haha yeah brie does rule. We just recently (like in the last year) had an Aldi open up near us; there was one out of town for ages but not driving, we couldn't use it. Most of the shopping is done there now. Parents have used it in France for years.

Everyone hating on me because I don't throw my money out of every door and window I'll have you know that I've been spending a lot of money lately on getting this place fully furnished and decorated! Not gonna like though, even just spending 200 euros at Ikea like I did on Saturday is making me wince.

I should probably adjust my frugality levels a tiny bit now I'm paid a lot better than I used to be, but it's hard to adjust. It's not even that I am really saying no to many things, more that I feel increasingly like I don't need that much....stuff. There are so many good video games out there that it seems insane to regularly spend 50+ euros on them, for example, and I've also drastically reduced spending money on other fun things that don't have much use beyond one read/watch. Things like comic books, movies, etc. Streaming services helped with the latter. With the movie I also did an assessment of all my stuff and I'm throwing out a lot of things that I've held on to for too long...you know, mementos, merch and gadgets. Feels good to declutter.

Sorry to hear you're going back to working full time soon Pev!! Good luck!! God knows I am still having a rough time going into work every day and I don't have to deal with your health issues. Sometimes I think to myself "have I gone soft or was this just a lot easier before?" going into work every day and commuting, I mean. The answer is probably twofold: I was younger (hah) and I also didn't care much about work back then...it was really an afterthought for me. Since then I've grown up and learned to care more and take responsibility. Maybe too much, since most people seem to get by just fine by putting in minimal effort.

Re: 4-day work week: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/busi ... ek-uk.html

Most people are not like us, but working less hours would definitely make me a better employee. Most of the things I do on a day-to-day basis are things I learned to do on my own time (or when I was screwing off on my job). So some people might read Facebook or watch YouTube videos and I'd play around with code or whatever. If I had more time, I'd definitely be screwing around with tech... like getting this stupid forum working on AWS with nginx. I have grand plans of porting over all of clankiller.com, breaking some of it off to plasmakiller, etc etc. But all that stuff takes a bunch of time that I don't have.

Anyway... I don't hate my job, it just regularly annoys me. Soon all of the developers will be taking turns being on call. it used to be handled by our tech leads exclusively, but it seems like more and more things and turning into OMFG emergencies (even when they're not) and so they're trying to spread the pain around some more. I'm not thrilled. Getting called nights/weekend/holidays/ON MY BIRTHDAY is one of the reasons I quit my last job. Bleh. 1.5 years until I'm fully vested.

How often do you need to be on call? We have a similar thing at our job but it's spreading among most of the employees, and there's about 50 of them. So it really is only one week a year for everyone, and most weeks there aren't constant emergencies outside of working hours anyway. It's just to make sure that there actually is someone when there IS an emergency.

I'm about halfway my probation now and had an evaluation which was almost entirely positive. He didn't say it in so many words but basically I'm definitely going to be confirmed in my position barring something extremely unexpected happening. Not that I was really doubting it, but it still takes away a bit of stress. Would have sucked to resign from my previous job and move countries only to find myself unemployed after making all those expenses. Especially when there were people getting laid off at my previous company with a 100k in severance, so I eventually would have had that too look forward to as well if I'd stayed.

You're right Satis, most people aren't like us. That's become painfully clear over the years now. I don't even understand how someone CAN do the bare minimum all the time and still be remotely happy in their job. Clearly, being pushed to work insane hours without much recognition sucks ass too, but if you have the time and room to make things better in your current job why not at least try? I just don't see how I could survive going into work for the rest of my life if I hated it so much...

Yea... when a job devolves into "well, I'm just going to keep showing up so I get paid", it's probably time to move on. Regarding how often we're on call, it gets rotated between 5 of us, so I'm on call 1 week out of every 5. This last time I didn't actually get paged at all, but everyone else got paged at least once. Somehow I got lucky. On Wednesday the guy that was on call had 3 emergencies, though they were all during business hours.

My job is kinda sucking. I don't know if it's getting worse or if I'm getting too sensitive. I spent a day and a half fixing problems caused by something another team did, and 10 minutes after I fixed it they decided to roll back the change that caused the issue in the first place. Never mind that I asked them about it before I started making the fixes. So I busted my butt for a day and a half for no reason. It makes me wonder why I try. I have 16 months before I'm fully vested.

I'm imagining a tracker on your phone that shows you the exact amount of days before you're vested.

Apparently at my current job there was previously a guy who had a calendar counting down to the day until his retirement, like 3 years before. It feels like it would only serve to make things even more depressing and far away, but I guess we all delude ourselves in our own way.

I'm still plodding away until I'm permanently confirmed in my role and then I will see where things take me. Not that I have any plans to change jobs any time soon, but you never know.

I think I'd like that countdown only if it was hidden away and I regularly forgot about it. So every so often I'd remember, dig it out and think "oooh only 7934 days now! That's 400 down from last time!"

oh man, that's depressing.

My job's still annoying me. On a positive note, my level of expertise in c# has definitely improved by leaps and bounds over the last almost 3 years. I'm pretty sure I can land another job pretty easily. On a negative note, the team of 5 developers has reduced to 4, so now I'm on call every 4 weeks. That definitely increases the suck level. My last on call period I got pulled into crap twice, once on a Friday evening. So yea...15 months until I'm fully vested.

Be honest, how drunk were you on that Friday evening when they called you up?

Bah... I worked until 5pm, then got called at 6. I was totally sober. Not to say I didn't grab a beer at some point.

You disappoint me

But yeah, ever since I got serious about my job and got old I'm also not drinking as of 17hh on Friday.

If you think I'm disappointing, you should see Shiny. She'll drink a beer or two fairly regularly (or a bit of bourbon) but rarely goes on a real bender. Last night was an exception and she's suffering this morning. I ended up ordering in a bunch of Mexican food because she was drunk and craving it. Everyone likes a drunk Shiny.

You most of all I'm sure

We're getting old bro.

So, one of the perks of being a civil servant: getting the whole christmas week off 'for free' (as in, the whole place shuts down and it's not part of my annual leave).

About two months left on my probation period before I'm a permanent official. Everything's looking ok so I'm not worried, but I'll still be glad when it's officially done. And once it is I can started shaking some things up in here. For the betterment of my employer of course.

Good stuff Rinox. Fingers crossed for your probation. Hopefully it doesn't involve too many hoops to jump through.