Saturday, December 10, 2011

When Life Gives You Lemons...

...bend life over and stick those lemons where the sun don't shine.

[Rant Mode ON]
Yesterday, I had some rather insulting news. We had our end-of-year Faculty forum. At this function they tell us what a wonderful Faculty we've been, how awesomely we've served our students and in general they pat us all on the back. This event is also when they announce the winners of the Performance Awards. These awards are given to those staff who have shown excellent performance over the past year. This year, the head of our discipline nominated myself and my assistant for these awards. He's been most pleased with our performance this year and thought we deserved recognition. I felt pretty good when he told us this as its been a tough year and we've still managed to pull through. That was about 3 months ago.

No one finds out if they've won an award until they announce it at the end-of-year forum. Today, they flashed up the names of the winners. I wasn't amongst them. O.K., I can deal with that. My assistant's name was up there. Wait, what? We've been working together on the same projects. I've been doing longer hours and working at least as hard as, if not harder than my assistant has and she gets the award while I miss out!?! I've rearranged my home life to commit to work more, spending less time with my family and getting more stressed than I have been for the last 15 years and apparently I'M the one who is not performing while she IS!?! What the hell is up with that!?! Frankly, I find it highly insulting. I'm pretty angry about the whole thing and if I didn't need the money to support my family, I'd storm into the office on Monday and tell our Dean that he can stick my job where his sun don't shine. How can you possibly award one person for their performance at a set of tasks when their workmate who is not only working along side them but is also supervising them and taking the responsibility for those self-same tasks is not also awarded?

Here, life. Take these here lemons and stick them where your sun doth not shine. I've had it with this cr@p.
[Rant Mode OFF]

Monday, December 5, 2011

Cruisin' around.

Well, I picked up my bike last week. Sweet. Getting the thing out of the dealership was a bit of a nightmare as they farked around with paperwork, checking that we'd payed the money and finding the boots I'd ordered. After about an hour of stuffing around I finally rode out of there on my new bike (so new in fact that it had zero on the odometer).

What a change to the scooter. The power. THE POWER!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!! Its just so nice to have the grunt to accelerate up a hill! I didn't get go on quite the long ride I wanted to (as the weather turned nasty and riding in the wet on new tyres is just asking for trouble) but I still got to give her a decent run.

I love everything about my new bike aside from two minor things. 1: Neutral is hard to find. For those of you who don't know, neutral on a motorbike sits between the 1st and 2nd gears. You do a half-shift with the gear lever while in 1st and the bike clicks into neutral. This is essential to find as when you start the bike from cold it needs to idle for a while and you don't want to sit on the thing holding the clutch in. I think it might be because the gearbox is new and still a little clunky. 2: The windshield sh!ts me. In the rain and cold, it keeps the wet and/or cold wind off your chest. Nice. When you go over 70kph the turbulence it generates around your helmet is so loud that you can no longer hear the bike's engine. Crap. You need to hear the engine so you know when to change gears. I can keep myself warm and dry with the right clothing but the noise thing is a problem. So the windshield's got to go. Its only four bolts to remove it so that's not too much trouble. As I said, they're pretty minor things.

What I'm really looking forward to is a nice ride up into the mountains or up the highway. I'm going to a gaming tourney up in Caboolture soon and plan on riding the bike up there. Should be nice to ride up the highway on the bike. Its just such a sense of freedom on the bike. I can see why its so addictive for so many people. I think I may become one of them.