wolffyluna

So, people may remember me asking advice about whether to take a job at a [Food] company. I have an update! I am starting towards leaning towards not taking the job, just because a lot of my interactions have been throwing up what seems to me to be red flags

So, my last contact with the hiring manager was several weeks ago, and it was basically me saying "I'm interested in the job, but I want to see a contract before I absolutely say yes (read: please show me your hourly rates, number of hours you want me to work, and whether overtime is paid or not)"

Hiring Manager: "All good. I'm currently working with HR to get you a contract through [Main Company] because that will give you a better hourly rate, and I'll let you know when that happens."

Fast forward to this morning, and I get a surprise phonecall from a Mystery Company. I have to play a game of twenty questions to work out they are
calling on behalf of the food company. They want my email to send me the safety induction videos

...

I am surprised, and try and explain "...I was going to confirm whether I would take this job once I am shown the contract, why are you sending
me safety inductions?"

Them: "Oh, because you are a casual, you won't have a contract. Your pay will be about $X/hr."

So:

 a) this is how I find out I am a casual

b) through a random unexpected phonecall

c) where I am told what my salary rate will approximately be, from some random guy I don't know from Adam

And like, the several weeks of silence is weird, especially because this is a job they have a deadline to fill (it's for someone who is going on maternity leave). And it's even weirder that they are not proactively giving me my salary in writing.

I have no clue if my instincts are right here, but this seems to be a pile of weird communication problems, and I am double twitchy about basic information not being given proactively in writing. If it’s not in writing, it’s not real, and I am not taking salary information from a random over the phone.

Christmas was reasonably good this year. The 'relatives that are in this city that aren't all booked up on Christmas' is both a reasonably small number and lines up pretty well with 'relatives we like,' so we were able to have a lovely (if wildly over catered) Christmas lunch.

(Seriously, it was only afterwards that we realised "...wait, we had one Meat Thing per person... and one of those Meat Things was Most Of A Pig's Leg")

And I am also filled with warm fuzzies about the some of the gifts I got.

( Christmas Crowing )

Under a cut, because even though they are positive, the shadows of COVID lingers over them.

( Read more... )

I am not going to be watching The Untamed.

I mean, I'm not going to make an active effort to avoid it, and if I'm bored and scrolling through Netflix I might watch an episode or two...

...but I'm not going to be making an active effort to watch it.

(As a note, I am mostly writing this as a note to myself, and to have something to point to if someone says 'Hey, have you heard of The Untamed? It sounds like it might be up your alley!' I do not intend to yuck anyone's yums. It's a good show. Just not my thing.)

I have made a solid attempt at watching The Untamed. I know a lot of people who really like it, and I get a lot of my media reccs from people I know really liking a thing. Usually they're right! That's how I got into Dragon Age, and the Silmarillion and The Magnus Archives. If a lot of my friends and acquaintances really got into The Bridge Jumping Show!, hell yeah would I watch it.

So of course I checked out The Untamed. A lot of people liked it! A lot of people who's taste I trust like it! And it seemed like it was likely to be a thing I liked!

And I do like it! ...I'm just very bad at watching it. I don't know quite what it is? But something in the melange of 'has subtitles'+'the subtitles are not great'+'I do not know this genre or this cultural context very well' means that I am constantly confused. And sometimes it is a fun confusion! But sometimes I'm left wondering if I've actually properly understood a basic conversation at all, or have to I have recontextualise four episodes on the fly because I did not realise most of the characters were teenagers. (...And I have just enough of a second hand embarassment squick that Wei Wuxian is really hard to watch a lot of the time. A second hand embarassment squick that is strongest in ~school settings. Yeah.)

And the thing is, even though I do like the show ~overall, the pressure I've been putting on myself of 'lots of people like this! you should like this! maybe make content! but you should watch and like this because so many people who's opinions you trust like this! watch it! like it!' and the fact it is actually difficult for me to watch outweighs that overall liking of it. It has made it kinda stressful. Not even necessarily to watch, but it's been hanging over my head. And it's been taking up a slot in my 'list of things I could do in my recreation time' and considering one of the big things that eats into my recreation time is picking a thing to do-- I'm taking it off the list. At least for now. Maybe I'll end up putting it back on it. Maybe I'll end up reading Mo Dao Zu Shi. Who knows.

But yeah, probably not going to be watching it any time soon.

( covid-19 cw )

My university has started hosting farmer's markets. I want to be cynical about that-- but I just can't.

The reason I want to be cynical is that recently my university has been making decisions based less on what it would make sense for a university to do, and more on what would make it the most money. For example, it recently knocked down a lot of its central buildings and rebuilt them. And completely ignoring all the other reasons the reconstruction was annoying-- They knocked down a set of large lecture theatres, and replaced them with a cinema. (Because it's not like a university would need large centrally located lecture theatres?) They stopped renting out restaurant space to the cheap'n'cheerful food-on-the-go-places, and now there are fancy (and expensive) cafés and poke bowl places instead.

And they increased the price to hold a stall on the grounds, to an amount that a student club could not hope to afford, but an AcmeCorp recruiting event totally could.

Before and during the reconstruction, there were weekly markets. They weren't anything fancy, but that didn't matter, because they were aimed at university students and students don't want fancy+expensive? There were usually a couple second hand book stalls (one for non fiction, and one that sold old sci fi and fantasy paperbacks for $2 each) and a second hand clothing stall. Someone might be selling hand made jewelry. Those sort of stalls.

But once the reconstruction was finished-- no more markets. They stopped. There was annoyance. Outcry. Talk of 'is this the because of the fucking absurd stall fees?'

But then the administration listened! The markets would be back! ...as farmer's markets. Because artisanal cheese* is really aimed at the student demographic. And the 'all things must be handmade' edict sounded like it would stop my beloved second hand bookstall with too many Anne McCaffreys from attending, and that stall was the highlight of the markets for me.

It was the fancy nonsense that the university is starting to pull, and I should be cynical.

But then market day rolled around. Firstly, the second hand bookstall was there! (And the second hand clothing stall, too.) Hooray!

But also-- one of the artisinal food stalls was a cannoli stall. That sold cannoli in multiple flavours. Unusual flavours, like 'chocolate orange', as well as your more traditional 'vanilla cream' and suchlike.

...did you know that the way to my heart is passionfruit cannoli? I didn't know that until recently either.

(I had two cannoli: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, because what if this was the last time the cannoli stall was ever there? I got a 50c discount on the second one, presumably because it was noticed I bought two? I was instantly charmed. Thank you, cannoli man, for the 15% discount on your delicious baked goods.)

I just can't be cynical about book stalls and cannoli. It's a character flaw.

*I shouldn't be too cynical about the cheese either. I bought some at my mother's request, and it was good cheese. Bizarre decision to try and sell it at a university, but good cheese nonetheless.

( I have weird hang ups about weird things )

So, I've got the reviewer comments from the paper-that-might-get-published (by the university.)

I need to travel back in time two years, and punch myself. And also everyone else working on this project, but mostly myself.

I have spent a chunk of this morning going through several excel spreadsheets, doing forensic wtf-ing, to try and work out what data we had taken and how many samples we had. This was made awkward by the fact that we had a 'detailed' spreadsheet and a 'just the facts ma'am' spreadsheet, but we didn't label them that way, did we? No, we labelled them as 'group 1' and 'group 2', and because there were two groups, that collected different data, I had to try and work out whether the group 2 data was duplicated from group 1, or if group 2 was just really bad at measuring things.

Also, there is a stupid, repeated maths error you could drive a truck through and which might change the results. Basically, instead of calculating metabolic rate by dividing oxygen consumption by time, we did it by divided oxygen consumption by mass. Which we might have had a reason for, but it's two years later and I don't remember, and considering we were a bunch of mostly-first year biologists with a week of time, somehow I think it's more likely to be an error.

(There was a reviewer comment that was "that's an interesting method for calculation volume, you should mention in your method how it would fare against [standard method we did not know about]." I have no clue whether they meant interesting or interesting. But I am kicking myself in the future, because apparently we did not need to use the goddamned callipers for this, we could have just used the mass to estimate the volume, why didn't we think of this?)

Meeting with potential Honours supervisors is going well so far. I've met with two today (out of a potential eight), and I think both meetings went okay? I definitely managed to impress someone with my chemistry knowledge, the fact I have ever used a microscope, and that I knew about contamination unprompted (it's a lab that involves trace elements, include Boron-- which is a pain-- so they care about contamination.)

But thanks to meeting with Honours supervisors, and an information session, and having to go see the sub dead about a thing that is resolved (grumblegrumblegrumble) I'm quite busy. Which is self inflicted, but still. I'm not sure where I'm gonna find the time to do assignments, both of the school kind and of the fandom kind. I'll work something out.

(...I've also just realised that over the weekend, I'm booked for a stressful and long event (a wedding), which is not only going to eat into my homework time, but which I'm doing instead of de-stressing horse riding time. Woops.)

A continuation of the 'gahhhhh' series, except this time with good news!

I got to talk to an academic advisor (without any bureacratic finangling! They had a drop in session scheduled today).

Bad news: There's a reasonable chance that this semester I will go below the 70% average needed to stay on the Honours track.

Good news:... you only get kicked off the Honours track if you have two semesters below the 70% average. Which is, like, possible, but not necessarily likely. Especially considering I'm planning to do Earth Science courses this semester coming, which I'm better at and should bring my average up.

Double good news: I don't need to do anything fancy to get an Earth Science major. I just need to do three 3rd year Earth Science courses-- which is hella doable? Like, I need to take three 3rd year courses this semester anyway. But there's no bureaucratic finangling, no having to stay at uni longer, I can still graduate this year and do Honours next year.

Wahey!

(Now I've just got to pick some Earth Science classes. I'm definitely doing Planetary Science (geochemistry!) and Economic Geology (mineralogy!), but I still need to pick between Groundwater (pros: field trips, I'm sure it is a useful and marketable skill, cons: I'm sure groundwater is fascinating to a certain sort of person, but I have no clue if I'm one of them) or Paleoclimatology and Climate Change (pros: I unironically love climate proxies, cons: climate grief is a thing, and a thing that kicks my butt.)