Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Secret Santa Update

With so much going on outside work, this was perhaps the only Christmas gift I was going to purchase this year. (Putting to one side my donation to The Angel Tree.) I should really start by updating my list from my previous post. Last year my gift was a scarf, purchased at the last minute due to a abrupt change in the date of the Santa Exchange. I have no idea where that scarf is now, probably in a drawer somewhere in my bedroom. This year I probably received the worst Secret Santa gift ever.

I have drunk two "plastic" cups of coffee in my life. In the late 1980s in my youth, I was playing around with a vending machine at my parents work place in Marlow, during a family day and decided to try coffee for the first and only time. Fast forward almost 30 years and by mistake I entered the wrong code in a vending machine at my place of work. Most people would have just thrown the cup away and got the tea they were craving for, but not wanting to waste the beverage, I begrudgingly drank the coffee. Never again.

As I was growing up, the coffee drinkers were my Dad, and my sister Samantha. Everybody else is a tea drinker. My wife Michelle is a coffee drinker. Although she tends to restrict herself to coffee purely in the morning, as a "wake up juice".

So you can imagine my horror to be given this package when opening my Secret Santa gift in front of colleagues (including working from home S, whom was on webcam via Skype for Business on a Microsoft Surface Pro).

Strong Coffee

What further condemns this initial offence, is that our colleague J had thought up the initiative of listing our wishes onto a whiteboard to give the everybody the inspiration they needed.

Secret Santa Wish List 2015

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Conversation Killer

Whenever you meet new people, eventually the conversation turns to your occupation, your career. The question can come as simply as "What do you do?". I try and consider my reply before engaging my mouth but there is no alternative way of sugar coating my job. "I'm a Business Analyst for a global software company". Unfortunately it is very difficult to spin my job in any other way. Sure, there are variants but they just make the job appear more junior than it truly is, such as Reporting Analyst or even Sales Operations Analyst. The truth is very few people understand what the Sales Operations department in a multinational organisation actually do. Maybe I just need to be a little more creative with what I say I do to make a living.