I've just started the second week of my new job after a couple of months split between taking things easy and applying for jobs.
I had a few thorough interviews, which taught me a few things about myself that I hadn't considered too carefully. Apart from that, I spent my time doing very little, very slowly. I had planned to do all sorts of things after my previous job ended, but did none of them. As a consequence, I feel very well.
I also planned to move somewhere different and assumed fate would drag me to London. I ended up accepting a job in Bletchley, nearer to my house than anywhere I've ever worked (apart from when I was self-employed and only had to climb the stairs each morning).
Didn't someone else once write about discarding your initial plans?
So far, accepting this job seems like a good move. My first task is to rewrite some LAMP code of the worst sort: Red Hat, PHP, MySQL. I'd forgotten how awkward I found RPM to work with, and PHP really is as ill conceived as I suspected. I suggested that rewriting should involve FreeBSD, Perl and Postgres, and that's what we've decided to do. I've suggested we contribute some of our work back to the open source community, and this seems approved of. Fingers crossed.
So, we built a new development server this afternoon, having bought the parts late on Friday. The contrast of working in a small company (there are 5 of us) to a lazy, disorganised bureaucracy (as opposed to 7,000 of us) has really cheered me up. My previous employer didn't officially use Perl, yet I still used it to get my job done on time. One of my colleagues used XML::Twig to deal with a legacy database with 250,000 users, but I haven't a clue what his managers think he uses. You've heard this story before. My point is that I appreciate the change.
Unfortunately we listen to Radio 2 (for those who don't know: dull) in the office, but I'm sure I remember it being much worse. I suspect this shows I'm aging. It's mostly tolerable, occasionally good. Not the typical nu meejah thang.
So far, the most important thing I've learnt from my job is that Felix cat food in Scandinavia is called Pussi. I suspect knowing this might help avoid various embarrassing situations.
Pity it's not sold here(US). I'd love to walk into a convenience store and ask the fat woman with the straggly hair behind the counter if they had any.
