one year later
It's been more than a year now since my last upload to thisaedan.com. She's been a busy gal and writing rather fell by the wayside. During the COVID lockdowns after I disappeared from most social media apps and this little corner of the internet became my new outlet for thoughts, creativity and life hacks. It was the ideal place to brain-dump the ideas and learning curves of the past few years and I enjoyed doing it.
But then life picked back up again didn't it. The lockdowns eased, the offices, coffee shops and (most importantly) pubs opened back up again and I found myself without the time of day to blog anymore. It was sort of inevitable I suppose, and maybe a good thing too. I was starting to find myself taking the blog a bit too seriously. I was coming up with loads of ideas and thrashing lines of verse into the Notes app on my phone, but I'd then overthink them until eventually they'd never see the light of day. It turned from something I enjoyed doing, to a chore I felt obligated to do. But now I've had a good break away, you might start seeing more bits and pieces on here. Though I wouldn't go checking everyday just yet!
Life updates are in order then I suppose.
I'm still living in the same flat. Unsurprisingly I suspect with the house prices these days! Ryan's still living here too. We have, inexplicably, not battered the shite out of each other just yet! Lockdown's tedium and cabin fever had us reduced to daft arguments on a near-daily basis at one point. But when the country opened back up again, getting some daily or weekly time apart made all the difference. I think you need that. Spending all day every day with one other person would drive anyone mad, let alone when they are two very different people in a lot of ways!
He's got a new job now too, which he's chuffed about. A decent, consistent number of hours which he can actually live on, plus less to do on the job. I don't care what anyone says, his old work were starting to take the piss with workload and hours, in that he barely had any hours at all, and when he did there wouldn't be enough people in to cope with the demand. He was even called into work at the last minute a few times too, only to do two hours (or less) of work and then be told, "it's quiet now, you can go home." His reward for doing them a favour, a slap in the teeth. "Gee thanks", he should have said, "I'll try not to spend all £18 of today's wages in the one shop." The cheek of them honestly. With little in the way of a 'thank you' for his bending over backward, a new job was warmly welcomed by both of us. No more welcoming guests, no table service, JustEat machine or last-minute "shifts". He's a barman in a bougie restaurant now, pouring pints and making cocktails all shift. And with their full vegan menu, he can actually eat when he's on shift! Gone are they says when he's been at work for 10 hours and eaten nothing but a bowl of chips! He's seemingly one of the more experienced ones on the team too, manager included, which is wild to me. Especially when he's pulled up on nuanced, largely unimportant details when he's making his cocktails. "Is that no a bit rich," I'll say, to which he shrugs and says something to the effect of 'if it's the only thing they've got on me, I'm not worried.' And therein lies the biggest difference between us. He'll quite happily shrug off the irony of someone with less experienced telling him how to do his job, when I'd have been digging my heels in. It's an easier life though, I'm genuinely jealous!
He's now in third year at uni. You should have seen his face when he saw what he's studying this year. The boy is buzzing, primarily for the animal behaviour bits. He loves that shit. Although the other day he came home reeking of fish and I ordered him into the shower! I did also suggest that he burn his clothes as well, but he wasn't so keen on that! Turned out they'd been dissecting squid and drawing diagrams of their insides. Yes I see the irony in that too, the vegan working on animals donated to science. He wasn't the one doing the cutting was his argument, and they'd be dissecting them whether he helped or not, so he draw the diagrams instead for the sake of passing the course! He wants to work in a Zoo, a job for which he'll be massively over-qualified when he graduates. Nonetheless he's enjoying it and understanding most of it, which is more than can be said for most uni students these days. Ryan's a guy that knows what he wants, and much as I laugh and joke about it, he is very book-smart, so uni fits him well. I'd say he fits into that top 5% of people who really should go to uni.
In other news, my back-ally mechanic, dog shit smearing litterbug of a neighbour has finally pissed off too! John, or Rab C Nesbit, or Fatboy Slim (actually my dad had a few names for him!) moved out about a year ago from the flat below me. He chapped the door one random morning just before the office reopened and asked if he could put a van on my driveway because he was moving out and it would make it easier to humf all his stuff. I was more than happy to oblige. And let me tell you they must have had some amount of shite in that house right enough. It took them from ten in the morning right through till dark to clear a tiny 1-bedroom, ground-floor flat. I suppose, his shite-hole of a garden needed clearing too and if the state of that was anything to go by then god knows what the house was like. He was a prick and so was the wife, but in all fairness to them, the flat really wasn't suited to them anyway. His wife (whose name I was never graced with) was in a wheelchair and these old flats have neither the ramp outside nor the space inside to manoeuvre properly, so their moving house was probably in their best interest as well as mine.
Downstairs is a council flat, so it took the council a couple of months to reset the gaff in time for my new neighbour Cerys moving in. And she's lovely thank fuck! She loves a party too which frankly is a weight off my mind. Now I don't need to worry so much when I'm having folk over! I don't have parties often but when I do, they are loud and go on till stupid-o'clock in the morning. Plus my being above her, she'll no doubt here all the jumping about through the ceiling too. New Years is at mine this year and it will be the first big party I'll be having since she moved in, so hopefully that goes well!
Well, that's if the living room is finished in time! I moved in here three years ago and until last month hadn't so much as bought a pot of paint, so the time had finally come to make some changes. I've stripped the decades-old painted wallpaper and removed the skirting boards as well, as they were knackered looking. I also found a shelving unit hidden behind what looked like a homemade, cowboy builder stud partition, so I've cleared that out to use as a place to put some books and maybe a drinks cabinet. It was some shift let me tell you! The plan was to do the bedroom next year but I honestly don't know if I can be arsed! The good thing though is that the manual labour from my side at least is mostly done. I've phoned up a joiner for a quote for some new skirting boards and I've a phone number for a plasterer. I'm not sure yet wether or not to do the painting myself, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm hoping it will all be done for new-years, but honestly if it isn't I won't be mad about it. All I really need done before then is the skirting boards if I'm totally honest. The radiator is currently off of the wall and will be until the plaster is dry, but to get plaster dried at this time of year I'll probably need some kind of oil-filled radiator anyway, so I could always stick that on for Hogmanay. Make do and mend, bit of wartime spirit, that's all you need. Plus it saves the risk of any brand new paint work getting roughed up with spilled drinks or whatever, so its a win-win to me.
I've also been promoted at work since our last chat. I'm now a Principal Engineer, which is just as daunting a title as it sounds. It's the highest non-management rank you can get in our company, and I'm in two minds about it. Firstly there's the part of me that says 'you're as high as you can get without being a manager - not bad for a high school drop out!' And then there's the imposter syndrome part of me that says I'm really not knowledgable enough to deserve that kind of title. I think everyone gets a touch of that from time to time, but honestly it's rife with me. A lot of the time I feel I'm making it up as I go along, which is fine when you know what you're talking about. But when your knowledge of a particular subject consists entirely of what you can google, the challenge of talking about the subject as if you're an expert is daunting at best.
In addition to this promotion, I've also transitioned into to a new Customer Builds team. This is a team dedicated to the provisioning of servers for managed and professional services projects. Sounds fancy as heck, eh! Basically, I build shit. I've stepped away from the operational support side to focus strictly on project work, which believe it or not has actually had a big improvement on my general happiness and stress levels. My aunt, who actually works for one of my companies main competitors funnily enough, had warned me to be careful of project-focused roles, as the line between work time and your time can start to blur as you get closer and closer to deadline dates. But so far it's not been too bad, in fact if anything at this time of the year we've been quite quiet. At the start of my transition in the summer and all through the year, the team was getting inundated with provisioning requests, thus necessitating the creation of a team dedicated to that work alone. Since September though the work has rather dried up as companies with their new financial year budgets already have their big projects underway. To fill the time I've been working on the converse, decommissioning tasks. The retiring of legacy servers is a job nobody likes because frankly, they can be a nightmare. All sorts of problems come up, from machines being added to a shutdown list that are in fact still live, production machines; to the fact that they take weeks to process from start to finish and for most of that time, you're in limbo waiting on the server's cooling-off period ending. For those that aren't in the know, a cooling-off period is where we power servers down for anywhere between two weeks and three months, to basically see if anything breaks. On the upside, these long periods of deliberate inaction does allow you to take on quite a few of these tasks at once without ever feeling like you're taking on too much, which is a very nice feeling.
Even Ryan has noticed a change in me since the move. The long day-to-day slogs on the OS support side of house was really getting to me. There was all this busyness, you were never short of work, but you felt like you were never even making a dent in the workload. It must be how superheroes feel - there's always another life that needs saving. Whereas now, I'm much less stressed out, I'm on top of my work and I'm having to deal with so much less bullshit, for lack of a better term. To be clear though, there is still some bullshit, as is the case with any job, but it's a different kind of bullshit. That was a lot of bullshits there, which hopefully puts my point across with the exact amount of exasperation as I intend! There's less noise to deal with, but the noise I do have to deal with is louder, if that makes sense? Before, my biggest bug-bear was the daily barrage of petty support issues from our Service Desk that really they should be more than capable of handling themselves, but either don't have the time for or simply can't be arsed with. Now, it's Project Managers, Solutions Architects, Customer Success Managers - and project deadlines, which are often 'we asked for this today but needed it yesterday.' I imagine if I'm ever in a situation where I'm behind on work, this could become an issue as well, but thankfully I'm yet to cross that bridge. Perhaps the full brunt of the role hasn't hit yet, or maybe I'm just so conditioned to intense daily chaos now that projects and they're moving deadlines don't phase me so much. Who knows. My new role is full of procedures and checklists, most of which I've put in place myself, and this way of working really leans into my process-driven mind. And while I may from time to time need to work at weekends for project go-live work, I'm no longer on an on-call rota, which is another blessed relief. Easily the worst part of IT is on-call. As I've said before, my time spent on the backups team and the on-call I worked basically paid for the deposit on my flat in a year, but it was the worst year of my life, so to be honest I've been angling for a no on-call role ever since. I do contractually still need to do one weeks worth of back shifts every month, which isn't ideal, but I can live with it. It can actually have it's benefits from time to time, dentist appointments, tradesmen coming to the house, long lies etc, so I'm getting to enjoy that aspect of back shift again without dreading the start of my shift which is lovely. If I ever did want to remove on-call from my contract, I'd need to take a 12.5% hit on my salary, which is out of the question right now and probably will be until a promotion with a substantial merit increase comes around.
On the subject, my promotion came with a merit increase, taking me up to £35k. The salary though is another thing I'm in two minds about if I'm honest, and it comes down to which metric I use to measure that salary against. One part of me says 'good job son, a £35k job at 25, you'll go far,' but then the other side chips in with, 'yeah but...£35k is a common starting salary for uni graduates... and I've got 8 years of industry experience... maybe I'd be more valued somewhere else.' And both arguments are equally valid. It's awkward though. There are people all across the country approaching retirement age who have never earned £35k per year in their life, so I sometimes feel like I have a cheek to complain. But in the same breath, if I had just finished uni this year and started my first job, I could have walked into an entry-level position in tech on that kind of wage, if I picked the right company. Where's the justice in that? Does my experience count for anything? Or am I maybe just so used to being ahead of the curve for my age that actually I need to adjust my expectations now? I'm not sure. Honestly it's an argument I'll probably be having with myself for a little while yet, because in this current climate I'd be a fool to change jobs. Why?
Well, as you probably know, the country is on the brink of recession. As a result, most tech companies have started trimming the fat, and mine is no exception. A few weeks ago over 30 people from our US and UK offices were made redundant and frankly, I fully expect another round of redundancies in January, if not sooner. So the question I found myself asking was this; why would I leave now for free, when it's possible that I could be paid off in January? That, right now, is the no-brainer to me. There's plenty of weight in the argument that you shouldn't be too loyal to any one company and that moving to a new company every few years will get you the biggest pay jumps and career advancements and so on. However, the fact remains that because of my 8 years of service as of September this year, if I get made redundant in January I'd be looking at a redundancy pay-out of just over £3k, plus any earnings I'd accrued since my last pay cheque, which you just wouldn't get if you've been hopping company every two or three years. Granted, you might think that the maths of three grand for eight years doesn't add up (and you're probably right), but if I changed my job now and then get made redundant from that job in January, I'd get nothing. Zilch. Nada. Suddenly three grand doesn't sound too shabby after all, eh? That cash would get added straight to my emergency fund, which I could live on for a full eight months before I'd be in trouble. It's in these trying times when loyalty to a company over a number of years could actually pay off if you're unfortunate enough to be made redundant.
But for now at least, I still have a job, and as I said earlier my promotion got me a nice wee bump at the end of July as well. With the cost of living crisis and the first recession in my adult life looming, this bump was a blessed relief I must say.
I wouldn't say I'm struggling by any means, my bills are very low primarily because of my modest-sized flat, but the cost of everything noticeably increasing. At the start of the year there I'd started raising an eyebrow at the larger-than-expected bill at the checkouts in Asda; bills that were slowly creeping up each week despite that our big shop doesn't really change. We're creatures of habit like that. And that's without any meat or alcohol in the trolley, what with not eating meat and not regularly buying alcohol - not unless I know I'm going to a house party at the weekend. So after a few weeks of spending over £100 on basically vegetables I decided enough was enough. So I do the big shop in Lidl now and what a difference honestly. We've been doing this for a couple of months now and the difference is surreal, it's practically theft! We'd put it off for so long, assuming that the cost savings versus the convenience of getting everything in the one place just wouldn't pay off. Ryan is vegan and I'm a high-functioning veggie, a vegetarian who is borderline lactose intolerant, so changing up our routine was quite daunting. We worried that we'd never be out of other shops picking up things we couldn't get in Lidl, and end up spending the same as if we just went to Asda in the first place. Turns out that's not the case at all. The only things we can't get in Lidl that we really need is Felix cat food, Catsan litter (can you tell our cats are picky?) and Nutritional Yeast, which is relatively hard to find at the best of times. Everything else we can get in Lidl and the damage rarely goes over £50 per week without even trying. Since I started writing this post they've even introduced tofu as well! So I can safely say that I'm a Lidl boy through and through now, even if I do need to remember my quid for those bloody draconian shopping trolleys!
On the subject of money, I've been trying out a new budgeting method since June that's been working a treat for me. This is another one of those things that I actually heard about ages ago but I didn't think would do me any good. It came around off of the back of lockdown when, needless to say, my aggressive savings strategy stopped working. During lockdown I was managing to save and invest up to 50% of my take-home, which under normal circumstances would be completely impossible, especially now. But thanks to everything shutting down and not having to commute or drive anywhere, there wasn't many opportunities to spend money and so I was finding myself with quite a lot left over every month. This eventually allowed me to top up my emergency fund with money I'd borrowed from it to replace the boiler a year prior, pay off my car finance, start investing for an early retirement using a Stocks and Shares ISA and double-down on my savings for a deposit on our forever home. But as the country re-opened I quickly realised that my lockdown budget wasn't going to cut it anymore and so I had to sacrifice some of the money I was putting into savings to use for spending. The problem was that after so many months of aggressive saving and hitting one financial goal after another, I now felt guilty about taking a little extra for myself to just spend however I wanted. Innately, I knew that there was no point in saving and investing for my future if I wasn't enjoying the journey, so I knew something had to change, a healthy balance needed to be found, but I had no idea where to draw the lines.
That's where the 50/30/20 rule came in. There are different ways of applying this, but the method that works for me is to allocate 50% of my takehome pay to bills, 30% to savings and investments and 20% to what Ramit Sethi calls guilt-free spending. It's guilt-free because you know that you have your bills and your savings goals covered, so the rest is for you to spend however you want. Buy as many fucking latte's as you want, have at it. You've earned that right. What's important to remember is that the world has infinite choices but your budget is finite. Or in other words, you can buy anything you want, but you can't buy everything you want. So whilst Sethi encourages you to buy whatever the hell you want with your 20% of guilt-free spending money, he tells us that we should be sure and deliberate with our choices before we commit to them. For instance, if you love coffee, a daily latte is a luxury you'll really value. If you're a foodie, maybe that means eating out in restaurants a lot. If you love cars, maybe you can justify that brand new Range Rover to yourself. That's the beauty I find with the 50/30/20 rule, it teaches you both guilt-free spending and financial restraint. You decide how to apply the rule. For instance, a common alternative is to save and invest 20% and spend the remaining 30%. It depends entirely on your priorities. The trick to getting the rule to work is to stick to those priorities, however tempting it may be to stray across the lines. For me that means invest and save, buy as many coffees as I want, go for a drink on a Friday, but do not buy a new car or even consider moving house. Not yet anyway.
In other news, my big Scouting family finally made it to Croatia and back. We were hopeful that it would go ahead last year, but in the end it was added to the long list of things that COVID-19 ruined. However belated, the trip was a resounding success. I was given the 'dry land' award for barely participating in what was an almost entirely water sports holiday - no surprises there. In spite of myself I still had a great time though. I was kinda shitting myself about the whole thing to be honest. I'm more of a land-lover myself, not at all confident in the water, be it kayaks or canoes, snorkelling or paddle boarding. Basically this holiday was my idea of hell, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would! I actually even discovered after 25 years of avoiding the activity, that I can in fact tread water. Wholly by accident though if I'm honest. It was during a snorkelling session when I was following some fish. I brought my head back up above water for a rest, tried to touch the ground and realised I couldn't. And so treading water just commenced, out of nowhere and without really thinking about it either. I'm putting a lot of that ability down to the heavier salt water, but it's still a win for me. I drew the line at paddle-boarding though, I had no intension of going on one of those things, even in the boiling heat. When one of the kids changed his mind and said he didn't want to go on one, I breathed a sigh of relief as it meant I could use that as an excuse for not going on them myself! So instead we sat by the shoreside with some ice cream working out what bus we'd need to catch to get back to the hostel in time for dinner. We ended up having to run for that bus, which did not go down well!
I'd been looking forward to the holiday for the catching of some much-needed rays. I'd even payed a few sneaky visits to the sun beds to work on my build-up, just to reduce the chances of being burnt to a crisp. Thankfully it seemed to work, as I came home only with some mild redness on the shoulders. I think the heat took us all by surprise though. We knew it would be warm but even the locals were saying that the heat had been unbearable while we were there. It was becoming a real problem for me. For an 8 day trip I'd packed something like 12 tee-shirts, which I felt was sensible before I left. One for each day plus a couple of spares just in case, smashing. But by the end of day two, I swear to god I was running out of tee-shirts already! I was sweating so bad that I knackered six tee-shirts in two days! I was wishing I'd brought travel wash. At least I wasn't the only one though. By day three, most of the guys on the trip had came to the same conclusion that this would just have to be a taps-aff holiday. Most mornings, by the time we were sat down to breakfast at about 9 AM it was already 30 degrees Celsius. It would get gradually warmer till about noon and then wouldn't properly cool down again until well past midnight. It was torture. This twinned with the amount of walking we were doing meant that sweat management became a daily struggle. So eventually a lot of the guys had adopted the strategy of carrying a tee-shirt just in case, but were going without it most of the time. It's something I'd ordinarily never do, even on holiday. I'm far too image conscious for that, but I just had to make an exception in Croatia because the heat was unbearable. I'd take an early morning walk by the sea every morning wearing shorts and a tee-shirt to waken myself up before we woke the kids, but then the shirt would be off for pretty much the rest of the day, right through to midnight. For those 8 days I was a changed man when it comes to body positivity. On day three we'd literally planned our day around attractions that had air conditioning, even if the attractions themselves were a bit shit! But even after all of this, after plenty of water-proof sun cream and dips in the sea, we still had a few people, leaders and kids alike, who were struck down by heat stoke.
I think it's easy to forget that it's more of a working holiday for leaders. As much as we're getting away, catching some rays and doing the activities with the kids and we do enjoy it all, it's not actually for us. We're there to facilitate, to put in long hours, barely sleep and keep an eye on the kids. A few times over the years parents have questioned why so many leaders go on these trips when there's only one leader in charge of the trip. Basically parents often think that they are paying for all these leaders to go for free, which isn't the case at all. There is indeed a minimum number of leaders who must attend, obviously. This number of adults varies depending on the number of kids going and these adults must be sent for free, as without them the trip simply doesn't happen. It's kind of a standard practice for any institution that takes kids away on holiday, the schools included.
However usually in Scouts, for our group anyway, there are more adults going than is strictly necessary to make the trip happen, which is where the questions from parents usually start. Thing is, it would be unfair to send some leaders for free and make the rest pay full price. So instead, the discount for those mandatory leaders is spread across all the leaders attending. In effect, all leaders pay for the trip, but the rate the leaders pay is slightly less than what the kids pay. More often than not, this discount isn't massive, but it's a token gesture for the leaders going. So the stance we've taken for a long time now is that if a parent doesn't think that's a fair trade for us giving up a week of holidays with our own families to look after someone else's kids, then they shouldn't send theirs - plain and simple. The next question is then why do so many leaders attend? Well A, because they want to, obviously, and B, because the minimum number of leaders required to make the trip happen, really is the minimum number. If and when shit hits the fan, having the minimum amount of adults becomes a real problem. Whereas when there's a full leadership team away with us and some kind of problem comes up, there's plenty of adults to manage it. Basically the full team isn't there for when things are going well. The full team is there for when shit hits the fan and we need coverage by adults in order to do everything safely.
So if you think that the leaders are away for a jolly, you're gravely mistaken I'm afraid. When we're away, we are effectively on-call 24/7, right up until we drop the kids back at their parents feet. If something happens during the night, leaders are up dealing with it. It comes with the territory really. Every time we do one of these trips we laugh and joke about how we need a holiday to recover from the holiday, but we're only ever half-kidding!
Some things went wrong of course. It doesn't really matter how much you plan, there will always be things that come up that you just need to adapt to. And we did. And of course there were some squabbles and melt-downs and tension between the leaders as the holiday wore on, but the important part is that most of the kids were blissfully unaware of the hiccups. That's all that matters in the end. Sometimes as leaders we can get so caught up in the semantics that we forget the point of it all. Did they have a great time? Yes! Then it was a successful trip. And for the most part, the kids were impeccably well behaved, which just makes trips like this unfathomably easier. In particular our explorers and young leaders, who really were invaluable assets all week. Until Croatia, we'd never taken a group through an airport on these international trips, we'd always been a coach trip kinda crowd, but despite the new surroundings, the vicious heat and the slightly chaotic atmosphere at times, the kids took it totally in their stride. Every single one of them have something to be proud of and stories to tell from the trip. At the end of the day, that's why we do it.
What else, what else. Oh, Manchester Pride was wholly underwhelming this year. Not much more to say about that to be honest. In fact, the biggest let down of all was Bimini, which I never thought I'd say! Ryan went to Kavos on holiday with his cousin a few weeks after Manny. He's the fairest of fair skinned, but thanks to the trusty factor 100 sunblock, which has a wallpaper paste consistency to it, he came back relatively unscathed. So he's given the green light for a sunny holiday next year rather than going to Manchester. I think it's the kind of event you should do every few years to be honest. I'm chuffed with that personally because sunny holidays are something I didn't think we'd ever get to do together because Ryan burns so easy. So we'll be looking to get booked on to something shortly. My house-hunting addiction is subsiding slightly, I think primarily since I've accepted that I'll be in no position to move house any time soon, so really there's no point in coveting. Fingers-crossed the renovations scratch that itch for a while too. And I've re-downloaded Snapchat and even got TikTok now too! Who'd have thought? That might be a whole post in itself that!
I think that's it for now. I can't guarantee that it won't be another year till you hear from me again! We'll just need to wait and see. It will be a surprise for both of us!
Toodaloo
Aedan.