- Well. Got a lot of feelings covered this week. Deliriously happy on Tuesday, completely destroyed by the end of Wednesday.
- A few months ago I found out I had been accepted onto the first “Next Generation Board” at work. It’s a programme that the FT are running where 12 people from around the business meet monthly to tackle some things they think are important. It includes things like training, presenting to the actual board, and being paired with a board member to reverse mentor. This week - on Tuesday - I found out who I had been paired with. It was a surprise to get into the programme at all, so then I figured I’d be paired with… well look there is obviously a pecking order of board members and also some that are just simply more interesting to me than others. Anyway. I was, as they say, just happy to be there. So it was a very big surprise to be paired with Roula, our new and incredibly impressive editor.
- We had a very big tech incident on Tuesday night, a DNS problem, something for the whole of technology. I’m not on the out of hours support rota. Having a 2 year old complicates the whole “being drafted in to fix a problem at any moment” thing, even when picking up the call is voluntary. Anyway - I saw there was a problem and I wasn’t busy so I pitched in. Watching the response happen, helping where I could, sitting in on the 30 person conference call in-case there was anything I needed to decide.
- Tech incidents at the FT are a beautiful thing. Everyone is so focused. People doing their best work together as a team. I’ve never seen them done so well. No flapping, no blaming, no yelling. It was great.
- I’m reading Girl, Woman, Other. It’s good, some stories more compelling than others. I wish I had been drawing the relationships as I went as right now I can’t remember which characters relate to which others and why. I found a diagram someone had done on Twitter but I think the greater understanding would come from drawing it myself.
- I have a very bad cold, and so does everyone else in my house. Please send your thoughts and prayers.
- Some important context for the next bit: I am pregnant, the baby is due in July.
- Zara do have started doing maternity clothes and they are just1 very2 odd3.
- I started to feel the baby move this week. Little flutters that could be gas but are in fact a baby wiggling around.
- I used to think Radiohead’s “Creep” was about the many computer science undergraduates that fell in love with me at university and wrote things like “Alice is g33k hot”4 on the desks. Look, it’s not that I’m especially lovable, there were 80 men and 3 women on my course: the odds were good but the goods were odd. Anyway increasingly I think it’s about what happens to my belly button during pregnancy as the inside of me forces my usually reclusive navel blinking into the sunlight.
I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…
I am absolutely down for all the weird things pregnant bodies do but this one I could do without.
 
 
 
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