horsemouth has just been reading about mary shelley (following the outlaw bookseller mentioning that she had written much of frankenstein while living in bath).
on 30 the december 1816 (today's date lest we forget) percy shelley and mary godwin (the soon to be mary shelley) marry at st mildred's church, bread street, london (now the location of the 30 cannon street office building). mr and mrs godwin were present and the marriage ended the family rift.
yesterday horsemouth was asked if he wanted to work. he said no.
he announced that he had retired from the note-taking work.
the notetaking part of the work and the working with the deaf he enjoyed (mostly). it was more the prospect of self-employment and the IT wrangling he found not to his taste.
on the IT side the work changed from a paper based operation (handwritten notes and hand-annotating hand-outs) to typing things in on a laptop, emailing things to people in particular formats, attending zoom and teams lectures. none of these changes made horsemouth feel he was doing a better job of supporting the deaf in higher education – in fact it made him feel he was doing a worse job.
it finally became time to admit this to himself and call it a day.
in addition to this it was the increased reliance on submitting your own timesheets and (effectively) processing your own payroll via a variety of bespoke systems that finally pissed horsemouth off. there was seemingly never any training to be had to do this, like bill bruford said of playing in king crimson 'you were just expected to know'. the analogy horsemouth often uses is the great leap forward.
like many people the technoshock and the flexibiity required for pandemic working were the final straw. horsemouth would have carried on but the job had changed under him – it may well be that it is changing back (but it is too late horsemouth has bolted out of the stable door).
when the work looked like changing to self-employement there was just more of this, plus the need to purchase memberships of professional bodies, insurance etc. and all this for less work and less regular work. now horsemouth had worked self-employed jobs before (as an addition to his main employment) - it was the face of self-employment post these later changes that put him off.
the great casualisation was supposed to drive down horsemouth's pay and conditions and hours (in real terms) but as a matter of fact they had been declining all the time he had been working the job. the work (being insufficient to cover his costs) would have become the alibi for his universal credit claim etc. etc.
horsemouth said fuck it.
he can do this because he has enough to carry him for a while at least until he knows more what he wants to do. he has some money left from the redundancy cheque he will see how long that lasts.
today (well this evening) horsemouth goes to a meeting of the communal endeavour (afterwards there is pizza - possibly). thereafter in a busy social whirl horsemouth is heading out of the back door of the year towards christmas. (horsemouth hates christmas but it is the best that can be done given the circumstances).
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