When your partner rolls over in their sleep and manages to smack you in the face… not the best way to wake up.

My husband has always asserted that it is my cat who is the sole instigator in attack grooming sessions, and he may well have been right. But this night, my cat was sleeping peacefully on me as I peacefully slept when his cat decided to go on the offensive.

At 3:30 am.

I appreciate your growth as a cat, Bob, but I would have appreciated it more had you not awoken me with your new-found confidence.

Why does my brain sabotage me? I have a weird dream that wakes me up and now I’m awake at 3am and can’t go back to sleep. I went to bed at a reasonable time because I was dead tired and this is the thanks I get?

Not posting as often lately because my childhood dream — a Nintendo DSi — finally arrived, in time for my birthday. More of a gift to that teenage boy who’s dead now than to his older trans female counterpart, but still.

Been playing Pokémon HeartGold, enjoying my life, all due to things improving at work & medication cumulative effect kicking in. Finally.

Without burning internal pain, a poet ceases to be a poet. I rarely write now. I still have wild dreams, and I write down snippets for them not to be lost when I’m properly awake, but I just… don’t have that strong of an urge to share them here. Maybe I’m not as dependent on someone else’s validation anymore.

I’m planning to team up with someone who can draw, so we can make zines, as suggested by you. If you can draw — let’s talk!

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.