Week 50: Active toilet rolls

August 19, 2019

Vegan cornettos are good aren’t they. As good as normal cornettos.
There is some training at the FT for line managers and it includes the line “People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers”. Which is concise and sounds like it’s true.
Of the 4 people I line manage, 3 of them have resigned or switched teams in the last month.
At work everybody is getting a small photo frame to put whatever they want in to jazz the place up a bit (our new office is very grey - I don’t mind it at all but it makes some people feel sad). The CTO has put a photo of his pug in his one. His pug is a bonk-eyed snaggle-toothed hairball, utterly utterly hideous. Like - you have never seen a dog this ugly. Anyway. What will I put in my frame? Obviously E is the thing that cheers me up the most, but I don’t want to subject her to the judgement of the office. She is too good for the office. Someone asked me if I felt any pressure to be “witty” with what I put in my frame. The answer to that is no. It had occurred to me that this is an opportunity to do a joke but I haven’t thought of anything funny yet. Well, actually I’ve thought of some funny things (“Shut up and do some typing”, “We aren’t paying you to chit-chat”) but all of them would probably not be as funny to everyone else as I find them. Current best plan is some pressed flowers from the garden and maybe I’ll write “cheer up tiny tears” really small. 🌸🌼
There are currently five - five - active toilet rolls in our upstairs toilet. It is a mystery how this has happened.
E’s (Scottish) grandparents have mounted an attack on her accent and as such she now says “pear” and “bear” with a Scottish accent but nothing else. They may have won the battle but they have lost the war.
Me and the fam went to Green Man this weekend. Predictably, E loved it. They have a whole sub-festival for kids called “Little Folk” which has live music, craft, water kitchens, ball pools, weird installations. I usually find festivals a bit stressful - I don’t like crowds of people at all and while I’ve sort of got a grip on my fear of glitter, people at festivals seem to cover themselves in it and I feel genuine revulsion looking at them. I normally put up with this because I like camping, I like being outside, and I like live music, but it’s a different balance of activities when you have an 18 month old to take care of.