A rare update from my corner of the Internet: some things have changed here (others stay the same). I’ve started on a new chapter of my life, let’s call it “becoming a dog trainer”.
Tag: I’ll just employ myself then
Employment obstacles in Sydney’s Southwest (for me)
There are not a lot of jobs down here where we now live. That became obvious when I searched for jobs on the usual major online job portals like SEEK and Australian Job Search and added in our new postcode, or filtered the job results for ‘Sydney Southwest/M5 corridor’.
I am looking for menial pay-the-bills jobs like cleaner, data entry, basically anything I can do*, and the result list was ridiculously short.
I could of course look for work in Sydney and commute. Commuting comes with a cost in terms of time, petrol, road toll**, and wear on the car (= workshop bills), though, so the income needs to be worth it. For a part time job, the insane travel time and cost of commuting to Sydney is unlikely to pay off.
The average peak hour travel speed on the M5 motorway, which is the geographical life-line between the Southwest and Sydney, is about 35 km/hour (the Daily Telegraph quoting RTA, Feb 2011) although the speed limit is 100 to 110 km/hour most of the way. And it isn’t only bad in peak hours, see:
There is also a nasty long tunnel to trap people underground in bumper to bumper slow motion for a looong time. I don’t complain: this the price people like us pay to afford a house. We are “Westies’ now, and happy … well knowing how lucky we are to have a house.
So in the near future I’ll have a closer look on the work-from-home options, such as:
1. Try harder with freelancing
I start to think that work-from-home isn’t just an option, but my only option after all.
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Coping Tools for Non-verbal Aspects of a Business Meeting in a Cafe
Non-verbal aspects of a meeting, revisited.
This post focuses on the non-verbal aspects of Yesterday’s meeting and follows up on Non-verbal communication in a business meeting.
Meetings are hard, but Yesterday’s* meeting went well and didn’t leave me totally drained. This is a recall of was different from usual, as I am analysing and adding the factors to my mind’s toolbox of coping strategies.
The context for Yesterday’s meeting
Yesterday*, the last thing in the world I wanted was the meeting. Tired, mildly depressed, and feeling so very unready for talk, interaction and the role as professional service provider.
The math circuits of my brain don’t have a fail-safe mode and tend to freeze when I feel stressed, nervous, tired or overloaded with impacts. I knew I had to suggest and guide about how to set the shipping calculations so it would work for all products (I had calculated some suggestions from home, but they were likely to be adjusted). So I worried whether I was able to operate my calculator in an IQ>70 manner.
Mind freeze was a problem in the meeting, but it was mild and (hopefully) invisible. My notebook where I wrote the numbers down to handle them reminded of an anthill – every number was on the move and relentlessly crossed path with other numbers. However after a while, after realising that I in any case seemed to understand the logic better than the client, I relaxed and the details came into place.
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history of bad parties 