Working for a change

Lola Towers garden, June 2021

Getting paid for vaccinating is proving to be quite a challenge. At the end of June I got my first payslip which showed without any further detail at all that I'd been paid for 30 hours, which equates to five shifts, two of them on Saturdays. In fact, up to the end of June, I'd worked twelve shifts, two on Saturdays and two on Sundays. So it was back to the Temporary Staffing team, then payroll, and a helpful young man who gave the impression that he understood the situation and said he'd get back to me. He didn't.

Then I turned up for a shift only to find that there wasn't one. I did stay to have a chat with the admin people, who told me that the young people who are now eligible for their jab are no longer coming - all the ones who wanted the vaccine have had their first jab, but it is suspected that since the official guidance is that no further restrictions are needed after 'Freedom Day' (19th July), they don't see why they now need to get vaccinated. So although the clinics are open to booking by the public now, the only demand is for second jabs.

When I followed up the payroll issue (twice - the first time the helpful young man was not available) I was told that everything was fine and that I had been paid for the shifts I had done. When I pointed out that I hadn't, the helpful young man had another look, gave the impression that he understood the situation, and told me that I would be paid for all the remaining shifts at the end of this month. We'll see. The booking system doesn't show many shifts at the times I can work, and two out of three shifts that I book are cancelled. I have been contacted to change the working hours for the next one so, fingers crossed, that will go ahead tomorrow and maybe I'll find out more.

Working for Mr MXF is coming along quite nicely, although I manage to surprise myself by the extent to which I can procrastinate if I'm not actually having to go to a workplace. [Writing blog posts is one example - when I was working I just about managed one a week, and now I'm churning them out every five or six days.] I'm starting to grasp some of the essentials and can describe for you now what it is that I'm trying to do at the moment.

Mr MXF hosts some websites for family members and non-critical businesses, as well as the more important website he runs for his main business (broadcast and media technology consultancy, as far as I can tell). I'm not going near the important stuff yet, but the other websites reside on a very flaky server which constantly needs kicking to keep it going. My first challenge is to work out how to reliably transfer these websites to a different, more reliable host server. And then, to carry out that transfer without breaking anything.

During the last but one US election, when the Russians were, let's say, a little bit twitchy, some of Mr MXF's websites were hit by some sort of bot infection which caused him no end of trouble and needed much time to rectify. Having learned how to move all the websites from one place to another should put me in a good position to be able to recreate a working website without delay if such an eventuality should occur again. I am more confident of the first task than the second at the moment, but as I spend more time on these jobs it gradually gets slightly easier to imagine.