stable and supported platform is ready?

That's a good question.

Our CIO has decided that he does not like MS Access, and he has mandated that it will be gone by the end of the year. Since these reports all run out of Access, we need to move them before the end of the year. Sadly, the scary number of machines running outside of IT that are processing large volumes of business data through MS Access are not being migrated. Our CIO has no idea how much information that is critical to the business is being processed by the business itself because IT has cut itself too thin to do the work for them. The new year is going to be ... interesting.

My counterpart from Toronto was also out at the head office, so even though I was not keen on flying out there for two weeks, I was glad for the chance to hang out with him again. We've worked together for years, but the last time we got to meet in person was almost ten years ago. I must say he is ageing better than I am. The trip was fun, and educational, and productive, and very, very tiring. They decided that since we we (that is, me and my counterpart, but nobody else) should work through the long weekend to make it worth the expense of flying us out there. After twelve straight days in a row, getting up at 5:30 every morning starts to get a bit old.

My director took me for coffee one morning on the second week, and he had a number of interesting things to say. Some of it was probably slightly privileged information, but I have a knack for seeming reliable, so all of my managers have tended to share secrets with me. By far the largest part of the coffee chat though was him finding different ways to paraphrase, "Please, please please don't retire next year." He was all-but begging me to consider sticking around a couple more years. He and my direct boss have both confided in me that they consider me their top developer, so I can understand why they might be concerned over the thought that I want out.

This is doubly so when they know they are also losing two other very senior developers to retirement next year as well. What they don't know is that they are also probably going to lose their best system administrator as well, because he's got a job lined up with another company in the new year. We are bleeding people and knowledge at an alarming rate right now, and I don't see the flow stemming any time soon as long as our current CIO is at the helm.

I admit that I am torn over the idea of leaving. This company has been a big part of the larger part of my life, and I'm not really sure what I will do with myself when I retire. I love the challenge, and I like the work that I do. I like the people I work with, and I appreciate being appreciated. Unfortunately, that's all wrapped in the layer of this toxic department that our CIO has created.

Also, with the possibility of a strike in the running trades looming next year, I foresee them pushing me back into the engineer training program sooner rather than later. It's not that I don't want to learn it, but I don't want to cope with the misery they have been inflicting on other managers who are qualified in the running trades. My boss said that he would do everything in his power to keep me out of the program if I agreed to stay, but he admitted that it might be out of his hands. Nice of him to promise something that he knows he likely can't deliver. I guess the thought is there.

On another front, I took Monday off to make up for one of the days I worked through on the long weekend. I'd had a mental list of things I wanted to accomplish that day, but in the end I just went over to the clinic to get some blood sucked out of me and then came home and vegetated in front of my computer. I was still a bit burnt out from my trip.

The blood work was interesting. I am not a fan of needles at the best of times - in fact, I daresay I love them like Superman loves Kryptonite. They are the acid to my base. The beef gravy to my vanilla ice cream. When I started counting how many vials the nurse pulled out as I sat down, I knew I was in for a rough time. Fortunately I seem to have finally got past the part where I come close to fainting every time I get a needle, but I had to work hard to stay in my happy place this time.

It wasn't so bad when she first stuck in the needle. I was also still holding up as she filled the first two flasks. What almost did me in was when she decided that the blood was not flowing fast enough, and she started readjusting the needle in the vein, pushing and twisting it around a bit until she found the sweet spot again. After six subjective hours, it was finally over. I escaped with my life again this time, but someday I may not be so lucky.

I had a weird, work-related dream last night.

At the start of the dream I wasn't actually working, rather I was just out with my younger brother and we happened to be down by the tracks watching them move cars. In this case, the cars were being moved by somebody who was obviously a contractor, because rather than a locomotive, he was driving a Semi that had been modified to run on rails. He was tied onto about a dozen cars, and was trying to back them around a fairly tight bend into what I assumed was a storage siding. The guy was having trouble getting the cars to move, and finally he floored it and they started to move. I remembered part of my training about the dangers of applying too much throttle when pushing around a corner, and even as I thought that, one of the cars in the middle of the cut jumped the rail with its trailing set of trucks and began bouncing along the ties.

I hopped of the car and ran toward the guy, frantically waving a stop signal at him with both arms. He stared at me for quite awhile, pushing this derailed car up the rails before he finally stopped. When he stopped, the slack ran out and the car hopped back onto the rails. Naturally he did not believe me about the derailment, even when I pointed to the trail of broken ties. He yelled at me about how I was killing his productivity, hopped back into his truck, and floored it again.

This time he managed to jackknife and derail the whole track; cars went everywhere.

He was livid. He started screaming at me about how this was all my fault for putting him behind, and how he was going to kill me and my brother. By this time I was back in the car (because he had at least cleared the crossing) and we both agreed that we should probably report this incident - not the least reason being that he was threatening our lives.

The dream transitioned to the office, where I was looking for somebody who might care about a contractor who had derailed a dozen cars and threatened to kill an employee and his family member. The office was mysteriously empty, but I finally managed to track everybody down in one of the large meeting rooms. One of our project leads was out from the head office, giving a talk about swearing in the workplace. The focus of the talk was not what I'd have expected though, focusing on how swearing has been shown to be good stress-reliever, and is a valuable tool when employed respectfully. She illustrated a respectful use of swearing.

"Our new director is a cunt."

Everybody applauded - well, in fairness I did not. I was a bit appalled, thinking, "That's not really very respectful at all, even if she used a fake Aussie accent when saying it. Our new director is actually very nice."

It was about this time that I began to suspect that it was a dream, and I woke shortly after.

It has been a little while since I updated here, so I am trying to remember where I left off.

I think I mentioned the email I got that wanted me to show up for 3 1/2 months of intensive training on very short notice. The news on that is currently a holding pattern. The foot that I injured last year had been troubling me, and after pestering my doctor about it for months, he finally sent me off for x-rays. When I booked a follow-up appointment with him (to renew my prescriptions in case I got sent out of town, and to find out the results of the X-ray), he admitted that he is not an expert on feet, but that there was no obvious breaks or bone spurs. On the other hand, there were clear signs of swelling. He instructed his front end staff to refer me to a specialist.

The hemmed and hawed over it before finally recommending that I go to the Pan Am Clinic. It's a walk-in, first-come-first served clinic, though they prioritize by severity. They took down my details and gave me a number. Forty-five minutes later I saw a triage specialist who took down more detailed information, including the name of my family doctor. Then they told me to return in about four hours.

I had another two hour wait before I finally got in to see an actual doctor, though when I saw the condition of people who they were taking ahead of me, I did not begrudge the wait. He poked and prodded my foot and ankle, asked me a few questions, then called up the x-ray. When I described what had happened last year, he said that the x-ray confirmed it, and he then exactly described the symptoms that I would be having now because of it.

In a nutshell, when I pushed off with my left foot to straighten a draw-bar, the strain caused one of the small bones in my foot to dislodge and cross over one of the other bones. When I was flexing the foot a couple of days later, the pop I felt was the bone snapping back into place. In the process, it tore the tendon. I probably should have gone to see a foot specialist at the time, but it happened over the long weekend, and by the Tuesday, it was feeling much better and seemed to be on the mend.

The problem now is that when the tendon has suffered scarring, and it healed too short. As a result, I experience pain from walking, and shooting pains when walking on uneven terrain, navigating stairs/ladders, or otherwise pushing off from that foot. You don't want unexpected, shooting pains in your foot and ankle when you are working around large, industrial equipment.

Now that I have the formal diagnosis, I need to set up an appointment for physiotherapy where they will use ultrasound and lasers to essentially damage the tendon again and stretch it out properly as it heals. Does not sound pleasant. I also need to get some paperwork filled out for work to indicate that I am under a doctor's care until further notice, and will not be available for training in a safety-sensitive position.

ON ANOTHER FRONT

Over the winter I started buying instant decaf coffee to drink in the evenings. I used to buy ground decaf, but it always took me so long to go through a bag of it that it was invariably stale before I got to the end. With the instant decaf, the coffee is bad from the get go, so I can drink it at my leisure.

I have been trying a variety of brands in a quest to find the least awful of them. A couple of them were actually surprisingly drinkable, but the most recent one I bought was a German import that is vile. I had this misguided idea that Europeans know good coffee, so if it was from Germany, it must be good. I conveniently forgot that there are probably still old Soviet factories operating in some of the more remote parts of eastern Germany, and that this horrid product probably came from one of those. It tastes like coffee that was infused with despair and then had all the joy distilled out of it.

When I was out shopping last week, I found a coffee substitute in the organic food section of the store. It was a brand that I had never heard of, made from ingredients that sounded only vaguely familiar. I was both intrigued and repelled at the same time, so naturally I bought it. I made a cup of it the day that I brought it home and it's ... a thing. I tried it again the next day, making it slightly stronger, and adding sugar. It was a ... slightly stronger, moderately sweet .... thing. I can't really come up with adequate words to describe it. It's not what I would call good, but it's not really that bad either. I cannot claim that I enjoyed drinking it, but neither did I dread each sip.

I had a bit of a rough day today (had to spend a few hours dealing with work-related support issues), so this evening I decided to round out the awful with some decaf. I had the German crystals in my hand and briefly considered throwing them in the garbage, but on a whim I brewed up a cup with 60% of the German decaf, and 40% of the coffee substitute.

Oddly enough, the result was actually pretty good. I don't know what weird alchemy happened in my coffee cup, but apparently two wrongs can make a right if mixed properly.

A couple of weeks back the CBC morning show was giving some air time to a young woman who was talking at some length on the topic of cultural appropriation. The concept is not new, as it reflects the natural flow of memes and influences across different cultures when they meet. Our western culture is a result of millennia of intermixed religions, cuisine, traditions and language. English is a bastard child of almost too many different languages to count.

Lately - especially among the Tumblerina crown - there is a growing use of the term Cultural Appropriation in a negative light. The suggestion is that people gain a kind of inherent copyright on their language, style of dress, food, music and other things that fall under the shroud of their cultural aegis. This girl had made it her life goal to publicly shame people - mostly those with a higher profile in the community - whom she considered to be guilty of engaging in cultural appropriation.

I don't know what goal she pursues with her end game, but I imagine it's that she wants every culture carefully socked into isolated silos, with no cross-blending of ideas. While I am pretty sure she presents herself as a champion against racism, she seems to be chasing a means to encouraging the kind of isolation and ignorance that leads directly to it.

I think that the concept of cultural misappropriation is one of the dumbest things to come out of this century so far.

On another front, every time I start to think that maybe I'd like to keep working past my earliest retirement date, my company gives me start reminders of why I want out. I will miss the people, and I will miss the feeling of being part of a larger thing. I love being one of the old timers who has forgotten more than most of the newer folk have learned. I was joking with one of the others in my seniority group about how the top three of us had about 110 years of experience between us. Also, my director has made no secret of the fact that he's a bit scared of losing any of the three of us. We are not as technically skilled as the newer folks who have more schooling, but we have a very deep business knowledge, and we actually understand what the data we work with represents.

I got a call at 4:20 this morning from my immediate manager who had a bit of a panic attack over whether one of our key jobs had run properly (it had). At around 10 this morning I got another call because we'd had some issues with a patch on one of our Linux servers (always give us more grief than the Windows servers) and it caused the revenue numbers on our morning dashboard to be low. I was on and off the phone for the next six hours before they finally released me.

I have to be back on again at 1:30 tomorrow morning for another four hour stretch to monitor everything that runs because they're having fainting spells over the idea that the same problem might recur.

For most of those four hours I'll just be listening to the phone and levelling up my rogue in WoW. Time better spent sleeping, IMO.

On that note, I'm off to bed to see if I can catch a couple of hours nap before the long night begins.

This is something I won't miss after I retire.

Our CEO toured the office today. Our GM led him and his small entourage past my desk at a brisk walk, waxing poetic about the marketing guys who sit in our little area of the office as they passed. Just as they were about to round the corner she waved generally in our direction and said, "And these are IT people who do some kind of support stuff."

I don't suppose I am really offended by it, as ignorant and dismissive as it was. I am just as happy to fly under the radar of the top brass.

We knew that he was coming, and she reminded us twice last week when she stopped over and implored us to clear our desks of any evidence that they are used for real work. The CEO likes clean desks. I don't know how he'd have been able to spot a messy desk at the speed she was dragging him through the office, but I guess once you get to that pay level you can pick out a zen bamboo from a blur in passing (we're not allowed any kind of plants in the office, and those little bamboos were specifically mentioned). Curiously, they had them in the break room and washrooms when we first moved into the new office, but I guess word must have got back to the top brass.

He was in town to hold a town hall. It was halfway across town, so I did not bother to attend. I had too much work to do, and I figured I could get the condensed version of it from all the folks around me who drove out to hear him. All I know of the meeting so far is that there was a fair contingent of unhappy folks from operations who were directing a lot of very pointed questions at him. Many of the questions centred around the systematic bullying and harrassment happening in the company at the moment, but the guy who was describing the events does not speak English as a first language, so it was hard to get a good description from him. I'll squeeze the others for more details when I see them tomorrow.

One of the marketing guys just got back from a stint of inspecing and repairing railcars (yes, they are forcing managers into doing that as well as being conductors and engineers). Thanks to the deep cuts by our previous CEO, we are desperately short in a lot of departments. He said that while he was out there, he was chatting with one of the mechanical department heads about the situation. They are trying to address the shortage, but word has gotten out about what a wretched place we are to work.

They put out calls to twenty applicants for interviews, with the idea of hiring 5-6 of them.

Only one person actually showed up.

I got curious, so I checked a couple of online listings where people can read about prospective employers. Our company had comments about it like, "The pay is good, but the morale is abysmal."

The weather was freakishly nice here today, so we put down the top on the convertible and headed up to the park to collect some Poké Balls.

The weather was absurdly nice yesterday too, but I spent the better part of the day on and off the phone, logged into my work machine because they pushed out a new executive dashboard this week. They as in not me. Even though I volunteered to help more than once over the months¹ that this thing has been in development, I and my co-worker (who both know the business rules that drive this thing inside and out) were shunted aside so that the star programmers could work on it.

When the report went gold on Thursday, the business immediately complained that one of the key metrics was wrong by almost a factor of two. During all this development time, none of them had thought to run these numbers by the business for validation. Mind you, my co-worker had mentioned to them on many occasions that their numbers were wrong - until they politely told him to stuff a sock in it. They insisted that their numbers came from a different source, and would naturally differ slightly.

Or, in this case, by about twofold.

Fortunately, I produce these figures in another dashboard that is related to, but not part of this one. My numbers are right. I spent a good part of yesterday working with the our director and the business to pull the numbers from the back end of my report and feed them to the new one.

Speaking of work, I got an email on Friday instructing me to report to the head office for another two weeks of simulator training, starting on the 14th. I guess I had better book my flights and hotel tomorrow.

Sigh.

¹By months I mean close to two years.

---

There were a bunch of these set up in the woods by the river when we were walking through the park today. I like the slight haze that this shot captured (sunlight off the lens I think) because it adds an air of mystique to the shot.


All of the summer plants are long gone from the Leo Mol gardens, but they've left in the fall vegetation for now.


The years have not been kind to Queen Victoria in this bust. That, or too many years in Winipeg have driven her psychotic. That will happen.