Helena Handbasket

By Tivoli

Pre-cast decals, Purpose-moulded bricks cut-and-laid to suit.

Bedford town centre was glorious this morning – ice on the river, swans apparently sleeping afloat, a deep-raspberry-coloured pre-dawn providing a background to skeletal wintry trees in silhouette. I would have loved to have captured it on my ride in to work, but the ambient air temperature was 7° below zero and I wasn't prepared to remove my double-gloves for anything - not even for blip.

At work I picked over every take-off sheet for every flat-roofing project I have been involved with since 1st August and was happy to discover only six had obvious errors. I corrected those and re-sent them to the in-house estimators with apologies. Not a single response.
Next I re-read some mostly irrelevant training material, joked about the errors it contained and was given permission to correct it and clean up the formatting, which I did, happily.
Toward the end of the day I received my annual review. It's quite the strangest one I've ever experienced. I've been told there will be a cash gift in my payslip of 30/12, my notice period will be extended from 2 weeks to 4 from 1st January, my salary will also increase by 4% from the same date, and if I'm still around by 1st April I can expect to receive a share in the company profits.
Isn't that clever! It's a family business, no shareholders with votes, no partners, but staff receive a cut of the profits, as determined by the family. The same family that rides around in Maseratis and prefer women to be fragrant. Never met anything like this before!
Have I been set any targets? No, not one.
Have I been offered any appropriate professional training to advance my career? No. None.
Have I been given any feedback at all about my performance so far? No.
I can only presume that because my notice period has been extended and I've been told about the profit-sharing scheme that I must have passed the probation threshold, though that was not confirmed specifically.
I'll just stay quiet for a bit.

Receipt of CV elsewhere has been acknowledged.

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