Appraisal and Wedding in Diary

I finally had my annual appraisal at work on Friday. My boss told me I was too quiet and need to speak up more when I have a problem. Also that I need to be better at filtering sales calls. I thought I was quite good at that! I’m always firm with them when they insist on being put through, and I always tell them if we’re not interested whereas Amy just says “He/ She’s not available at the moment.” And that just means they call back again. But then my boss is never here so she doesn’t know how many sales calls we get or how persistent they are and they know all the tricks like pretending it’s about an existing contract. So I only got a 2/5 for Decision Making and Judgement. All the other areas I got 3 or 4, where 3 is Good- meets expectations and 4 is Very good- better than expected.

When I said that I’m the only one who looks after the group email inboxes, she said she had noticed that, so I don’t know why she’s never mentioned it to anyone else. But next time it happens, I have to send her an email and ask her to email everyone else to ask them to help. And she apologised for me never knowing when Amy is going to be out or how long for, as that was her fault for always asking her to do things.

So no major issues for me to fix, which is nice. Now I just have to stick it out for a few more months. I've even made a ticker which I've posted below. That is my goal for leaving here and becoming self employed, it's going to be terrifying handing in my notice without having another job to go to, and being entirely responsible for my own finances! But I finally have a date to work towards, eeeek!

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On Saturday we headed over to Derbyshire for Ed and Ashleigh's wedding reception. We were two of only a tiny handful of people who weren't invited to the actual wedding so, when we arrived, Blue said to me sarcastically "Oh you made it then...!" Yes, we made it to the part we were invited to! He thought we were just late.

Most evening parties we've been to have had a buffet, so we didn't have any dinner before we went. But there was no buffet, just the cake. But there was no cake, they had wheels of cheese instead! Apparently this is becoming more common but I'd never seen it before. To go with the cheese there were big hunks of bread, crackers and grapes. So me and Jay filled up on those in place of a meal!

The first three hours of music were rubbish. The DJ didn't even play typical wedding music, just rubbish cheesy dance and pop from the 90s. Until one hour before the end when he cracked out Foo Fighters. After seeing all of us dancing to that, it was swiftly followed by such treats as Rammstein, Rage Against the Machine and Drowning Pool. I always enjoy it when that happens at a wedding. All of us, a big group of metal fans, dressed all posh for a wedding in suits, nice dresses and fascinators; moshing, windmilling our hair, pushing each other around, while everyone else looks on, confused and bemused. Hehe, it was a lot of fun.

Ed and Ash met at a Discworld convention, so all the table setting were named after characters from the Discworld books. Inside their card and guestbook, I found some quotes from the Discworld books which were related to weddings and marriage, so I hope they enjoyed those.

I was all grown up and paced my drinking. Now that I'm getting hold, I'm getting hangovers far too easily, so I alternated between alcohol and Coke and didn't have a hangover at all in the morning, which is greatly preferable to getting drunk. It's a good job I did this considering I didn't get any sleep at all. We only had a double bed in the hotel room, but me and Jay have a king sized bed at home. Jay seemed to think he was still in the king sized bed and he spent most of the night trying to push me out, while I clung onto the edge for dear life trying to edge my way back. I was SO TIRED the next morning and had to have a nap yesterday afternoon.

So I got another catch up with everyone, three times in a month. I hope it isn't another 10 months until I see them all again!