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There’s a strange atmosphere at work at the moment due to staffing issues in my department. The girl, S, who I have fretted over in many a blog post for her laziness and poor attitude has been off sick for almost two months. She had an accident which was genuine but she has been less than honest in regard to her extra-curricular activities. Bottom line: she was found out. She returned to work on Monday but was dragged in to the boss’s (the one at the top of the tree) office and left five minutes later. No one is telling us anything and it’s all very secretive but I think she’s facing disciplinary action, serious enough for us to be thinking she’s been fired.

Of course, all the proper channels have to be gone through which is why we aren’t being told anything but it is so damn frustrating not knowing to expect her back or not. The atmosphere is so much better at work without her there but we don’t know whether to be relieved she’s gone yet. My gut instinct is to believe she’s not coming back since she wasn’t allowed to stay in the office but stranger things have happened and we are pretty new to actions like this despite them being long overdue.

Of course, her absence is causing a lot of stress in the department because we are one person short (despite the fact she did as little as possible) and we are only just managing to cope. Whenever one of us goes on holiday though, it causes more of a problem and it’s not going to get any better any time soon.

I just despair of the place sometimes. We are just so busy and stress levels in every department are high. We have had major cuts in our budget which restricts our ability to take on casuals so a lot of errors are being made which makes us look like right muppets. On top of that, the English equivalent of our office received a severe roasting in the press lately which made them sound like typical money grabbing government types and we don’t know if it will have a knock on effect for us. We do similar work but laws in Scotland are different which means the end result is not the same but the overall idea is to protect those who are vulnerable. It would be easier if I told you where I worked but since there is only one office of its kind in Scotland, I’d rather not do that. Suffice to say, the article was very one-sided and it upset me a great deal. In a way, I now understand why celebrities get so upset by untrue press coverage and I think it is appalling the reporter made no attempt to discuss the complaints with the actual agency before publication.

Since I hardly buy CDs anymore and mostly download, I’ve decided to start clearing out all the CDs gathering dust on my shelves. I never listen to them anymore. The music I listen to is already on my iPod and it never changes much. I never really had that many CDs to start with and none of them are rare or valuable in anyway so they are heading to the charity shop along with some VHS tapes I still have lurking in the corners. I’ll be sad to see the VHS stuff go, but most of it has already been replaced on DVD and I don’t have the patience for video anymore. I have a few blank ones filled with old TV shows that haven’t made it on to DVD yet so I will be hanging on to those for awhile. I toyed with the idea of transferring them onto DVD myself but I don’t think they are really worth the effort.

I’m also downloading TV shows online as well, so how long before I get rid of the DVDs? Can’t really see that happening myself because I love my DVD collection so much more than my paltry music collection. I pre-ordered True Blood from Amazon recently and then cancelled it, opting for download instead which is a first for me. I have S4 of Supernatural and S1 of Sanctuary on my laptop and am downloading new seasons for each. Of course, the big drawback there is storage space as my laptop will only store so much before protesting. I’ve been looking at getting an external HD for storing media long before this happens but can’t make up my mind which one to get. However, if the rumours about Apple’s online storage are true, maybe it won’t be necessary.

Then, there are e-books. I’m a bit of a bookworm and while I’ve had a clear out recently and have been swapping like crazy, I have still got shelves and shelves of books. I’ve been reading about Amazon’s Kindle with interest and I have to say the thought of having thousands of books on one little machine is very appealing. However, books are special and you just can’t replace the feeling of a book in your hands no matter how hard you try. And then there are all those pretty covers. It may seem shallow but I’ve often bought a brand new copy of a book because I’ve liked the cover. How beautiful are the new editions of the Sookie Stackhouse books, for example?

Soon our lives will all be packed on to our computers and our rooms empty of clutter. My mother, for one, will love it and is already lusting after the day she doesn’t have to look at wires everywhere. A geek my mother is not. Me, I love technology and clutter. My mum thinks rooms should look like those perfectly set out show homes, beautiful but with no personality. Personally, I’d rather live in a home than a showcase. Clutter, it is, then.

I haven’t been blogging much mainly because I’m too damn tired to do anything by the time I get home from work. Things are downright awful at the moment. S has been off for more than 8 weeks now and with other people’s holidays coming around, we’ve been struggling pretty badly. At one point, there was just two of us trying to do the work of six. The only good thing about it is there is definitely some disciplinary action coming down on S’s head and while I feel mean for saying it, it’s not before time. Three years I’ve been waiting on this to be done. We are still being inundated with work and while that is good in the face of the recession, our budgets have all been cut down to less than a third of last year’s level and we can’t get any more staff. We are taking on casuals here and there but as luck would have it, we always end up with the ones who go on longterm sick leave and since they are given the same rights as permanent stuff, we have to jump through hoops to get rid of them.

On top of that, I came down with a bad cold last week and ended up losing my voice. I still had to struggle with answering calls though and felt pretty unprofessional when I had to keep spluttering all over the place. I’m somewhere near the couldn’t care less place right now.

The new line manager we got isn’t turning out to be a good as thought since he pretty much relies on everyone else knowing what to do. He never once asked how L and I were coping on our own last week. At one stage, he kept palming off his own work on to L, I turned round and told her not to do it since she was busy doing someone else’s work. If he had a problem with it, he could do the blasted thing himself. The problem is he hasn’t a clue what we do or how we do it. I’m hoping he will take the time to learn but I really don’t think he’s happy in the job and will be moving on. I can’t really blame him because a large part of his job is putting up with complaints from other depts and dealing with them. He really doesn’t like getting endless emails and I don’t think he was really aware what the job entailed. Of course, that makes life harder for everyone else and we are having to dig our heels in to make sure we don’t get landed with stuff he can’t be bothered doing.

I never thought I’d be in a position where I know more about the dept than the man allegedly running it. I was temporarily promoted into his position while he was on paternity leave but I really have no designs on the job itself on a permanent basis because it would drive me insane. I have no desire to be responsible for staff and too soothe all their petty complaints.

Something needs to be done soon about the whole place because TPTB are far too lenient on the staff right now. Most of them seem to think they get paid to surf or send texts all day. Don’t even get me started on those who get pregnant, take a year off, come back for a month or so, apply for promotion, announce they are pregnant again and will be taking another year off. Give me a f**king break. I know women deserve maternity leave and having a child is a strain while you are working full-time, blah, blah, blah, but a year’s paid maternity leave? It means those staff who play on it (and yes we do have those) are next to useless in the grand scheme of things and someone else gets cheated out of a promotion they probably deserved just as much.

You get why I don’t blog these days? Too prone to ranting.

Just updated Caledonia Heritage with a post about Scone Palace, check it out.

I’m not blogging much these days because I don’t really have that much to talk about. I seem to be spending more time away from the computer reading books and I suppose that’s down to sites like Good Reads and Read It Swap It.

Things are going okay at work. I have a new line manager who more or less leaves me alone because he trusts me to get on with the job and since he’s new to the department, he’s relying on me to help him out with a few things. Yeah, I know my boss’s job better than he does. LOL! Isn’t that always the way? We had a few incidents this week which I’m not going to bore you with but they again involved the girl I’ve spoken so much about. Steps are being taken and I’m thinking she is going to be in a lot of hot water soon. She’s attempted to pull her socks up a bit but it is too little too late. I’m watching with interest because I’ve heard on the grapevine that some people are going to be facing disciplinary action over things like too much internet usage.

Other than reading, I’m spending a fair amount of time on my family tree. I gave up having a separate website for it and am using Ancestry UK as it makes maintaining the tree so much easier. I recently found a few Irish connections but haven’t explored them yet. I’m not sure if I’m even going to be able to do it because they are really far back and Irish roots are harder to explore. One of the lines I’ve been exploring is also very high in illegitimate births which makes things so much harder. I’ve been quite shocked by just how many illegitimate children a couple of women have had. I mean once may be a mistake but six or seven! I have a feeling the kids all have the same father but only two have his name on the birth certificate and one was born well after his death!

Not sure what I’m going to do once I have nothing left to explore. I really wish I could do more work on my English side but there’s not a lot of info available and I was disappointed when a possible connection never emailed me back but still helped herself to my photos. I have no problem with sharing information or photos but it is only polite to ask! Even if I do use someone’s info, I never take photos without permission. It just seems so wrong to me. I got quite a jolt when I saw pictures of my mum as a girl on her tree.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just being too sensitive about it. I tried making my tree private but it was blocking other people from their research so I opened it up again.

Just attended my second funeral of the year and seriously hope it will be the last. I suppose it is a sad fact that you attend more funerals as your family gets older but I could seriously do without them.

This morning’s funeral was for my aunt’s dad and I was more or less there to support her and her family because I really didn’t know her father well. My aunt’s parents divorced when she was really young and her dad was just never in the picture. She was raised by her grandmother because her own mother was an alcoholic and her father more or less abandoned her. He remarried and had a whole new adopted family. So, for a long time, after the death of her grandmother, my aunt’s only family were her husband’s family (us lot) and any remaining members of her mother’s side.

Over the past five years or so, my aunt and her dad had renewed contact and he got a chance to meet his grandchildren and great grandchildren. He became estranged from his second family for years apparently and something made him reach out to contact my aunt again. I’m not sure how it all happened but suddenly he was there in the family circle.

Of course, the whole estranged family part is making things totally awkward for my aunt since she is his only natural child. Most of them hadn’t seen her dad for nearly 19 years and my aunt told them they were welcome at the funeral but to stay away if they intended causing trouble. My cousin, herself, said she had no idea how to react to her grandfather’s death because he was never there while she was growing up and she only got to know him over the past few years.

I’m glad to say everything went well but there was a distinct awkwardness, especially at the end of the service when the family lines up to greet guests. It is one of my pet hates because I think it makes people feel uncomfortable. My cousin skipped it because she didn’t want to speak to any of the second family because of how they had treated her Papa and of course they were all strangers. I saw her standing to the side and decided to skip the line up myself and quietly waited with my cousin until the strangers had left and it was just my aunt to hug.

Afterwards, at the tea, it was like someone had drawn a line down the middle of the room with us on one side and the other family on the other. My aunt was a real trooper though, she circulated the room and spoke to everyone. Unfortunately, I think the real nastiness will start after the will is read but my aunt is bowing out and leaving it all to the solicitor.