Breakfast 🍏🍎🍐🍊🍋🍈🫐🍓🍇🍉🍌🍒🍑🥭🍍🥥🥦🥑🫛🍆🍅🥝🥬🥒🌽🥕🥐🍠🫚🥔🧅🥯🍞🥖🥨🧀🧇🥞🧈🍳🥚🥓🥩🍗🍖🫓🍕🍟🍔🌭🥙🧆🌮🌯🥗🍲🍜🍝🥘🍛🍣🍱🥟🦪🍥🍘🍚🍙🐠🍤🪼🦀🐙 🍗🥮🍢🍡🍧🍰🧁🥧🍦🍨🎂🍮🍭🍬🍫🥜🌰🍪🍿🍯🥛☕️🍵🍺🍶🥤🧋🧃🥂🍷🥃🍸🍹🧉🔋

Little things that make you enjoy life more?

For me right now, it’s movies.

Watching Crackerjack in light of participating in a potential lawn bowls game next week.

My work week is finally done.

And what a cluster fuck.

While the department that I work in is profitable, overall our organisation is set to lose money this year.

Bad decisions made by the “manager” have been a contributing factor.

But.

The “manager” has gotten it in his head that if only our organisation can send an email to everyone on a partner organisation’s mailing list, sales will boom.

A couple of months back, he convinced the partner organisation to send a small segment of its list an email offering them one of our organisation’s products for free.

And to be fair, a reasonable number took up the free product.

This has convinced “manager” that if the partner organisation sends an email to its entire mailing list offering them a discount for buying our org’s products, thousands of them will take it up. Even though many (most?) of their customers have never heard of us before.

The “manager’s” boss is new in her role (she moved into it after a restructure earlier this year), and trusts what he says.

Here’s where it becomes a trainwreck.

The past two years, our org has run an end of financial year sale aimed at consumers. Both times, it has increased sales a bit, but nowhere near enough to meet targets.

Marketing have tried different promotions and shown they work better. They want to run a marketing campaign to business customers for the end of financial year, and use a different approach with consumers in the new financial year.

They did a whole preso to “manager” showing that a different approach will generate more sales overall — but a lot of that revenue will fall in the new financial year.

Manager overruled them. His official reason is that he doesn’t want to try anything different to last year, because that’s risky.

(The real reason is he wants as many sales as possible this financial year, so that the losses from his bad decisions are as small as possible.)

So marketing are stuck with a campaign they know won’t work.

“Manager’s” brilliant plan is to use that campaign strategy that hasn’t worked, but then to get the partner organisation to email everyone on their mailing list, which he thinks will mean thousands of people will buy products and that will make it work.

(And yes, partner org mailing everyone on their mailing list is something out org hasn’t done before. But this isn’t seen as “risky” by “manager” because it’s his idea.)

Of course, this pissed off the business salespeople.

So to keep them on-side, he’s also making marketing run the business promotion as well, even though they don’t have the staff or the budget to do both.

He’s only just approved all of this now, and both promotions need to start on 1 June, so the graphic designers basically have two weeks to get everything ready.

It gets worse.

The partner organisation has already explicitly told us that e-mailing everyone on their contact list during June is a hard no.

But “manager” has sold his boss on the idea, and she’s said that she expects partner org to email everyone on their contact list.

Following a string of meetings, my boss is now stuck with making that happen. Even though it’s a hard no from the partner org.

So I was stuck in a string of meetings today where my boss was desperately trying to find a reason to tell her contact at the partner org why they should change their policy other than “Manager” thinks it’s a good idea (there isn’t one). Or some fact or piece of information will persuade “manager” to see reason (I’m honestly not hopeful).

Sorry for the rant. But it’s been a week!

Um. My ducted heating just died. I think it’s the fan part of it.

Has anyone watched Dark Matter yet? I think this is the first time a book has been turned into a movie or show and i’ve actually read the book first. And I gotta be honest, I kind of hated the book so I’m curious to hear what people think of the show.

Trying to find some small comfy masks to wear at work all day. Was surprised how little there is available at chemist warehouse and Priceline.

5 - 2. Holy shit. Can’t have that happening. Need hot cuppa in the morning.

I have a dilemma. Boyo will become 40 in the not too distant future. He’s asked I not do a big thing because not trusting people to turn up. Based upon his 30th this is valid. So WTF do I do? Self fulfilling nothing or attempt a Thing that could end up worse?

Feeling sick still today from the migraine yesterday so am chilling in bed with fluffy butt. Might get some music done today because the weekend is all IT learning time.

As an aside, windows server seems pretty straightforward. Nothing too crazy as yet.

Kinda just laying here in a stressed out but exhausted state from the week. Had a bite to eat but too tired for much else. Think I am gonna pour a drink and make a list of the work life things that have to happen next week then go to bed. I hate feeling like I left everything in a mess but nothing seemed to get finished this week and I can already feel the wave building up for next . Gah hopefully it’s just grey day blues

I tried to post on a tolkien site, it was like trying to post on a fundamentalist site where all answers have to be from tolkien scripture 😵

Went out with mein liebe for a few beers and a pub meal. Now home getting into the aldi wine we bought. Got a dr appt on Monday for my MC script so hopefully I can feel rested; the night terrors and sleep debt are killing me.

Wheeeee!

Here’s to the end of a pretty ordinary week. Mr P had to give bone marrow sample and has had appointment at Peter Mac. We’re waiting to find out if he has blood cancer, leukaemia or whatever they call it now. Elder minipeeler is still having major issues with anxiety and school refusal. My MIL offered to pay for him to go to a private school she thinks would be better for him… would’ve been nice to offer that last year, when I was having to enrol him in the only (really big) public school in our catchment and I was saying that I didn’t have a good feeling about it, that I felt that there’d be problems for him given the issues he’d had in the past, but had no choice financially. I was equally anxious and bummed out about it and she knew that back then. Now she wants to sweep in with her money and save the day, by uprooting him and plonking him into a new school‽ I feel bad for being ungrateful. Miniest is going through a very testing rebellious and wilful stage. I’m trying to give her as much of myself as I can and my patience, as she is jealous of Elder and her dad being home all the time, which is perfectly understandable. She is academically gifted but puts in a bare minimum of effort and is wasting her awesome potential and it’s hugely frustrating, but she doesn’t give a shit. I am feeling older and more tired in my body and it’s depressing. I’ve been bingeing dystopian shows on Netflix and find them comfortingly awful. I gave up on the “comedy” category… maybe Americans just laugh at different stuff, but I found little humour there. Thankyou for reading my grumbles.

now for an old old song

winchester cathedral -csny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI7phwtRjUA

Is anyone here a teacher/recently completed their education degree? I have a question about practicum placement.

This may be only applicable to Swinburne Online but figure I’d ask anyway.

Currently, I do 2 units a trimester and find that comfortable enough with balancing a full time job and a part time child. I’m planning the next few years to get an idea on course work, which units are available in which trimester, etc, and in between all that I have the practicum placements.

Regarding the placement, I’m looking at the unit info and its a full 12 week unit, with 20 days placement and 2 assessments (with 0% weighting - makes no sense, typo or whatever) and was wondering how intense this unit might be because I was thinking if I can squeeze it into a trimester and have 2 units plus the placement unit I can shorten my study plan to get my degree from mid-2028 to early 2028 or even end of 2027.

Hopefully this makes sense.

(also no idea how I am going to get 20 days off x 4 placements with work but that’s another matter.)