The Waiting Man

I resigned from my job today... to take up another role in about 2 weeks time - same industry, same kind of work, more money

I've known the guy I'm going to work with for about 3-4 years & am reasonably confident he'll be an okay 'boss'... there's just this little part of me that is always suspicious of glittering, gold things - after all, I was made a quite substantial financial offer for my services by another company last year, only for it to all fall apart within 6-7 weeks & I was pretty close to becoming a bus driver before another company - the one I'm now leaving - stepped in with a good offer. Trouble in Paradise started in December, when they restructured my remuneration, lowering my base salary & introducing sales target incentive bonuses... something I don't like, don't trust or believe in & plain don't want. Just pay me what I'm worth & don't fuck me around, is that so much to ask?

Hopefully I won't have to worry about that with this new role... except I do worry... & I will

Having just commented in a friend's Journal that the war in Ukraine (not to mention the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, China's sabre-rattling, Myanmar's unchecked ethnic cleansing... all the way down the scale to the flooding in my home State!!) has discouraged me from Journalling, as nothing going on with me can even compare to... well, all of the above...

It's raining, it's pouring & has been for nearly 2 straight weeks. WaitingManor is not under direct threat from flooding, unlike parts of Sydney & larger parts of New South Wales, but things are getting a little damp 'round here - specifically the carpet & flooring. We have ordered a decent-sized de-humidifier online, as they are sold out at every appliance store we've tried. Glad to know we're not the only ones feeling soggy...

Work-wise, I've been wet, but Dorian the workhorse has good air-con & dries me out just in time to go & get wet at my next site/appointment. The roads are treacherous, full of puddles, inland seas & lots of potholes, as well as people who don't know how to drive when it's raining, but Dorian & I are, so far, unscathed. There has been a lot of work, which has meant quite a few 12 hour+ days/nights & that leads me to the big issue...

... L-SP & I went to see our accountant last week to do our taxes for 2020-21 (Yes, we know, we're running behind!!) & he delivered a stark message to me regarding my latest work incarnation as a sole-trader/contractor - I made a $5000 loss last tax year & am currently earning about half what the minimum wage is in Australia, once all my operating expenses are taken out of what I'm getting paid by both my clients, but especially the main one. This prompted a meeting with the CEO of my main client, to negotiate a more liveable rate. My proposed figure - which would never buy me a yacht, but would at least cover my expenses & provide a buffer for sick days & the occasional holiday - was rejected & a minimal increase counter-offered, along with the vague promise of some other form of compensation/income

A few days later, this other thing turned out to be an ad-hoc role as an on-road commercial flooring consultant, working for commission only, with that to be paid only on profits above a certain percentage - a percentage that is about 5-6 points above what the current norm is for commercial projects. I would have to take complete ownership of the process from initial contact, to inspection/estimation, to quoting & (hopeful) invoicing, as well as ordering & project management of the job. This, in addition to my ongoing role as measurer/estimator for all the sales consultants at the company's 5 showrooms... adds up to about an 18 hour day, with 'compensation' only coming if I can convince clients to pay more than they are used to, on the sheer strength of my personality alone

In short (too late!!), it looks like I'll be giving the whole game away & intensifying my search for a 'real' job. While that's an uncertain prospect at the moment, it will, at least guarantee a steady, reliable income, sick pay & holidays. Long-Suffering Partner assures me that we are financially okay for the moment, so can afford to kiss this thing goodbye, but...

Uncertain, stressful times

Random stuff from the last few days...

Do I have grounds to issue a 'Cease & Desist' order to my former employer, who is telling clients who ask for me, that I'm "on leave"? On leave?? I left that place a year ago... & there's no way on your god's green earth I'm ever going back!!

I don't understand what's so bad about telling people I don't work there any more... It's not like there's some kind of deathly stigma attached to it...

On a related note, my 2nd client I do measures & estimates for wanted me to work out a plan that had been sent to him from a client who turns out to be building a house in the next street over from WaitingManor. The initial plans were devoid of measurements & indication of scale, so couldn't be estimated. When I pointed this out, he arranged to have revised plans sent, which he then forwarded to me, so I could get them printed at A3 size then estimate it for him. I had a couple of issues with that: Firstly - I don't work for him, so why am I having to take time out of my day to go to Officeworks & get plans printed? Why can't he do it?!? It's his client after all... Secondly, why can't I just walk 'round the corner & measure the place? Apparently, he doesn't want to pay me for a site visit................. & so expects me to just print plans & estimate them for free................ Right.............

I think it's time he & I had a little chat about this - & about his pleading with me to work at his other store on weekends. I already do 5½ - 6 days a week, WHY would I then sacrifice my only time off to travel an hour+ to the north-western edge of town to stand around in a flooring showroom that's also full of rugs - my physical nemesis?!?! Long-Suffering Partner would never forgive me if I did that... & neither would my right shoulder... I place a pretty high price on my skills these days... & an even higher one on my endangered free time. In fact, the latter could be said to be priceless

L-SP & I are part of a group taking turns to feed a stray/street cat colony near a timber yard. We've been doing it for almost a year now & while the cats are eerily silent - no meows, no purrs, no yowling, no nothing, they've come to accept us & usually when we arrive on our allotted evenings, there's about 12-15 of them who are looking forward to, if not seeing us, then seeing the food we dish out at least. Over the last few weeks I noticed there was one male cat who was crowding right up against me when I ladle the food out of the cans, not-so-inadvertently getting himself a kind of pat/stroke by walking under my arm & hand. Last week, he finally consented to some actual petting & even swatted away another cat who saw this & wanted to get in on the action... Yesterday, he was back & consented to more pats & even let the other cat get some in as well. There was a 3rd cat who saw this & when I reached out to her, she came over, looked me right in the eyes & lashed out with her paw'n'claws, drawing blood just above my knuckle & below my wedding ring. Nice shot!! No hard feelings... well, not on my part anyway. She, on the other hand, continued to give me baleful glares the rest of the time we were there, as if to say "Keep your filthy human hands off my friends, or there'll be more where that came from Buster!". Didn't stop her eating any of the food I put out though, I noticed...

A quick trip tomorrow up the Central Coast to buy a Tongue Drum spotted on Gumtree - an Australian community sales site - by the other Pelican Daughter, who sent me the link. So... the musical menagerie I'm surrounded by in this little room where I'm typing, is about to gain a new member. Which reminds me - I need to replace the high G string on Huddie, my new 12 string, who's currently an 11 string, thanks to the recent humidity affecting his tuning & as I was remedying that, the extremely thin high G went Twwaanngzzxxccddzzzblblblpffft!! about a semitone shy of its proper note - somewhere around F# ish... Not altogether unexpected, nor uncommon, but a bit annoying because the only string gauge I didn't have amongst my spares was... well, you can guess

Bed...

Haven't been away, just been busy & when I'm at the computer, I've either been working, or haven't found myself with much to say...

Yes - busy week-and-a-bit at work which, while it was a financial pleasure, meant a lot of time in the spare/computer/office/music room endlessly drawing & estimating plans & not a lot of time with L-SP, who has been catching up on her TV watching, so I'm not sure how much I've been missed?!?

Last Sunday, I packed Dorian the workhorse with effect pedals, various instruments & esoterica & had a recording/mixing session with the other Pelican Daughter for the track begun late last year & now completed... click here if you like bird calls & dub reggae..., or here to listen to all the tracks completed so far for the as-yet-unnamed/unreleased 'album' (if, in the age of digital download, there's such a thing as an 'album' any more...) I'd like to call either 'Flattering Light', or 'Low & Slow', but is most likely to be named after the track 'The Lost Zoo' - which you can hear via that 2nd link

Next musical project is to practise the 2 12-string guitar pieces I want to film for my ego posterity & posting... & after that, I'm arranging for an erstwhile bandmate from yet another failed attempt at getting a band together, to come on over to WaitingManor & give me a thorough run through & grounding in Cubase software, so my little sketchpad studio can finally make some worthwhile noises

The only photos I've been taking lately, look like this...



Yes, they need new flooring... & not a little levelling work!!

I wouldn't normally share pictures of the floor plans I do - they're usually quite boring, square/rectangle things, with the occasional 45 degree angle thrown in to make me swear a bit

But yesterday, I walked into this place & immediately had no idea how I was even going to draw it, let alone estimate it for carpet... This is the closest I could get, based on the measurements I was able to take... which wasn't as many as I think I'm going to need, due to construction work ongoing & there were building materials &, more often, builders in the way...



I've named it 'Hippo With A Hat On'... & that's about the most I've been able to confidently do!!

Sunday Morning...

Time to reflect on the last 7 or so days - especially now that I've had a decent amount of sleep in the last 20 hours or so...

I've just received 5 jobs from the 2nd flooring company I'm now working with. I say 'working with', as I haven't signed a contract with them & will just be invoicing them for whatever work I do. That way, I'm not in 'breach' of the contract I have with the 1st company, who want my contract with them to be exclusive, though I'm not sure if (a) the contract actually states that, or (b) that's the kind of clause that would stand up to legal scrutiny. Regardless, the 2nd company is fine with an ad-hoc arrangement & so, as we Australians say, no worries! 5 jobs from these guys all in one day, will make tomorrow a bit interesting, if the 1st company has a typical Monday for me - it's usually the busiest day of the week, but sometimes not... I'm not sure whether to pray for a quiet one, or just load me up & have a long, really busy day, as most of the past week has been a bit light, work-wise, so it would be good to finish off the invoice week with a better bottom line

A light workload turned out to be a good thing, given the 'life' side of my work/life balance has been pretty demanding this last week. 2 things are noteworthy - the recording session with my resurrected 1st ever band, which was more of a listening & plotting session going through various candid & field recordings we've made on our phones & deciding which ones would blend for a backing track, over which more instrumentation can be played later...

The 2nd thing wasn't so much fun - we got a phone call on Wednesday night informing us that the lady who used to run the bar at our local Bowling Club was in a coma & not expected to live very long. Both L-SP & I did bar-tending shifts there for a while & got to know this little northern Englishwoman of a certain vintage that called a spade a fucking shovel & was equally blunt & forthright in every other opinion she had... & she had a few!! We ended up as friends & went to several dinners & events, before her health declined & she moved to a retirement/nursing home on the New South Wales central coast, closer to some of her family. Then Covid19 happened & well, you know... nobody could see their elderly relatives or friends for a long time. We drove up to Bateau Bay on Thursday afternoon to see her & say goodbye & ended up staying for a while, speaking with some of the family, when... her eyes opened one last time & she drew her last breath

We are now, of course, involved in the memorial service & have been taking & making calls, as well as being the face-to-face contact with our late friend's church of choice - it's about 5 minutes from WaitingManor

The next few days are promising to be pretty hectic then... Maybe I should go back to bed now & get some sleep while I can!!

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I was expecting a day at home, with no work having come through last night, but a phone call this morning at about 10.30 sent me off to 2 measures in the afternoon... Quite a lot of traffic & people around, for a town that's supposed to be locked down. Little wonder the State government have today introduced tougher measures to try & cut down on the number of people who just seem to be wandering around out there for no good reason except to offer themselves as culture dishes for the Delta variant... or uncultured ones more likely

Still, any day that ends with a glass of good scotch whiskey & my football team winning by 46 points is a good day
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Sunset on the Mundi Mundi plains, western New South Wales. Taken on last year's 'round-the-State roadtrip

4 measures today... there were days before lockdown when I didn't have that many!? Strange times indeed. Still not enough to lift the income back to a level where I can discontinue the Federal 'disaster relief' payment I went through all that grief online & on the phone for. I've sent in an invoice tonight for about ½ what I'd normally make in a 'normal' week... or maybe slightly less than that

Today is also National Census day. This was the first time we've done it all online - for as long as I can remember, it was always a booklet that was delivered to the household a week or so before the date, then collected within 3-4 days afterwards. Good to see the Australian Bureau of Statistics is thinking Green & saving trees - it's more than can be said for the attitude of the current Party in power...

Enough... methinks an early night
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This...

The other way to look at this photo is to remember where it was taken & when... on our last long roadtrip around New South Wales, last year when we couldn't go anywhere else because all the other States had closed their borders. Fast forward to now & the only difference is that we currently can't even leave Sydney. But anyway, this was taken on a deserted, remote, outback dirt road somewhere between Goodooga - a place even most people in New South Wales have never heard of - & Brewarrina - which a few more people may have heard of, but probably haven't been anywhere near. Until we rolled into town about 2 hours after this photo, the only thing I knew about Brewarrina was that it often featured in ABC weather reports, either for high temperatures, or occasional outback flooding, as it sits on the Barwon River... Now I also know it's home to the oldest existing man-made structures in the world - the fish traps on the river built by the local Aboriginal people 40,000+ years ago. They're still there & still in use... by the local birdlife anyway

An open road, in the middle of nowhere, without another person in sight... That's L-SP's & my idea of heaven

Noisy, but nice...

The Harley Davidson dichotomy - a machine that is a symbol of anti-establishment freedom... now increasingly owned by aging bankers & businessmen looking to regain their youthful 'rebellion' - like that time they skipped a day at their private school & went out on Daddy's boat instead. This one, for example, was photographed at the Canberra Yacht Club... a name that has a couple of problems: Firstly, Canberra is an inland city... hundreds of kilometres from the ocean - it only has a man-made lake. Secondly, if you look at these photos you'd be hard-pressed to see anything that qualifies as a 'yacht'... & it's therefore exactly the kind of place you'd expect a 'Merchant Banker' to park his Harley

Hopefully, I'll have a few hours with my guitar student tomorrow afternoon, but work has loaded me up with measures in the morning... I don't know - when I want work it's not around & when I make other plans based on its paucity, the floodgates open!! Am I never happy??!!

Some more driving around in the newly-christened Dorian, just to get a feel for how the car handles etc... including hard braking, on a couple of occasions

Tomorrow is a pretty full day, with an early start, so let's see how Dorian goes on his first day at work...

Stockton Beach Sand Dunes

I knew work had been scarce... seems it's been scarce for the other Measurer as well, as the GM of the company we both contract to has sent us an e-mail "reminding us" that our contract with the company is exclusive & we're not allowed to go looking for additional work from other flooring companies. I actually wasn't aware of that, but am not surprised. What surprised me is how the bugger managed to read my mind! L-SP & I had recently discussed me looking to other companies to help fill in the gaps - both in my day & in the bank account, then lo & behold this e-mail arrives. We don't have a smart TV, nor an Alexa to listen in to us... we haven't even had the Covid vaccine with the Bill Gates microchip in it!! How did he know!!??

On the plus side, at least he's aware that neither of his Measurers are exactly raking it in at the moment... & comforting to know that the other guy is getting just as little as I have been the last few weeks... so I'm not suffering alone!

Posting from my phone, as I think I've killed my keyboard... I spilled red wine on it after knocking the glass over while turning a plan around to try & figure out all the angles... What's with all the modern houses with angles somewhere between 26 - 45 degrees?!? It was hard enough sketching this place on site today, let alone trying to scale it & work out what the doorway angles are...

The round place I measured a couple of days ago was a picnic by comparison...

Anyway, hopefully the keyboard will dry out overnight, otherwise it's time for a new one

Yesterday was the busiest day so far - not hard to top Tuesday, when nothing happened. Or today, for that matter - nothing on the schedule for today either, except maybe a meeting/conversation with the company's accountant to set up payments etc... but I haven't heard from him yet

Yesterday started with an aborted measure in Ashfield, scheduled for 9am, but there was nobody home. Fortunately, I was spending the day with the company's commercial projects manager, who got pissed off about the situation enough that I didn't have to. So off to the next stop, a retirement home about 10 minutes away from the first call. Here, he saw how I measured & then proceeded to take my style apart a bit, saying I measured "like a salesman". Which is fair enough - that's what I've been all these years. I'll take on his advice & instruction to change a few things, as it's really not that different to what I do, just way more accurate, without the need to allow for wastage amounts as I always have. His comment that "You make the same mistake all the others do" will stick with me a while, I think... I may be wrong, but at least I'm not alone?!?

8 more measures after that, over on the eastern side of town, which meant a drive-by past my old Debtor's Prison. Not close enough to see if they're struggling as a 2-person company, or have ensnared someone new, but I'll try & keep tabs on it... Or maybe I won't. The wound is still a little raw, but it won't heal if I scratch at it - or put it anywhere near the toxic environment it came from... All finished by about 2pm, so I headed home, much to L-SP's surprise. But this will be kind of the new normal - all the measures done in the first 2/3s of the day, then drawing/estimating them for a couple of hours & either scanning & e-mailing them, or delivering them to the relevant store location. Fortunately yesterday, I only had to photograph the ones I'd done, as the Commercial guy just wanted my rough plans. He must have thought they were okay, as I already know they've lined me up for 5 measures... & counting for tomorrow

So L-SP & I went to test-drive a Mazda CX-3... & I must say it's a good-looking car from the outside, just not as comfortable on the inside as you'd expect. Also, given it has the same size engine as the i30 we drove on Tuesday, it just lacked the same 'zip'. Add to that, the promotion we've seen online & on posters about clearance prices was immediately shot down by the Salesman, who informed us prices now start from $500 more than the deal we've been offered on the i30 & I'd say the CX-3 is out of the running, unless we find a good, new-ish one 2nd-hand somewhere... then I'd consider it

Today, with nothing official on the agenda, we may go & see what Bitsareshitty Mitsubishi & the new MG range are like...

... in a long list of first days across my 36-year working career

But this was the first one where I'm not officially working for a company, unless I choose to name it WaitingMan Pty. Ltd. The first thing I learned today, was that nobody starts work at 8am at this flooring place. Or 8.30... So at least I got through my daily word, solitaire & sudoku puzzles while I waited

Once I was introduced to the main Salesperson at the head office location, we traded some war stories from our respective industry experience & then a customer rang & hey presto I had my first measure as a Contractor. Once I'd done that, then drawn & scaled it, I did a rough estimate for them, just to show what I can do & the way I do it. They seemed pleased - surprised & pleased actually. I get the impression the last guy wasn't as good as I am... iIdssm

By 1.30pm, there wasn't much else they could show, or tell me, so in the absence of any other work, I was done for the day & came home. That felt weird... like I was skiving off work early or something. All day when I was in the Showroom, I had to stop myself from getting up & greeting customers & showing them products - reminding myself that's not my job any more!!

The flip-side to this being, of course, that while I'm at home, I'm not earning money, so an earlymark is actually a bad thing. Hopefully this will not be a regular occurrence. I already know I'm measuring a block of 6 apartments on Wednesday, with more to come... After a month off, I'm actually quite ready to get out there & not sell some stuff!!