Month: September 2001

Blogger seems to be having a few problems, so if updates become infrequent, you’ll know why.

Further annoyance for today: my mobile phone was supposed to be delivered this evening – no sign of it. Guh.
So I’ve just cooked myself some utterly splendid chicken fajitas as compensation. I haven’t been cooking for myself so much lately – by that I actually mean *cooking* as opposed to just warming up a readymeal. Sometimes, cooking for one gets to be a bit of a drag. I really should do more cooking though, not least because it is cheaper than constantly buying readymeals, but also because there is more variety and it is possibly healthier too.
Of course, what would be much better is to be cooking for two, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Most amusing sight of the day: as I was driving to college (yep, borrowed the car to transport my pot plants home from repotting at the nursery), I got held up in a queue of cars. Looked over towards the college buildings, and on the edge of the college grounds, clearly visible from the road for all to see – a couple having a shag. Cue: lots of people tooting horns, laughing and shouting – didn’t seem to put the amorous couple off though!

Gah. College. GAH.
Reasons why Chichester College can be crap:

• I asked (twice) ages ago what books I should get for this term. I received no advice on the subject. Having a £50 voucher that I had to use before it expired, I used my initiative and bought the two top books from the CIM reading list. Guess what? …yep, they’re not the books we’re going to use. Oh well, they won’t go to waste.
• Tonight we had induction. In fact, it wasn’t really induction. It was sitting around filling out forms that we could easily have done at home beforehand, duplicating the same information on four forms (what no integrated database? like, don’t they practice what they preach?)
• As an afterthought, our tutor remembered to tell us that the nights had been changed for our classes – good job he remembered to tell us rather than wait for us all to get pissed off when we turned up needlessly on Thursday.
• Oh yeh – the forms – the wrong ones of course!
• And, on top of that, we couldn’t complete our enrolment because either we had the wrong forms, or because we need to get our ILA application cleared first.

Guh. Guh. Guh guh guhitty guh.

There has been a lengthy discussion today on the UKbloggers mailing list about what it takes to get a job, with comments from recruiters and recruitees.
For me, it seems that it comes down to the old marketing principle of “exchange”. The employee has to offer what the employer seeks, and the employer has to offer an appropriate something (pay, working environment, flexible work patterns, etc.) in exchange. From an employees point of view, the most important thing is to offer an employer what they want – not necessarily skills or knowledge, as they are things that can be learned, but more likely an ability to solve problems and to learn, coupled with enthusiasm and an appropriate personality. These are things which (it could be argued) are harder, though probably not impossible, to learn, but if you can gain the right qualities in these areas, I reckon you are going to have an advantage over other applicants for a job.
At least I hope that that is the case, because I like to think that that area is one of my strongest, stronger than my academic record for sure.

This post would work well if spoken over the tune from “My Sister” by Tindersticks.

beer tonight with Paul F, Rick, Paul, Dave, Simon, Paul S, Arron, Lynne, Leah, Kristian, Anthony, Joel and everyone who knows me. Tired now. Anyway, Paul F is ok, which is good. And I had a long chat with Leah on why we live in and love Chichester, and the sacrifices you have to make for being in such a place – a subject on which we definitely agree.

Have just been descended upon by Bora and his mate Dominic – always a pleasure, and an opportunity to catch up on “the gossips” and generally put the world to right.

Such flattery.

Gary has sent me through the details for his stag weekend extravaganza this weekend in Kilkenny, which will feature drinking, girl hitchhikers, drinking, golf, drinking, t-shirts, drinking, me sharing a bed with the groom(!) …and then maybe a bit of drinking if we have time. I think I’ll pack extra Alka-Seltzer.