Blog 4.0

During my weekly phone call with my mother, the subject of politics came up, and at some point she said: "That X human is also terrible!" "Ex human? Do you mean Elon Musk?" "Yes, him!" "Yes, yes he is." It just amuses me that even my elderly mother in Austria who doesn't use the internet has heard of the guy at this point (and dislikes him).

On the whole, it makes me sad to see my elderly mother diminish, get slower and weaker every year. However, there's one strange upside to her no longer being capable of doing anything that requires a minimum amount of strength or dexterity: I get to feel like a bloody hero for performing all kinds of simple tasks. Need a match struck to light a candle? A box with a slightly stuck lid opened? Batteries in the small torch need changing? Not to worry, I am here to save the day. It's a good thing I'm only visiting for a few days or it might go to my head.

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

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.

I had only been in the office for about ten minutes today when our manager asked me and everyone else who was already in to join him in the nearest meeting room. When a member of HR I came in, I remember thinking "wow, this must be important to actually have a member of HR physically present" - what I didn't expect, what none of us expected, was to be told that the head of another department we work with had passed away over the weekend. He was only 42 years old and perfectly healthy for all anyone knew; his wife just suddenly found him dead in his bed. They have a little daughter as well. It was shocking and upsetting to all of us. The colleague sitting next to me exclaimed "What? We just messaged each other on Friday about how we were going to see each other today!" before bursting into tears. I didn't know him that well personally, but he'd been in the company for as long as I have, so we'd effectively been working together for almost ten years. H...

A new meeting appears on my work calendar, called "short business announcement", hosted by the CEO and with everybody invited. These always make me uneasy, because while the CEO is a nice guy, big business announcements are rarely good news for the little people. They almost always bring change, and change often means redundancies. Then again, it really is a short meeting, only fifteen minutes. If it was something that big, it would be longer. I try to think of what else it could be. There's a certain contradiction in it being short (and therefore seemingly not that important) and yet it also requiring the CEO to speak to the whole business. Maybe someone important is leaving or changing roles and there'll be a little speech about it? Seems unlikely that it would be the CEO himself, announcing his own impending departure. My mind wanders to the next most important and senior person I can think of, our department manager, and I briefly recoil in horror at the thought o...

Late in the evening, my husband decides to open a Christmas card we found on our doorstep that day. He suggests that the handwriting looks like that of his best friend, who was best man at our wedding five years ago. As he pulls the card out of its envelope, it reveals a cutesy drawing of a cat and the words "Meowy Christmas" - oh yes, that's definitely from him (he has a cat and is quite a cat lover). When my husband opens the card, it starts playing a song... several slightly out of tune voices singing a Christmas carol, but every word is "meow" . We spend several minutes laughing as it gets louder and louder and more voices join the chorus. Eventually, it finishes and starts over. He folds the card and puts it back down, but... it doesn't stop. Slight panic sets in as we try to figure out what's wrong. Did we not close it properly? Is there a tab you need to pull to make it stop? Is it just broken? As the loud meowing continues, my husband declares th...

 I put up a shelf for the first time yesterday and I'm ridiculously proud of myself. I've never been what you'd call a "handy" person, and I wasn't encouraged to be one either as anything to do with power tools and the like was considered "men's work" in my family. When I moved out, I always lived in rented accommodation and wanted to avoid making any permanent modifications to the property. While we're still renting right now, we've also lived in the same flat for almost a decade and the letting agency basically doesn't give a damn, so we figured we shouldn't let that prevent us from doing minor things like putting nails in the walls. The inspiration for the shelf came from a plant that I brought over from Austria as a sapling in April this year and which has been growing like crazy here in England. I used to keep it on the windowsill, but it's just become so big that it was spilling everywhere. A small shelf on the kitchen w...

Today my mother and I went to the local shopping centre to run some errands. First we visited a shop for her landline and cable provider, as I was interested in adding internet to her package, with an eye on me coming to visit more often in the future. I was hopeful that this would be easy, as she was sent a brand-new modem only the other week, which does have wi-fi capacity and everything; it's just not unlocked. First the guy told us that he couldn't just "add" internet, we would have to be changed to a whole new bundle deal. Fine, I thought. And no, we couldn't keep the current modem, in fact we'd need two new boxes installed. With an activation fee. And a monthly rent. And my Mum would need a new landline number. That's where I kind of went "come on", because I couldn't believe that simply amending an existing contract would require a new landline number. The guy called up some higher-level support, chatted with them for about ten minute...

I flew back to Austria yesterday to spend a few days with my mother. It was mostly an uneventful journey, which is kind of what you want when flying, but when we descended to land, something pretty amazing to me personally happened. I always like looking out the window at that point to see all the little houses and trees, and to slowly watch them get bigger, but I'm bad at orientating myself, so I usually can't tell what exactly I'm seeing. However, this time the plane approached the airport in a straight line from northwest to southeast, on a beautiful day with blue skies, and just as the sun was starting to set. Everything was casting stark shadows and for the first time ever, I could clearly see all of Vienna from the sky, recognising what I was looking at and spotting landmarks everywhere. It was like seeing a perfect 3D map of the place. I didn't know what to look at first, I just kept staring as the plane passed by and before the city itself disappeared from view...

I created an online savings account with the Post Office this morning. Somewhat to my surprise, they didn't even send me any sort of "thanks for signing up with us" confirmation email. My user ID was a randomly generated number, and I found myself getting logged out of my very first session unexpectedly. When I tried to log in again, it became evident that my browser had not saved my login details, and I had no other record of them, meaning that I had to ring up their support hotline a mere ten minutes after account creation to ask them what my user ID was. Also, when I tried to put some money into the new account via my regular provider's banking app, it popped up with something like three different fraud warnings ( Are you sure this person is who they say they are? Well, it's me...), to the point that it made me feel insecure about sending money to myself . Not as smooth a process as I had hoped.