Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you're having a nice day today no matter what you believe or don't believe in. I hope you're spending it with your loved ones. 

I'm in London with JJ. The weather outside is really abysmal with heavy rain and hail during the night. I hope there aren't major disasters or floods.

I have loud happy music on, while I'm playing the happy sous chef. We're preparing huge amounts of food. I don't know how much of that we'll manage to consume. I expect the afternoon to be lethargic on the sofa watching movies or competing on some silly game in Wii.  

Merry Christmas - Καλα Χριστούγεννα!!! 

Becoming paranoid or cautious?

The world is supposed to end this Friday, which kind of sucks, since we’ll be missing the weekend. Why couldn’t the world end on the following Monday? Although to be honest, that Monday is Christmas Eve and it’s only half a day at work, which means that everybody will be in holiday spirit and not much work will be done. Apart from very emergency issues, the rest of the day will be spent chatting, gossiping and mindlessly browsing the internet. I think there will be a Christmas party for the employees’ children in the mess room, but I’ll try to stay far away from that one. Then it’s Christmas. Can the world end at the end of next week?

To be honest, I don’t think the world will end. Maybe, I’m being too selfish believing that I will not die this Friday, or maybe too optimistic. In any case, I have planned to do my Christmas food shopping late this Friday to try to avoid the weekend hordes of panicking consumers. My local big supermarket is open till midnight, which is very convenient. I’ll go home, have dinner and later that night, we’ll get ready and instead of going to a bar, we’ll go food shopping. On Christmas day, it’s going to be the two of us, so food shopping will be somewhat easy, even if we will stuff ourselves with food, as expected.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about is ‘prepping’. According to the Google dictionary, prepping is ‘preparing oneself for an event’. During these modern times, prepping has a new meaning and it concerns people getting ready for an apocalyptic event, i.e. the end of the world. There are some people really serious / fanatical about it. They believe that a disaster of that proportion will soon happen, whether it is a zombie attack or a civil outbreak or a spreading killing virus, and they have made preparations. They have escape routes from their houses, evacuation packed bags with necessities, a destination where they believe they can isolate and support themselves for weeks, even months, and they train themselves in first aid, hunting and various other similar self-preservation skills.

My self-preservation skills are almost non-existent. Even in the most user friendly forest, I wouldn’t know how to survive. OK, maybe I would try to find a water source and some shelter for the night. But that’s it. I was never a boy scout and I don’t think I would be able to light a fire without a lighter. If the zombies came, I would be one of the first to go. To be frank about it, that wouldn’t be a very bad thing though. Who wants to live in a post-apocalyptic world anyway? Have you read the ‘World War Z’?

However, some recent events made me thinking. Without taking the situation too far, wouldn’t be a good idea to be somewhat prepared? I’m not talking about the zombies or aliens coming. I’m talking about more real everyday stuff. For example, if a natural disaster occurred, like hurricane Sandy that left so many people without electricity for days, do I have the proper equipment at home to sustain myself for these days? Do you?

So, I made a mental list of things needed. In case the electrical supply was down, the supermarkets remained closed for some days and we got stranded at home for a few days. It would be good to have some candles or source of light, lighters, some lasting cans of food, water and a small bottled gas cooker like the one my grandmother used to use to make Greek coffee. Am I taking this too far? Is this just the beginning of me turning into a crazy prepper? OK, that’s not a proper word, but anyway, you know what I mean... Will I start looking into conspiracy theories and wait for the dead to rise?

The most hated word in the industry

Working in the IT industry, I know that there is something whispered on the higher floors of a company, that the low level minions should not hear. And that thing is ‘outsourcing’. By that term I don’t mean only hiring one or more contractors to finish a project or help someone’s job. I’m talking about the phenomenon of uprooting a whole team or department and replacing them with cheaper labour in a distant country.  

This trend is not of course something new. I can remember from my early school years, living in the northern part of Greece, small industries moving to the other side of the borders, to Bulgaria, saving millions of that old forgotten (?) currency. I heard conversations after conversations about the bloody taxes imposed by the government that pushed small companies away to a country just a few kilometres away, where labour was cheaper and taxes were lower.

The company I work for at the moment has its headquarters in the UK. There are of course local offices in various corners of the Earth, including the South and South East Asia, which are popular destinations for outsourced IT departments. There are minor helpdesk departments in these offices, but till now they weren’t responsible for anything major. However, there is a new discussion going on in London, about how the non-profitable IT department should improve effectiveness but cut costs at the same time! I really love it when managers and directors become all poetic like that and announce these major ideas!

Anyway, there is a storm brewing. A colleague of mine has already been sent to investigate how and if the company can set up an office of developers somewhere at the Indochinese Peninsula to save some money from hiring developers in the UK. This prospect is scary, since lots of the people I work with will no longer be needed and their cheaper replacements will be easily found. I’m not sure if my position is threatened. I’d like to believe that ‘not yet’. I’m not a full time developer per say. I work in a special division, close to the decision makers of the company here. So, hopefully, I’ll be alright for a year or two? However, there is that can of worms that now opened and the future is unpredictable.

I’m not going to leave you on a pessimistic tone though. It’s Friday after all and I’d like to change the subject and the tone of this post. A few days ago, I had my anniversary with my beloved boyfriend!!! We’ve celebrated three years of happily being together and a bit more of a year of living together! I can’t believe it’s been three years already! Time flies when you’re having fun. He’s my partner in crime, my rock in the storm and best friend. Love you so much ‘JJ’.