Friday 18 March 2011

In a word ... OMG!

OK, so it's not actually a word, it's three letters .. picky picky! ... but those three letters describe my life perfectly at the moment. I've been so busy living life that I haven't had a chance (or the motivation) to write about it here.

The first big thing that happened during my little hiatus was Bradley turned twelve. His last year before the dreaded teenage attitude really kicks in! Just kidding ... he's a good kid (they all are though you'd never know it by the way I whinge about them all!) and I just hope he stays the lovable little pumpy-umpy-umpkins he is now!! Love you schnookums ... mwah!!!

The older boys finally got their first shift at work ... three hours of checkout training on a Saturday morning ... and have done many more shifts since then. They've each received their first pay and Alex has already spent most of his. Andrew wasn't sure how much he had been paid as he didn't get an email notification/payslip, so he decided to not spend anything until he could find that out. He's also hassling me to help him set up a savings account for his car .. yes you heard right .. a car. Glad one of the boys has a forward planning gene in there somewhere!

We've had Pre-Start for the new house!! We finally got our preliminary plans on the 24th February and got booked in for pre-start on Friday 4th March. It was a long day and we didn't get the pricing done then and there as there was only one estimator and three pre-start consultations happening at the same time. (The fact that we asked for prices on everything under the sun to be included may not have helped our cause!) It was a long weekend as well so we had to wait until the Tuesday to find out that we had majorly 'overspent'.

After sitting down with a red pen, we managed to reduce the pre-start spending from $35,000 down to $18,000 ($4000 was electrical changes and $6650 was to have the house smart wired) and have now officially signed the contract to build the new nest. All we're waiting on now is the final finance approval which should hopefully be through by the end of this week. Fingers crossed!!

I can't remember if I've mentioned before (and I'm too lazy today to go back and read through all my previous posts!) but I applied for a job at the end of January and was granted an initial interview on the Thursday 3rd of February. It was advertised as a 'Production Clerk' and the duties included data entry, stock control and other general office duties. It sounded perfect for me, is nice and close to the new house (and not too far from this one either) and I was still keen even after taking a tour of the dingy, dusty transportable building that would serve as my office and the equally dusty manufacturing plant attached to it.

I came away from the interview and subsequent tour of the office and plant feeling that I had interviewed well and feeling confident that I would pass though to the next level. I received a call on the Friday afternoon asking if I wanted to progress to the next stage but was having second thoughts about working full-time so I asked for the weekend to think it over.

On the Monday, I rang John (the plant manager) and let him know I was prepared (as prepared as I could be anyway) to go through. He arranged some psychometric and aptitude testing (apparently a standard thing for this company) on Wednesday 9th February at the head office in Caversham. I was told to allow 2 to 3 hours to complete the testing but was out of there in just over an hour and then sat back and waited for the results, which I was told would take about 48 hours to come back from Sydney.

And I waited.

And then I waited some more.

I finally gave in to the insecurities and phoned John on Wednesday 16th February to ask what was happening. Apparently he hadn't heard anything either and wasn't getting any response to his calls about it. Eventually, he rang (22/2) and explained that the person responsible for dealing with the reports had gone on holidays for a week and no-one thought to check her mail for anything urgent. Luckily the report was favourable so I went off for a medical on 24/2 (another standard thing for this company) and then waited for, what I thought would be, the inevitable job offer.

Another week passed and I still hadn't heard anything so gave up on stressing about it for a while and focused on pre-start and the new house instead. During our pre-start meeting, John rang to say that they would like to offer me the job but the contract had to be drawn up by the eastern states head office, so he would call me when it was available to be signed.

Yet another week passed and John rang to say that head office had finally signed off on the contract and he would drop it around to me on his way home from work on Friday night. Oh and could I please start Monday. I'm sure the Universe was working with me on this because I didn't get the request to start until we had finished pre-start and signed all the necessary documents.

Anyway, I have survived my first week of training and will be starting the company funded psycho-analysis sessions at my own job any day now. Pray for my sanity if you have a moment as I am the only woman on a site with 37 men most of whom, judging by the double takes when I worked there on Thursday, have never seen a woman in their workplace before and are all worried that they'll have to mind their P's and Q's. Can't wait to set them all straight!!