girlofprey

I was going to come to you today with a fresh tale of car parking woe, but then I spoke to the security guard who was taking over from me tonight, and he said he and the other security staff are getting made redundant, and his manager said that our Facilities company would be going as well. My boss hasn't mentioned anything about it, but maybe he wouldn't. I'm going to ask him about it tomorrow, but maybe I'll be job hunting again soon.

Anyway, here's the car park story:

We have two offices at our company (or two car parks at least). The Leeds office has 54 spaces. The Manchester office has 9. Of those 9, 2 are spare - one is used for visitor parking, and one is used by our Facilities company for a courier van. There's a HR recognition space which is given out to be people as a reward for good performance on week by week basis - but it hardly ever gets given out, I don't know what's wrong with their performance in Manchester. So we usually have that one to give away. Then there's a woman who has a permanent space, but only uses it on a Monday, so it's free four days of the week. And then sometimes people are on holiday. So those are the empty spaces we have to give away every week - 2 at best, for the full five days.

A woman from the new company has apparently been awarded a permanent space at Manchester to go with the new position she's getting.

So. I don't know which one they're going to give her. I do often fill those spaces in with people from the waiting list - some of whom claim they've been working for the company for 19 years and never been offered a permanent space - but most often we use them as visitor parking for people coming from the Leeds office. Apparently we have some sort of policy that if people from the Leeds office need to drive to Manchester and have to park, the business is obligated to pay for their parking, which is why we have the spare spaces to begin with. Also, there's a woman who claims that it's part of her contract that whenever she works a late shift - once every ten weeks or so, for a week - and ends up being the last worker in the office late in the evening, she gets a parking space for safety reasons. We've been giving her the space, but if this other woman gets a permanent parking space, and someone is awarded the HR recognition space the same week there's the late shift, there literally won't be a Monday space to give her. Unless they buy new parking spaces. Which I'm guessing they won't want to do if they're trying to save money. Or they take a permanent space away from someone else. Which I'm guessing would cause a kerfuffle.

So I don't know where they're going to put her. But whatever. I'll just do whatever they tell me to do.

End of car park story.

Now that Trump has literally sympathised with Nazis, I think it's a good time for another round of letter-writing about whether or not he should get to come to England for a state visit. Or get to come to England at all. Or have anything to do with us.

I saw a hedgehog tonight. Casually trundling along in the driveway of the housing estate next to mine. Lovely little thing. It has redoubled my enthusiasm for putting food out for them, as you might expect.

Also, it turns out Pennywise from It doesn't give a fuck. ( Spoilers for It, I guess )

Also, I've been crying at work again, but this time it's to do with how much Bill Denborough misses his little brother George. It makes it super hard to just get into the book while I'm, you know, supposed to be doing my job. I wasn't expecting this when I started reading It.

Things I'm now afraid of because of It:

• Single balloons.


• American sewer grates.


• It. Not clowns, specifically It.


• The emotions of children.


• Rodan.


• Anything bad happening to Will Hanlon.

I watched the Fright Night 2011 remake the other night. I don't recommend anyone else watch it, it has misogyny here, there and everywhere, but it's pretty good if you want a bit of violent vampire kink. I thought I recognised the main actor's name, though. Then another post mentioned he was Russian. And then I realised it's that actor who played Chekov in the new Star Trek films, and died unexpectedly last year. Which is kind of a shame.

That feeling when they mention the water in Derry.

I've been aggravated this week. One of the morning women at my job is on holiday, and my boss couldn't find anyone to cover for her, so I worked from 10am till 7pm today, and will do so until the end of the week. I've been at work so long, it feels like Thursday, but it isn't. However, they've been super good about my breaks, so I get a lunch hour as well as my usual half an hour at 4 o'clock, and actually today was fine, and sort of super busy, and maybe that'll be good for me, taking my mind off things.

I don't know what it is, but somehow the takeover at work and the summer holidays seem to have culminated into some sort of perfect storm of constant activity. I'm spending way more time on the car park than usual, because the 30 redundancies the new company made pretty much as soon as they took over came into effect on Friday, and a bunch of people left, so we have way more empty spaces than we used to. And a lot of the people who are still at work are on holiday, both people with permanent spaces and people on the waiting list, so I am just hammering through the list way more than usual. Plus they're doing some sort of desk/floor move thing, so the Facilities team - which is 3 people - have been crazy busy all week, and then we had about 4 contractors in for various things in yesterday. Today my manager had to go to the Manchester office, but just before he did an executive assistant reminded him they were supposed to organise our meeting rooms for a Town Hall with the CEO, which is like a big meeting/presentation thing, so he had to leave the other 2 Facilities guys rushing to hastily set it up in the 15 minutes before it started. And then, while he was in Manchester, a crowd of teenagers came to the building, claiming to be from a Citizen's Service, and they - and the adult with them - said they had a meeting with our woman who does a lot of charity liaison stuff, but unfortunately she left the business on Friday. I ended up signing them all in to have a talk/tour with a woman from HR, but that meant we're now down to about 15 visitor's passes, because the visitor's book is nearly empty and the guy that orders the new one is on holiday till August 8th. Oh and some people showed up to clean out the ducting in the kitchen, and that stunk the whole place out for about 2 hours. Right around the corner from the Town Hall meetings.

So. Interesting times, at least.

I feel okay. Tired, but like I said, at least it was busy. We'll see if there's any cumulative effect over the next few days, but hopefully I'll make it to the weekend. And like I say, they do kind of need me at the moment. It's just really bad timing, given everything else that's been going on lately.

Also, I know it's a lot of pretentious wank, but sometimes you get to a point in a situation where you just can't feel anything about it anymore, and it's not because you're heartless, it's because you're heartbroken.

But I called my local mental health service yesterday, and I'm having a telephone assessment on Sunday to see about them giving me some further support, so we'll see how that goes. When I told my mum about that, she said "what do you think these people are going to be able to do for you?". And then we mildly argued about whether she got slightly upset the first time she found out I was seeking mental health support, when I had counselling back in University, and she said she felt like she didn't know why I couldn't just talk to her. Spoiler: she did say that.

Also I finished Trails of Cold Steel 2. You might think I finished it long ago, when I talked about the final fight, but no. After that fight some crazy shit happened, all sorts of unexpected revelations, and then suddenly it was 2 months later, in a different city, and I was playing as 2 people I'd never met before. And then we went back to the school, so our main characters could finish off their school year. Then some more weird stuff happened on the campus, and I discovered what the actual final fight was. It was considerably harder and more irritating than the other final fight. And the main character made it really clear beforehand that there was no point to it, they were basically just killing for fun. But I did it and I finished it, hurrah. It made the ending slightly sour for me. But now I can wait for the third game, and see what finally happens to all my lovelies. If indeed I make it through any of those final fights. It's still slightly sad though, because the new one won't be coming out on PS Vita, so this is the last time I'll play it on there. Not sure how much I'll enjoy the grinding on the PS4, when I have to play it at home. But we'll see.

There are many films I want to see coming out over the next four weeks. The one I'm most excited for is The Hitman's Bodyguard, and that's two weeks away. I hope it's good. But anyway. It's not a terrible problem to have, I guess, looking forward to something.

I rewatched the Other Guys tonight, a comedy film from 2010 which is not super, but does at the end try to make some serious points about the imbalance of wealth and corporate excess/corruption in America, with fairly specific references to the way that's unfair to or outright cheats 'the little guy'. Towards the beginning of the film, there's a shot of Trump Tower. I'm not really much of a crazy conspiracy person, but it was still a little disturbing.

But actually, as part of it's theme, the film makes references to a lot of luxury brands and 'American excess', like Cartier diamonds and such, so it was probably more a reference on the other side of things. Which frankly, is just a little bit sad.

I did not like the film as much as I did when I first watched it, but it did have Michael Keaton in it being amazing. And then they had a whole special feature that was an extended cut/daily rushes of him improvising in a scene where his character is the boss at a Bed, Bath and Beyond store. Which included him talking about someone's near-death experience on the Staten Island ferry, and berating someone named Tony. So it made me very happy.

I know my petition sites are really sad about the potential mass death of the bees, but it does just look like they want to rip bees.

I finished the Communist Manifesto today. Well, I actually finished it a few weeks ago - it randomly ended about halfway through my book. The rest turned out to be the many prefaces Marx and Engels had written over the years, as it got republished. Which was interesting, because they briefly covered all the political/socialist changes that happened over the decades after it was written, including some revisions to their theory - a revolution in France in the 1800s showed that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes', apparently. And it was also slightly sad, because it covered the years after Marx died, and Engels had to go on writing the prefaces alone. And then the last part of the book was an essay Marx wrote after the election of someone in France that people clearly did not like and were shocked by, following some of their socialist uprisings, and frankly it was like reading something about Trump. Although I know I only draw that conclusion because Trump is happening now, and that's the closest example I have to compare it to. It also, on the other hand, contained this charming phrase:

"A nation and a woman are not forgiven for the unguarded hour in which the first available adventurer is able to violate them."

Calm down there, Marx.

It was interesting though, partly because I never realised a large part of Communist theory was that socialism was the ultimate outcome of capitalism - that in the same way that the progress society made by organising into feudalism essentially led to capitalism, and commoners overthrowing nobility, the progress made by capitalism would inevitably lead to socialism. Which is a weirdly dynamic and completely undynamic belief - at what point does/can revolution happen? Slowly, over time, I suppose. Again, I find it's heavy overreliance on the idea of revolution, on the idea that violence and only doing things violently can really achieve anything a bit much, plus casually ignoring women and racism outside of 'competition between countries' obviously. But it's still an interesting read, and worth doing, given the current political state of things.

I just let my mum go round to the shop to get some chocolate for me. I feel a bit bad, but I did lend her some of my supply the other day when she had none.

I'm not really a fan of hot hot heat. But I do really like the way everything looks in the sunshine, and the way smells carry further, and the way everyone smells like skin and suntan lotion, and you can hear flip-flops every now and then throughout the day.

I find it much weirder that the Doctor's never been a non-white man than that he's never been a woman. But eh.

( Difficult stuff )

I went to see Spiderman again today, because Michael Keaton is amazing. I still spent a lot of it wishing someone would slit Tony Stark's throat, but the bits with Adrian Toomes were amazing.

I picked up an issue of a new comic yesterday called 'Sacred Creatures', and from the varied and interesting-looking group on the front I assumed it was about gods living in modern times, and what they do. Turned out that it was - but it was mostly about some random dude, with a beautiful girlfriend he just couldn't let down, and what his experiences with them were.

I really have no idea these days why people think anyone who wants to watch a show about GODS in modern times, actually, really, wants to watch a show about a bog-standard, fairly uninteresting human who just meets them. No.