A degree in counting

The autism group tonight was interesting. I liked the topic of sensory stimuli. I used to have problems with sensory overload, and wrote about them on this blog. I talked about my (what I think were) out-of-body experiences. Rhiannon finds sensory overload a serious problem, and often refuses to go out because of it.

I asked the facilitator to waive the "no politics" rule in the wake of the election. She happily did so. The salient point from our discussion was how the non-voting population is skewed so heavily towards poor and sick people, who are unlikely to vote National. What a difference just a tenth of the 700,000 1,000,000 non-voters (I forgot to include those who didn't enrol) could have made. Now John Key and National can ram through whatever policies they like. Which could be pretty much anything. I don't remember a whole heap of policy discussion emanating from them. (I'm hopeful that it won't actually be that bad.)

Labour are all over the place unfortunately. They remind me of the Tories in the UK between 1997 and 2003 - they went through leaders at about the same rate as Labour have in NZ, were deeply divided within the party, and seemed to lack any sense of direction.

I wonder who my parents voted for (I never ask them directly). Well, with Mum I don't have to wonder at all. Dad has always been much more of a floater and has voted Green and Labour before (and Lib Dem in the UK) but, you know, he now lives in a household with 2000 vehicles per 1000 inhabitants, owns four properties, and goes on cruises for heaven's sake. Why wouldn't he vote National?

There was a lot of discussion of the results at work today. People were looking at the interactive Herald page that shows the results from each polling place. Someone was trying to figure out a way of fiddling the Ohariu boundaries to gerrymander Peter Dunne (who got 0.22% of the party vote) out of parliament.

I took this picture in Berhampore in the weekend before the election. Pretty neat I thought. The division symbol is quite appropriate.

I was thinking that as I'm reasonably good at counting (as Rhiannon says, I've got a degree in it) I should probably get myself involved in the vote counting of future elections. I should look into it. I wouldn't mind even doing a council election - it would be interesting to see the complex STV system with all its quotas and preferences unfold.

That's all the election talk you're going to get from me. It's been a very choppy day (weather-wise) today.

Update (Tuesday morning): I was woken by a reasonable shake last night. It was a 5.5, a lot bigger than the one on Friday night.

Work woes

Friday was my last day in my old role. Not many people there even knew. That didn't bother me. I don't have fond memories of my time on Level 25. In fact I don't have many memories at all. I do remember my last attempt at bluffing - nearly a month ago - before everything caved in on me: my big boss was talking about some make-or-break audit-whatsit called the FMR. I must have said MFR at least ten times before realising I'd got the letters in the wrong order. Perhaps that was the last straw for me. I might as well have said MFI (which is a chain store in the UK famous for selling dodgy furniture) or even MI5.

In all seriousness I managed reasonably well in the role until mid-November when my new boss arrived on the scene, creating an extra layer in the hierarchy. He was young, hungry, eager, energetic, basically all the things I wasn't (I'm not even young any more). Suddenly everything I did at work came under close scrutiny by an upstart who could quite easily do both our jobs. I was surplus to requirements. Depression set in, I became even slower and even less accurate, tasks got taken away from me, and before long I was just a body.

It was going to happen eventually, as it always has for me in a team environment. If it's just the three or four or five people in my immediate team then I can just about manage. But then people move in and out, you're expected to build relationships with people outside your team, alliances are formed, and before long I don't even know what I'm doing there any more and I end up on the sidelines. I know of no other possible outcome.

It wasn't a wonderful weekend. For some reason I could never relax. All that sunshine on Saturday did little to lift my mood. I did however watch some provincial cricket at the Basin - more about that in my next post. I saw Julie yesterday; she has her own battles with depression as well as physical pain. She takes twenty pills a day.

Today was my first day in the new role. New start. New opportunity. It would all be blissfully stress-free. If only. It was fairly menial, as jobs go, but I still had my fair share of new information to take in. I made multicoloured hand-written notes with bullet points and asterisks to help me remember. I started out OK but slowed up badly from about two o'clock when the sensory overload set in. I was wide-eyed, the ceiling lights seemingly turned up to 500 watts. It was a hugely frustrating afternoon for me - work got done, but very slowly. I'm quite concerned that I won't even be able to hold down this job for very long.

Buying this property (which, had I left it three months, would have been impossible) meant a new bank and more pieces of plastic in my wallet. I now have thirteen flexible friends, including those that fit into an ATM but have nothing to do with banks, and I can't keep track of them all. Most of the time I dodge the issue by paying in cash. As well as being easier for me (I find handling change much simpler than remembering which card is where), it helps to control my spending and reduce the size of my digital footprint. Regarding the flat itself, it's got a lot going for it and would be great if I was feeling better and could be confident of maintaining an income, but right now it feels like a burden. I structured my mortgage in such a way as to handle this scenario at work, not expecting it to eventuate quite this soon.

On Thursday I'm meeting Rose. Could be interesting.

My appointment with the shrink has been postponed till next Tuesday.

Tomorrow's job (apart from my actual job) is to tell Mum and Dad about all the work stuff. I know they'll be worried sick about me once I tell them, which is why I haven't as yet. Odds-on at least one of them will fly up here before the end of the month.