Coping

I don't think I am. And it's starting to get a bit too much for me.

Job stress

I don't understand my role here. I'm generally given the impression that I'm doing really really well, and there are no problems, and everyone's really pleased with how I'm doing. I'm not, and they're wrong. I'm better-placed to judge than they are, and I don't seem to be able to convince anyone that there are whole swathes of my job that don't make sense to me.

There are large chunks of things that other people do that make no sense either. Mostly things I've now got to live with the legacy of, and in many cases justify on a monthly basis the results of. And I'm sick of it.

"Why is this doing this?" "Because the old system did." "OK, why did the old system do that?" "I don't know you'll have to ask {person who's now left." or "But A doesn't imply B." "It does the way we model things." "Well then the way 'we' model things is wrong, isn't it?!" It took me nearly a day in June to figure out why someone was worried about a pair of numbers in a spreadsheet not being the same as each other (subtle point of Australian regulation that I still don't "feel", it's just words). However, it only took 5 minutes to figure out why they would always and forever be different because neither of them was actually showing what they said they were. (And then another 3 attempts to explain this latter finding to the person who's noticed the former.)

That's not to mention the other swathes of the job that are pointless and unnecessary. Two weeks ago, I was asked to repeat the checks that we did last year on a certain rather monolithic and poorly-understood process. Some of the checks involved things like making sure that, because we were effectively re-doing some work we'd done earlier in the year only going about it in a different way, we ended up with the same answer at the end. "So why don't we just not do it again, and take the numbers we did the first time?" "Because that's how the process works." "Why don't we change it then?" "Too late now, we've already started."

Everything is planned using the reverse timetabling method. When's the due date? OK, then work backwards. If someone ends up being squashed flat by the volume of work needed, that's OK, we'll authorise weekend work (and this isn't always me - there's another person in the department whose only day off since the beginning of June has been the day she had jury duty).

Presentation comes higher up the priority list than accuracy, auditability or amount of work required. E.g., 9am e-mail yesterday. "Friday's meeting said we need to adjust this number by 5m. I've got to present results on the new basis at 11am, so I'd like this fed into the presentation. Don't care how you split it." The number needs splitting into at least 4 pieces, the final split wasn't ready till the end of today, and different splits can change the message given by the results radically. The impacts on the presentation of any given split can be done in your head, whereas actually putting the numbers into the required spreadsheets and getting all the results for the presentation to hang together takes about an hour and a half, and now we have a final split for this, there's another hour and a half's work waiting for someone tomorrow morning to put the real numbers in since, inevitably, the assumed split wasn't the final one.

So, perhaps, an alternative would be to leave the presentation as it is and say "These don't have the effects of the 5m in there, as we haven't finished doing the work to split it properly yet. If the split works like this, the results would be .., and if like this, ..." When I suggested this, the reply was something like "I could, but it's much tidier if the numbers in the presentation are right."

And justifying things with comments like "Ah, but you can't deny we're world-class leaders in spreadsheet complexity" is not demonstrating a helping, constructive or supportive management style.

Financial stress

Direct debits don't really exist here in Australia, at least not in any sort of coordinated "why on earth would you pay bills any other way?" sense that they do in England. This has led to me receiving "final reminder" notices on 3 different accounts so far (in case you're still reading and care at this point, gas, electricity and credit card). I am exactly the sort of person for which direct debits were designed.

Internet banking to the UK is infuriatingly intermittent. Nationwide works about 1 out of 3 days, HSBC's not much better, and I still can't get Tesco's (which is the account of last resort, although given some of the unbudgeted expenditure in the first few months I was here, and that HSBC Oz won't have a bar of transferring money to HSBC UK, it's now borderline first resort) to work, despite re-registering twice and also ringing them (20 minutes on hold at international rates...) They don't know why it doesn't work. So for now, I'm stuck with ringing them to transfer money around.

And then there's Pickfords. I'm not going to go there.

Non-financial stress

I received an "urgent notice" letter 2 weeks ago saying that my health insurance company hadn't received my application form, and that if I didn't send it back to them 4 days ago (given the length of time between the date on the letter and when I got round to opening it) my cover would be cancelled. What it didn't explain was how they'd been charging me premiums for the last 6 months, or how they'd sent me a membership certificate and a welcome letter in February with all my details on. I rang them to explain/complain, and they said they'd now cancelled it and that I'd receive notice of this in the post in the next few days, and I could reapply next month. So that's going to involve some more irate phone calls over the next few days.

My lower right wisdom tooth is hurting nearly enough to make me go to the dentist. In case it's not clear how that's a problem, I tend to put dentists only slightly lower on the "dislikes" list than tarantulas. I've also no idea how much it'll cost, or even how to do it - too many types of dentist here, and it's one of those things that the locals "just understand." I ask, and they end up talking about bulk-billing and Medicare.

Relieving stress (no, not like that, you filthy-minded people)

I don't really have anyone in work that I can let off steam about all this - half of them don't understand a word I say, and most of the other half don't understand what I mean. I can't use e-mail at all any more, and am apprehensive about using the phone, since it leads to too many misunderstandings - I have to see how someone reacts to what I'm saying so I can tell if they've misunderstood me, so virtually everything's face-to-face. There are a number of things that just don't translate - unfortunately, most of them seem to be things I want to say.

I've bent Colm's ear a fair amount with this, for which I'm very grateful, and without which I might have gone postal by now, but it involves some treading on eggshells given he works for a competitor now. Other than that, local pressure release valves are pretty thin on the ground. And talking to someone in the UK via e-mail, or even Skype, just doesn't work that well.

Black holes

So I guess where I would like to end this post is a general apology for being increasingly uncommunicative, rude, slippery, uncontactable and unfriendly over the last 9 months. I really wanted this move to have gone better than it has. An awful lot better than it has. And I think that's probably the most depressing thing about it.