Blog 4.0

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.

The big project is still targeting the 1st of October for launch. With less than a week to go and everybody scrambling like crazy, somebody up top decided that this was the perfect time to announce an internal reorganisation including a bunch of job cuts. I can only guess that this was driven by a desire to have all the redundant people gone by the end of the year (as I think most of them probably had a three-month notice period). I get to stay employed, but my little team of four will basically cease to exist, with two people's roles being made redundant and me and one other guy getting shunted off to somewhere else in the org chart. The talking points were about what great growth plans the company has for the coming years, what agile innovators we are, and what amazing new opportunities this will bring for all of us. I guess I should be grateful that I get to keep my job, but I just feel bad. I'm simply not good at this capitalism thing. All I want is to earn enough to get b

I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und