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I’ve been really busy over the last few days.  On Saturday evening I went to a hog-roast party, which was attended by relatives and friends from my stepdad Terry’s side of the family.  The party was organised by his niece.  It was much better than I thought it would be – there must have been about 100 people there altogether, and they had even hired a local band to play in the back garden!

On Saturday afternoon I had to go round my sister Suzanne’s house to fix her computer, as it was really slow.  It turned out that there were over 200 pieces of spyware on there – no wonder it was so slow!  I used Adaware to get rid of it, and it was much faster afterwards.  Suzanne has recently applied for a new job, working as a shop assistant in a new up-and-coming clothes store called Outfit.  She had an interview on Friday, and she should hear in about a couple of weeks.  The shop is due to open in late summer.

Over the past few days there has been a massive health scare over chocolate!  A million bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate have been withdrawn nationwide, as it is feared they could contain small traces of salmonella (caused by a leaking pipe in the factory).  Luckily I hadn’t eaten any of that chocolate for quite a while, although my Mum has, but she hasn’t been ill.

Last weekend a group of ghosthunters visited the Townhouse hotel where my Mum works.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, the hotel is said to be haunted.  They did actually find what they believe to be evidence (if you follow the link above you will see what they had to say).

An update on my internal job-searching – I didn’t get any of the three jobs for which I was interviewed – 2 of them rejected me, and the other was withdrawn.  I wasn’t surprised about being rejected for the first 2, as they were both about 2 levels higher than my current role.  The third one, which was my favourite, was the one which was withdrawn.  However, I have been offered a secondment for a programming job in another department – so if I don’t get promoted in my current role, I still have an “escape route”.  I would very much prefer to stay in my current role though – I have my appraisal early next month, and everything should be much clearer by then.

We are currently in the middle of the first proper heatwave since summer began. It wasn’t quite so hot today, but over the weekend and on Monday it was really hot. And I’ve got a nice new zesty-lemon layout to celebrate!

On Sunday we (Mum, Terry and I) went to a barbecue to celebrate Terry’s grandson Thomas’ first birthday. It was really good, the weather was nice and sunny and I had a hotdog and hamburger.

In total, my sister Suzanne’s cat Izzy had three kittens. I think she is planning to keep one and give the other two away.

I recently heard the news that my Dad and Step-mum (who are currently living in Thailand) are having another baby, and it’s due in January next year. I already have three sisters, and it will be so funny if this one turns out to be a girl as well! There are hardly any boys/men in my immediate family, and I have no idea why.

Recently I have been visiting some local gardens. I took quite a few photos with my digital camera, but annoyingly I never seem to get round to downloading them to my computer! That’s the only thing I don’t like about digital cameras – you have to develop and print the photos yourself. And that reminds me, my printer has ran out of black ink yet again! I’ll have to get some more over the weekend.

My holiday tickets to Ibiza arrived on Monday. I’m so excited; there’s only 3 and a half weeks left to go now!

Yesterday, it was exactly one year since I started my current job! The year has gone so quickly, and I feel that I have learnt a lot in this short amount of time. I feel more self-confident than I did in the past. I am going out for a meal this evening with my step-dad Terry to celebrate this milestone (unfortunately my Mum can’t come as well because she had already arranged to go out with her friends. The three of us were originally planning to go yesterday evening, but that wasn’t possible, for reasons I will explain later).

About my internal job applications: the job-hunting process is pretty much over now, so I can write more openly about what happened. (I was reluctant to say too much before, as I can never be sure who is reading my site, such as one of my colleagues stumbling across it). As I said in my previous entry, I applied for 3 positions and I was fortunate to get interviews for all of them.

But now it looks like I am destined to stay where I am, which isn’t a bad thing, as my own manager has said they will give me an opportunity to become a Technical Lead Adviser next month (pending the outcome of the departmental restructure).

I’ll describe each of the 3 interviews in turn:

The first interview was for an Analyst/Programmer. It is quite a jump from my current level, so to be honest I was pleasantly surprised I even got an inteview in the first place. Anyway, I didn’t get this job, although the feedback I received from the manager of the department (who interviewed me) was very positive, and he even said I was a “very credible candidate”. What let me down was the fact that I had to take an online aptitude test as part of the selection process. I did very well in the verbal reasoning test (it’s just like English comprehension, really), but in the numerical reasoning (maths) test I struggled to keep up with the strict time limit. I panicked and I couldn’t answer all the questions in time. There were 20 questions to be answered within 20 minutes, and they all involved multiple levels of working-out. The questions themselves weren’t too difficult, it was the strict time-limit which threw me off course. Other than that, they also said that my previous experience in implementing change is not high-level enough for their needs. But that is something I have already begun working on, and I know I can improve at it as time goes by.

The second interview I had was for a Targeting Lead Adviser/Consultant. The interview was quite difficult, because even though I was applying for it at Lead Adviser level, the questions were all at Consultant level, which is the next level up. The interview got off to a bad footing, because the first question (on Decisiveness) was, “Describe a time when you made a decision, and it turned out to be wrong”, and I couldn’t think of an example to talk about. So I admitted this to the inteviewers, and asked them if they could give me another question from the Decisiveness competency. I managed that fine, but I noticed that one of the inteviewers had written the words “no effort” under the first question on his clipboard, and that made me feel bad for the rest of the session. I had assumed that as long as I answered at least one question from each competency, it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t have an answer to the first question they give me (on their clipboards they have more than one possible question for each competency,and they just choose one at random to ask me). When I later spoke to my own manager, he said that I had done the right thing, as it is always better to admit you don’t have an answer, rather than try to make one up. However, towards the end of the inteview, in the part where I am allowed to ask them questions about the job, it seemed that it wasn’t what I expected it to be anyway. I still don’t know whether or not I’ve got this job (I very much doubt it), but even if I have, I wouldn’t accept it as it’s not technical enough – it mainly consists of number-crunching in Excel, which could soon become tedious and boring.

The third and final interview was for a Claims Reporting Analyst, a Lead Adviser level role, which was my favourite out of all 3 positions. The interview went really well, I breezed through all the questions, and the interviewers seemed pleased with the depth of my answers. As this was my 3rd interview in the space of 2 weeks, I felt a lot more confident by this time. However, this morning, a letter came in the post. When I saw that the letter started with the word “unfortunately”, I thought “Oh no, not another rejection letter!” but then as I continued reading, I saw that this was no ordinary rejection letter. The letter actually said that the position had been withdrawn, “due to unforseen circumstances”, whatever that means. So at least I know it’s not my fault I haven’t got the job. I will probably show the letter to my supervisor on Monday, and ask about “unforseen circumstances” and ask whether I am still allowed feedback regarding my performance in the interview.

So, I’m staying where I am, in the Process Control team (where I have been since June 2005), and all being well, I should be promoted to Lead Adviser level next month. I don’t regret applying for these 3 jobs though; it gave me experience of handling interviews, improved my self-confidence, and made my own managers realise that they didn’t want to lose me after all!

In other news, my sister Suzanne’s cat Izzy has had kittens! We went round her house to see them yesterday evening, and I was surprised at just how tiny they are! At the same time, we also looked after my 2 nieces while Suzanne was at work, and that’s why we couldn’t go out for our meal last night.

The weather has been really hot and sunny over the last week or so, which makes a change as it was really cold and wet at the end of May – it seemed more like March. So this morning I had a nice raspberry milkshake at a cafe, and bought some new sandals for my holidays, which are coming up soon!

This post is getting really long, so I think I’d better stop now. Even though I do have more to say, I’ll do it in a separate post later.