Tag Archives: indiana

Winter Hits The UK Hard

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Debbie and I returned home at the weekend from our Christmas trip to Florida to see my daughters, and I consider us to be very lucky, since the northern part of the UK  had already been hit by sub-zero temperatures and record amounts of snow.

It didn’t take long however for Old Man Winter to move south, and by Tuesday we had snow in the south of England.  Fortunately going to work on Tuesday morning it wasn’t as cold as expected, so I didn’t need to scrape the ice off the windows of the car, just use the regular wiper to clean the windows.

Tuesday night we were threatened to have up to a foot of snow, but when I left work it was just light drizzle, and I made it all the way home in almost record time.  It wasn’t half an hour later however when we saw heavy snow falling, but fortunately we only got just over an inch, far less than the forecast said.  

Wednesday morning I set off for work early, expecting to have to have a major scraping job on my hands, and also to have to wade through deep snow, but it was already melting a bit, the car windows were not frozen, so I just had to brush the snow off the car, and got into work 30 minutes earlier than usual.

When I got to work I found that several people who live a bit further out of town and where the snow was falling earlier, had been forced to abandon their cars as they couldn’t get home.  One of them left work at 5pm and didn’t make it home until 11pm, and this is less than ten miles from where I live.  I guess I ought to be grateful that I live where I do.

We had a bit more snow during the day and it was threatening more for the evening, so I decided to leave for home ten minutes early to beat the traffic, and had a good journey home, that is until I almost got home. 

We live halfway up a steep hill, and I managed to take the turning off the main road onto our access road ok, drove the two hundred yards or so along there ok, then made the sharp left turn to go up the hill, and didn’t get too far.  The road was covered in snow and ice, and was too steep for the car to get enough grip to drive more than 20 or 30 yards up the road.   Frustratingly, this was only 20 yards short of where I needed to be to back off the road and down the alley at the back of the house to where I park.  

Well I tried and tried, reversed down the hill and around the corner, tried again, but the car wasn’t going to make it, so I parked at the side of the road and walked the last 1/4 mile home.   I then got changed, put my boots on, grabbed the bucket of salt/grit that we saved from the week before Christmas when we had the last freeze, picked up a garden shovel, and headed back to the car.   I spent a while shovelling snow and ice away from around the wheels, cleared ten feet behind the car and about 20 feet in front, sprinkled the grit down, and tried to get up the hill.   It took me 2 or 3 attempts, including a second round of shoveling having reversed down the hill a few feet, but finally I slithered up the hill and was then able to reverse into the alley.  Phew!

I then took my now empty bucket to the grit bin at the top of the road, hoping to refill it for the next time, but was dismayed to find that the bin was empty.  Not more or less empty though, I don’t think there was enough grit to even fill the palm of my hand.   Oh well…

More snow was forecast Wednesday night, but I woke up this morning to find that nothing had covered my footsteps of last night, however it was bitterly cold, and the snow out the back was crunchy underfoot.   The car windows took forever to scrape as the ice was really hard, and shovel in boot (trunk) I started my way down the alley to the road.

The road was still covered in snow and ice, and there was a car and a van close to the bottom of the slope, both obviously couldn’t make it up the hill the night before.   I turned into the road, then slowly worked my way down the hill, hoping not to slide into either vehicle (which were parked on opposite sides of the road), or to fail to stop and run into the line of trees at the bottom of the road.    I made it, then turned left into the access road, which was really slick and slippery.  At the end of the access road the road turns sharply right and goes downhill, then immediately onto a main road, with traffic that comes around a bend fast.  I decided to go really slowly down the last bit of the access road, because if not I could end up not stopping on what looked like a skating rink, and didn’t relish the idea of sliding into the main road and oncoming traffic.  Luckily the main road was clear, I slithered down the last section of the access road, put my foot down on the accelerator, and started up the main road.  Another sigh of relief…

The main road of course immediately goes up an even steeper hill than where we live, and this is one long haul of a hill too, up one side and then down the other.  Fortunately the road was clear enough, and the rest of the journey to work was uneventful, and also done in practically record time.

Although more snow is forecast and it’s still bitterly cold outside, the sky has been blue all day, and I am hoping that this will be enough for the snow on our road to melt enough for me to get up the hill and home ok.

I emailed the city this morning using their Actionline link to see if we could get more grit in our grit bin, and got a response to say that they would answer my inquire within three days.  Oh joy – maybe we can go shopping on Sunday!  Or maybe not as more snow is forecast for the weekend, and the freezing temperatures are set to continue for another week at least.

As for the two people who didn’t make it home on Tuesday night, neither of them made it into work yesterday or even today.  While the main roads are mostly clear, the side roads after the partial melt and the severe freeze last night have turned them into slick skating rinks, and it’s practically impossible for anyone to go anywhere.

This is so different to my experiences while living in Indiana, where the city had so many snow ploughs and salt trucks, plus a number of other people had pickup trucks with blades on the front to plough side streets and car parks for shopping centres and businesses.  In addition many people shoveled the snow from their own sidewalks or used snowblowers, yet here in England that rarely happens any more. 

Do you have a snow day story to tell?  If so, please leave a comment and let us know.

Reverse Culture Shock

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I have to admit that moving back to the UK after having lived in the USA for the last fifteen years is a bit of a reverse culture shock for me in many ways.   Fifteen years is long enough to get past most of the pangs of missing things from where you came and also to become well adjusted to where you moved to, however even after that length of time, there were still some words or customs I came across that were different in the USA that I wasn’t aware of before.

So having moved back to the UK and now having started back to work, albeit after almost three months of trying to find a job and spending much of my time at home, I am not back in the real world of living in England.

Working for a family owned company here is very different to working in Corporate America, where there are so many rules and regulations as to what you can and can’t do, and many of the traditions that might have been have long since gone.   Here for example, people in the department take it in turns to get tea/coffee for everyone, something that I haven’t seen in years.   The boss took us all down the pub for lunch on the first day, and it’s still acceptable to have a drink at lunchtime, whereas the mere mention of alcohol at work in the USA is a big “no no”.   Companies don’t necessarily have microwaves and water coolers here for the employees, in fact ours has neither, but there is a good supply of hot water to make a decent cup of tea as you would expect!

Driving to work is also very different to what it was in the USA, and for me it’s a step backwards.  No more driving 25 miles down the highway for me, or like in my last job 45 miles, which I could do in about 45 minutes.  Now it’s just over 8 miles to work, but it takes me between 40 minutes to an hour.   Only 1/4 mile of that is using a road that has 2 lanes each way, the rest is on just regular roads, and of course much of it is just one big traffic jam.

I guess this is just one of the downsides to living in the UK again, having to deal with the traffic, whereas in both Indiana and Florida where I was living in the USA, the traffic levels were much lighter.  Not only that, once I got out of the residential areas, the rest of the journey was on main highways with at least 2 lanes in each direction.  The traffic in the UK has always been terrible and it gets worse every year, but I am grateful at least that I am not working in London.  Most people working in London have to take public transport to get to work, and that just seems to get more unreliable every year too, so all in all I am pretty lucky to just have a 30 minute journey every day.

My next task, having moved house this weekend, is to sort out a food system for work.   In Florida I used to make myself oatmeal for breakfast in the office, and could bring in leftovers at any time to heat up in the microwave.  I also used to drink a lot of water, and kept bottles that I would fill up from the water cooler.  Now without either a water cooler or a microwave I am looking at alternative options, so will have to bring in my own water from home (since I object to paying an arm and a leg for bottled water), and will probably have cold cereal in the office, since there is a fridge that I can keep milk in.   We don’t have enough money for me to splash out on buying sandwiches etc more than once a week, and besides that, I prefer to know what I am eating, trying to eat healthy as much as I can.  Having lost more than 20lbs in weight over the last two years, I am determined to not put it all on again, as I feel so much better these days.

Well enough rambling for now… Please feel free to leave a comment…

Unemployed Again

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unemployed out of work job hunting job search looking for workI thought that this job I have had for the last two years would see me safe, at least for a while, since the company is keen to hire people that are looking for a long term position, and it likes to hire experienced people rather than  trainees.

Well it wasn’t to be, and as from today I am on the scrap heap for the second time in six years.

A few months ago the company said that it was cutting costs to try and avoid redundancies.  A few weeks ago we heard that probably our bonuses and 401K matching would be cut.  A few days ago we heard rumours that some people would be losing their jobs.  A few hours ago I was called into the bosses office and it was my turn…

I have always worked in the IT industry as an Analyst/Programmer working on IBM Midrange computers (AS400 . iSeries), and for the last 10 years with J.D Edwards World Software (now part of the Oracle group).  Up to 3 years ago, JDE were trying to phase out the software I work with and trying to get companies to upgrade to the new version that they had created, however the new version has had lots of performance problems, and for most companies to convert it would cost over $1million, since they would have to rewrite all their locally developed programs.   Many companies did not want to change over, or tried and found so many problems that they reverted back, and so when Oracle took over JDE they found that not only did they have a large user base that didn’t want to move from JDE World software, but they also found that this was the most profitable area of their business.  In the last 3 years Oracle have rewritten the system to make it work better for the future, however most companies have been slow to upgrade to the new version so far, but they have at least said that this will be supported for the foreseeable future.

What I have in my favor is that in the last 10 years, with the threat of JDE withdrawing support for this system, many of the analyst/programmers who worked in AS400 computers have moved onto other platforms.  Now that the system is here to stay for the long term, there are fewer of us to fit into the available positions.

With the economy in the state that it is though, few companies are looking to take on new employees or contractors, and this is the most dire job market I have ever seen.  The last time I was made unemployed, I was working in Elkhart, Indiana, a small town which this month has been in the news as having lost the most jobs and having the highest rise in unemployment.  Even President Obama was in Elkhart this week.

I updated my resume on Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com today, and looked to see what jobs were open to me, and while there would usually be several in South Florida, there was absolutely nothing in the whole state of Florida, which is quite disturbing.  However, jobs aren’t always listed, so I hope the recruiter who got me my last two positions down here can come up with something.

I also updated my profile on LinkedIn.com which is the professional equivalent of Facebook etc.   I don’t know what good this will do, however in the last two or three years social networks have really taken off in a multitude of ways, so it’s worth trying.

Other than try to get another job in the same field that I have always worked in, I would love to change career, in fact I would love to be able to earn enough online to support myself, but I somehow can’t see that happening.  I can however if I have the time, give it my best show and see if my efforts will make a difference.  It would be great if I could somehow find a way to get paid for writing articles, or could get my web sites popular enough to earn a reasonable income.  Watch this space…

Biggest problem is that there isn’t just me to support.  If there was I could probably just about manage on unemployment benefit, however I have two daughters to support, and they go to private school, since the middle schools are awful.  I would really not like to have to put them back into public school, as this would affect their whole lives, however I need to find the money to cover the school fees somehow.  I am also paying into a fund which will help to pay their university fees, since by the time they start at university I will hopefully be ready to retire.  I really don’t want to have to drop this either.

So please wish me luck, and if you are able to share this post, or our blog with your friends, I would be grateful.

Keep your fingers crossed that something comes along and soon…


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How Secure Is Your Job In 2009?

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I came across an article on Open Salon today by Steve Klingaman entitled Status Symbol for 2009: A Secure Job.

Having commented on this at length, I thought that my comments, together with the topic would make a good blog posting.   The economy is in such a mess, so many companies are struggling to stay afloat, and if like me you have a full time job, no doubt you have worries and concerns over what may happen in 2009.

Personally, I think 2009 is going to be a tough year for many people – too many people, and definitely having a secure job is a new status symbol.

But defining secure?  I don’t think you can.

My job got eliminated 5 years ago.  I was working for a musical instrument manufacturer in Indiana, got called into the boss’s office in the middle of a Friday morning, “Sorry to say your job has been eliminated”…   I thought I was secure, being the most acquainted person with the main accounting system.  But no – bang went my job along with 27 others, all either people who had been with the company the longest or those who were earning more.  I learned a hard lesson that day.  Now I never feel safe.

Right now the company I work for, which is a multi-billion dollar corporation, has made a lot of cut backs.  No pay rises, no perks of any description, no employer 401k matching, and some management had apparently taken pay cuts.  They haven’t said whether our usual annual bonus will be eliminated or not, but I’m not banking on anything.   Of course any action that they take to avoid cutting jobs is good, but there is always the worry that the economy will not recover in time to save us all.

Now this company I work for manufactures household appliances.  You know, toasters, microwaves, blenders, fans etc.   With sales being hit this year, the company has been forced by the big stores (Walmart, target etc) to cut their margins, and if you have been to any large store in the USA in the last few months you have to have seen the amount of consumer goods that are being dumped out at crazy prices.

It’s not just appliances.  Take a look in any store and see all the televisions, computers etc that are being offered at amazing discounts.   They just want sales, to keep their inventory turning over.

My fear is that in keeping sales up by dropping prices, many people have now purchased new items, which will last for years.  having bought a new television, toaster, fridge etc for a low low price, how many years is it going to be before these people need a replacement?

In 6 months therefore, are many companies who cut their margins to the lowest levels possible in order to maintain sales levels, going to see sales dry up as their customer base has already acquired the items that they need, often ahead of time because of the cut in prices?

Either the marketing plans that these companies have is based on some solid long term plan unknown to me, or before the end of the year we will see major problems in both the retail stores and the manufacturers that supply them.

I hope this doesn’t happen, but it really does scare me.

My fall back plan ideally would be to work for myself and to eek out a living on the internet, between blogging and earning income from affiliate programs, but obtaining the knowledge to do that is not easy.  I have been trying for more than 10 years (on and off) and still haven’t acquired the necessary skills.   Maybe 2009 is the year when I have to quit procrastinating and start seriously looking at finding alternative forms of income, just for my own security.

So what are your plans for 2009?  Are you actively looking to supplement your income, already self-employed and living off the Internet, or are you just keeping your fingers crossed that nothing bad happens with your employment status this year?