The electric train of soft cylinder parts.

[reddragdiva]

All this namby-pamby lefty talk of "work-life balance" completely fails to bring "work-life-commuting" balance into consideration. There's something qualitatively different about a ninety-minute commute as compared to a sixty-minute one. This morning I got up far too early, dropped £91.40 on a new zone 1-3 travelcard, went to Victoria, dropped near on TWO HUNDRED QUID on a monthly to Gatwick and hopped on a really very nice train. Southern appear to be using rolling stock under thirty years old as a selling point. Fine by me, particularly daily. Travelling against the rush hour too.

Reassignment with no particular urgent task is indistinguishable from being a new employee, despite having worked for the company two years last Wednesday. All I've been doing all day and probably all I'll be doing all week is reading pages and pages of training materials on the intranet and doing online tests. It's a plot to get me not to want to read stuff on screens.

I have an induction tomorrow morning at 10am. "Just pretend I'm a new employee."

The coffee isn't as nice as at the customer site.

I left work at 5:35, got home at 7:15 with a pounding headache from staring at screens and took about two hours to recover. I'm sure this will all get better, or maybe I'll kill everyone with axes.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

All the faff about "long working hours" from the TUC, and all that jazz, never mentions commuting transit time. I was much happier working 40-45 hours a week with a zero commute than 38 or so hours a week with a 4 hour commute, because one of those gave me enough sleep!

[duster340.livejournal.com]

Join the Dark Side and come and work for The Company (http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/).

Free travel for you and a nominee on the combine and buses, plus a 75% rebate on any season ticket which you require to get into work (which you wouldn't need if you worked us, but hey, that's more irony for you!). Oh plus nearly £34k for driving a train for 35 hours a week.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Nervous breakdowns come as a free perk of the job....

[karen2205]

I spent six months working in Vauxhall and commuting from North Hampshire - I spent about four hours each day commuting and found it soul destroying. It's physically possible to do, it just left me exhausted. I'm never going back to that again.

[reddragdiva]

At my previous workplace, one coworker commuted daily from Brighton. I am now amazed he was capable of speech by the end of the day.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

One of the Earl's Court District DOMs commutes from Peterborough. I think that has Brighton beat. Oh, and one of the signal operators commutes from Southampton.

frigging commute crap

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Commuting SUUUUUCKS, sucks your soul out of your body. I picked where I live based on its ability to reduce my commute and it's paying off to the tune of a good hour a day of MY time. I was willing to take less to work at a job where I had less of a commute because no one was going to be able to give me back the 5-8 hours (or more!) a week I was going to lose in traffic (I figured just 5 hours a week is tolerable, even delightful if I'm on foot. But an extra 5-8 hours was NOT.)

[hestia.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard "namby-pamby" used for years.

They haven't called you "Manager, Special Projects" have they?

[reddragdiva]

Heh, no. Not yet ;-)

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

I haven't managed to get hold of that info for you.
It might be worth it to seek out someone knowledgeable in employment law...

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I made the decision many years ago theat I flat out refuse to do commuting. If the usual journey is more than a 30 minute bus/train ride/walk, I'm just not going to do it. It's part of the reason I have a job instead of a career, but my brief spell of time commuting decided me once and for all that I have better things to do with that much of my life. And that was before I got sick and had to be in bed stupidly early every night.

[angharad.livejournal.com]

Phew; I'm safe then, since I have no axes.