2016 in review, part 3

You may have noticed the abundance of photos in my last couple of posts. Intern Peter told me about the 365 day photo challenge. The actual challenge itself doesn't seem to be clearly defined, but I'm going to try and use it as the basis for yet another attempt at writing a blog post every day for a year, which is going to be my New Year's Resolution for 2017. But rather than taking a photo every day, I'm going to slightly expand the topic. 

• It doesn't have to be a photo, but has to be an image of some sort, so it can be a screenshot, or a motivational poster. It must be something I've created myself though
• I don't have to use a picture created that day, but it must be one created within a week of posting.

Hopefully I can beat my last record of 120 days in a row!

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Unfortunately, it seems like there won't be a Wordpress annual review this year. It seems that it took a team all of December to generate those reports, which is pretty intense, so that makes sense. I guess I will have to make my own.

My blog was viewed 3260 times, by 2011 visitors. 

It was a pretty quiet year for me, with only 30 posts.

My most popular post was last year's post on the Java Certification Exam... which was 625 of my views.

Most of my views were from Australia (1239), with the second highest being India (663) followed closely by the United States (514).

2016 in review, part 2

Continuation from my last post - 2016 in review, part 1.

I mentioned in my last post that I was offered a promotion with strings attached. I was asked to change to another department, and although it was pointed out that the promotion and the change were separate, I got the feeling that it was heavily suggested that I move. I asked for the time to think it over. It was explained that the reason I was being asked to change to the other team was to "bring the people together". Yep. Those were the exact words. It was explained that all the things I do around the office for team morale would be helpful in another area.

At first, I was pretty insulted. I didn't go to university for 6 years to "bring the people together". I (usually) believe that I'm a competent programmer. I'm not the best delivery lead in the world, but my project made it across the line... eventually. There's more to me than the social stuff.

I was also asked to act as delivery lead on a project. I think it was a bit of a disaster, as we ran overtime and overbudget, and didn't deliver everything. However, my boss did challenge me to improve the performance, and we blew that target out of the water. The performance tester said she had never seen such a big improvement before.

During the project, I think I realised what my strength is: I am crazy, but somehow, I manage to bring everyone else along my crazy journey. Towards the end of the project, everyone was voluntarily pulling crazy hours, everyone was really invested in the outcome of the project, and the words "I have a crazy idea" brought smiles to people's faces rather than fear. Not that this is a good trait to have, but when you're facing a deadline, and you just need to get something done, it comes in handy.

But the entire project was misery on top of misery for me. I shouldn't judge based on one experience, but I feel like management is not for me.

I deliberated over the decision to change teams for quite a while, and in the end, decided to pull the trigger and make the change. Maybe this will help with my misery. I've been in my new team for a few weeks now, and so far I'm loving it. Not that I hated my old team, but I think the change of pace is nice. I made a farewell video for my own farewell. It was a music video, parodying Taylor Swift's Shake It Off. It was great fun filming it, and though I didn't manage to get everyone I wanted in the video, I think it turned out OK. I had someone from the bank's choir group sing the song, and someone from another team put together the final soundtrack.

During my misery, one of the few things that kept me sane was the few minutes a day I put aside to work on learning a new language. I mentioned a while back that I wanted to learn French to watch more happy French man videos, and I had quite a long streak going in Memrise. I also downloaded an app called Hello Talk that lets you connect with people to practice speaking to them.

You can correct people's sentences with what the correct version should be, and it also includes an auto-translate function, to keep the conversation going (yes, I know I missed the ka in that sentence...).

The app is pretty cool, but it is a bit hard to keep a conversation going, especially with the time difference. I feel like I have made a friend out of it though, a French-Canadian guy who also loves cooking and movies. He has sent me a few photos of his family, and I've sent him some photos of my cooking.

Although I did start learning because of food, I was also challenged to read Le Petit Prince, and my French is nowhere near good enough to do that yet, so I think I'll continue until I can.

What I do like is that I've actually started some conversations with people who I've always found it difficult to talk to because of French - mainly a couple of Belgian people, who also happen to speak French. I think it's just something that most people can relate to (learning a new language, not necessarily learning French itself), especially as there are a lot of people whose native language isn't English. The head of my new area is also from Belgium, so it might be a good ice-breaker for me.

The other big thing that happened this year is that I developed my first major crush since dating MrFodder. The guilt of it ate away at me for a very long time, but there was also that exciting, butterflies in your stomach feeling whenever I saw him. The constant fluctuations between those two feelings would make anyone seasick. I would catch myself e-stalking him on the office messaging tool to try and time my water breaks with his so that we'd meet in the kitchen, and then berate myself for doing something so childish. (On a more positive note, I did end up drinking a lot more water during this time.)

I ended up asking a few people who have been in a relationship for a while, and the general feeling is that it is completely natural to feel this way, as long as you don't act on it. I wonder why nobody ever talks about it. If I didn't already know of a married friend who had a crush on someone outside his marriage, I would have just assumed that it wasn't a normal thing, and continued thinking that I'm a terrible person (I still think that I'm a terrible person, but I've come to terms with it now).

This probably belongs in its own blog post, but I feel like now is a good time to discuss it.

Some reasons why having a crush on someone outside of your relationship should be considered a normal thing:

• for the most part, I think it's hard to control who you have feelings for. Sometimes you just happen to meet someone and click with them.
• the idea that you're only ever going to be attracted to one person is probably not true for everyone
• I think in a long-term monogamous relationship, it can be easy to fall into a rut - not that this excuses having a crush, but I think it's one of the reasons why it might happen
• your partner may not have every single desirable trait that you want, but they have enough for you to have decided to stay with them. You might come across a person that has the missing traits (but not necessarily all the traits your partner has). It seems natural to feel that "grass is always greener" pull. 

I think the biggest thing for me was how much I liked the excitement of it all. I don't think I ever really wanted something to happen with him. Maybe it was the high school crush experience that I never really had the chance to experience, and will not experience now. If I want to speak to MrFodder, I'll just go up and speak to him. No matter how stupid the words that come out of my mouth are, I am not afraid that he'll refuse to speak to me in the future. If I wanted to talk to The Crush, then I had to concoct some excuse to go and talk to him - we are in an office after all, and we're supposed to be working. Even though talking to him is so relaxed and easy, I still fear the rejection of having him say that now is not a good time to talk. And I can't explain why, but the whole process of engineering a plan to go and talk to him is something I enjoy doing; maybe I see it as a challenge? Maybe I'm just good at running down various scenarios and coming up with plans on how to deal with them.

I was quite wary of crossing the emotional cheating line. The aforementioned married friend with a crush said that the line is when you start feeling like you'd rather be with your crush than with your actual partner, and though there was a period where it might have been a bit iffy whether I had crossed that line or not, as things are standing now, I am well away from that line. 

The other question I asked was whether it was something worth telling your current partner about, and the unanimous vote there was for not telling your partner. Well, as you can see from this blog post, I have blatantly ignored that advice. I think the reasoning behind that advice is that it's a selfish thing to do in a way. It serves to relieve your own conscience, while burdening your partner with the feeling that they must be inadequate in some way for you to have developed a crush on someone else. Personally, I don't think that's the case (see the reasons above). I guess it was a bit selfish though, as I didn't plan to act on the crush, so it's something I could have easily taken to the grave.

But the knowledge that it's perfectly normal did help a lot, and I hope that if someone else reading this finds that they're in the same situation, it makes them feel better, too.

So the end of the year has me starting in a new team, I've definitely grown a lot this year, and hopefully I'll do a bit more next year.

2016 in review, part 1

Apologies for the long absence. We moved and didn't have internet for over 2 months, and the thought of writing an entire blog post on my phone didn't really appeal to me all that much.

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This has been a pretty big year for me, and I feel like I've grown a lot from it. It wasn't all positive, but whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

I'm pre-empting the usual Wordpress generated post, because I feel like a lot happened this year, and this post will end up being multiple parts.

New Year's Resolutions
So in my post from last year, I had a couple of resolutions:
1) Dress properly at work. I actually managed this one! It's the first time I've stuck to a resolution. It was a bit of a struggle, especially during the busier periods at work, and I did slack off at the end and give up on stockings (as there were only 2 weeks left of work, and I couldn't be bothered buying another pair).

Which speaking of, I lost count of how much money I spent on stockings. I kept getting runs in them and having to buy a new pair. Same with my work shoes, which now have a giant hole on them, and again, I didn't bother replacing them, because it was so close to the end of the year.

It's difficult to try and work out what the result of my resolution has been. On one hand, I ended up befriending someone quite senior in the organisation, I got offered a promotion (with strings attached), I was asked to act as delivery lead on a project. On the other hand, I have been building up to these things for quite a while, and how much of it can be attributed to a change in attire, and how much of it is just a natural progression of my career?

I didn't really notice any difference in how I was treated. Even when Mark suggested I try curling my hair and wearing contacts, and nobody even noticed. Or maybe it looked bad and everyone was too polite to say anything, like when I had to get my make-up done for the Spring fashion carnival event, and James gave a gasp of horror, but said nothing.

I'm still undecided whether I'll continue it next year. On one hand, there's that whole dress for the job you want thing (although I don't know that this is the job I want...). On the other hand, my new team is quite casual, and I stand out a bit. Although I have noticed that since I joined, a couple of the other developers are starting to dress up a bit. I don't know if that's related to me, or related to another developer who kinda swapped teams with me and has also started dressing up.

2) Write a book. I made absolutely no progress on this. I was actually challenged to write a story, which is currently in the incubation phase, and I've been doing some research on it, but I haven't actually put any words down. Watch this space though, as the resolution I've picked for next year will be related to the failed attempt this year.

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So to rewind back to earlier in the year. I have mentioned a few times that I have been miserable in my team for a while. The work itself isn't bad and the people are nice, but I was beginning to lose the desire to go into work. However, this is the only team I've ever been in, and who's to say it isn't worse elsewhere? I did actually apply for another role in a different department (financial crime), but didn't get it. I was at the point where I was ready to apply outside the organisation when I was challenged to a croissant bake-off, and I realised that maybe the onus is on me to make my work enjoyable, not the other way around. I don't have to love my job, it can be the thing that I do so that I have the resources to do the things I love.

Word got out that I was a baker, and I was asked to participate in a cheesecake bake-off.

This was around the time that our regular Friday drinks event was cancelled for budget reasons, so the team morale was quite low. I suggested we use the cheesecake bake-off to raise money for our own self-funded drinks event - where we'd buy the alcohol ourselves and people would chip in to keep it going, the initial money being used to seed it. We ended up raising quite a bit of money, so I began organising the drinks event. However, Julian asked me something about liquor licenses so I did a bit of research and found that we do need to apply for a liquor license to serve alcohol, and it's not cheap. So we concocted the idea of having people pay an entry fee for some other event, at which we would just happen to serve alcohol. And thus the Art Appreciation Society was born.

I thought I'd ask the compliance / legal team whether we'd be OK to do this, just to be on the safe side. Funnily enough, nobody seemed to have a definitive answer, and I got shunted around to various risk and legal teams before someone decided to make a call and say that we weren't allowed to do it on our floor, but we could do it via the catering company as they're licensed, or go to a bar instead.

Drinks was cancelled, and I became the Grinch who stole Christmas, with various people saying I should have just done it anyway, as nobody would have dobbed me in. Despite the criticism, I feel like I did the right thing. I introduced the pizza trolley instead, with pizza, chips and soft drink, and also a samosa afternoon. I ended up taking a couple of weeks off, and I realised nobody took up the role in my absence. One of the first things I was asked on my return was, "Will there be a pizza trolley this week?" and it made me feel sad. I decided to cut down, and instead of doing a weekly thing where everyone chips in on the day, we would raise money over several weeks and once we had enough money, do a larger event for the whole floor.

Our first event was a cheese and meats platter, which was incredibly successful, and the second event was a high tea, which was also a hit. I've been trying to reflect on what effect this has had on people's perception of me, and it has been interesting.

Someone called me "social", which I think is bizarre because as soon as the prep work for the events is done, I prefer to vanish rather than mingle with everyone. I think he is confusing "polite" with "social" as people will often strike up conversations with me, but I very rarely strike up a conversation on my own. Mostly because I still feel like I'm wasting people's time by talking to them.

I'm also seen as the "weird one" as whenever there is something unusual in the office, I often get messages asking if it was me. Granted, about 90% of the time, it is me, so I'm trying to vary it up a bit so that I'm not the instant suspect all the time. I'm not sure how I feel about this reputation that I've built. I don't purposely go out of my way to be unusual, it's just that some of the things I do just happen to be considered unusual out of context. For instance, when I walked to the train station holding a giant box above my head, it's because Intern Daniel said he didn't think I was strong enough to do it, and I had to prove him wrong. But anyone seeing us walk out of the office together wouldn't have heard that conversation, and would just see me with a box above my head.

The strange behaviour does mean I've become somewhat notorious, and I will write about what that might have meant for me tomorrow.