Living the Good Life - mortgage free and living in line with our values

Watty1

Glad the chat was positive, he can always check the travel percentage when he gets the offer

EssexHebridean

Oh Vix that's great  news all round - brilliant stuff! 

Hope Berlin is fantastic! 

themadvix

Thanks all - it is nice to have good news for a change! 

GP, what they did was what had been spoken about with us by the guy who visited before, but no one had shown us what the lagging/trunking would look like - think a full nine inches wide of black plastic, and not in a straight line either, but up, then left, then up again, directly around and above our front door. If we’d known what it was going to look like, we’d never have agreed to the plan. This was the downfall - poor pre-installation communication. And then, Greenbee is right, some issues with poor installation too, which I’m inclined to put down to laziness (there was evidence of quite a bit of that) and youth (all the original installers were in their 20s, notably the area manager’s ’top guy’ is at least our age, if not a bit older). While I wasn’t happy and the install coordinator brushed my complaint off, credit where it’s due - the area manager was pretty quick to say that she wasn’t right to say what she did and that it would be rectified - and not after I escalated my complaint, but on the back of the fact that the auditor said things weren’t right. So I think there’s a weak link in the chain with communication beforehand (already potentially improved by the availability of white trunking) and I think we were unlucky to have a pretty useless install coordinator and some poor installers. Suspect they won’t get away with it though!

Interesting comments about job travel percentages - I hadn’t considered that it would be expressed as a percentage. The ad info was very limited though - it’s a new role, so I suspect the answer will be they don’t know. But I’ll discuss with Mr MV so he can work out what percentage he would be ok with.

 Managed to stay awake to 10pm last night, and have slept very well, unsurprisingly! (We got up at 2.15am yesterday). Looking forward to having more energy today - off to see the view from the top of the Reichstag building (free tickets) and then to the DDR museum (25% discount with our transport card - which was €53 for 4 days, all inclusive - why is uk public transport so expensive?!). There, managed to get some MSE content in! 

 Have a good day all!

Greying_Pilgrim

Ah gotcha tmv.  🤞for a much, much improved re-install, with no lasting damage - this time around.  Here's hoping everyone wants to prove they're more focused than the results of their first attempt.

Hope you continue to have a wonderful break.

Greying X

Jessy103

Have a great time vix! X

themadvix

Afternoon all,

The rest of our trip to Berlin was good, although we were a little disappointed with the markets - too much focus on food and drink and not enough on gifts to bring home (compounded by the fact we couldn't bring liquids, meat or cheese back). I would stand by Berlin not being my favourite German city, but we still had a good time. 

Have been inundated with work (I ended up doing some at the weekend), which is good, but so much to do still Christmas prep/house wise. We did finish plumbing the downstairs loo back in again at the weekend and Mr MV also cut the dining table in half so we now have an extending dining table - currently a bit of plywood for the middle leaf, but we will get a new proper top sorted for it (discovered it's cheap MDF when we cut it up, so definitely not a precious table!).

Octopus guys arrived this morning (also had to prep for that) but the electrician didn't come as his wife had been taken into hospital urgently. So they've done as much as they can do without him, but we're now at a bit of a standstill. Another sparky is due to come tomorrow but has to fit an EV charger first. Hopefully that will be a quick job. It's already looking a million times better than the original install.

Mr MV is currently in his second interview. I think we're both fairly ambivalent about it - the travel percentage is 25% (quite high for him) and the pay increase is 10k less than he was expecting (as it would be a secondment, there's not a lot of wiggle room) ... so he's definitely not convinced about it. We will see what happens today.

In most excellent news, because of the lack of electrician, they've not drained the system, so we've got unexpected heating tonight! 

MS things:
* Used our Amex dining credit for two evening meals out in Germany
* Lounge access from Amex card for airport breakfast on way out (and a very quick snack on way back)
* Free breakfast, room upgrade, drinks in the bar and nuts and sparkling water in hotel room using our Radisson status (which was entirely a hack from headforpoints) - while we wouldn't have paid for the hotel breakfast (which was excellent, but I imagine about EUR20/person/day) it did save us money - not just on the pretzel we'd have bought, but we definitely ate less at the markets too. (Full disclosure, the Amex is definitely NOT moneysaving, but we do at least try to get our money's worth from it!)
* Borrow the skillsaw for the table cutting from the Library of Things (£4 for the week)
* Found two presents needed in virtually new/new condition in charity shop yesterday
* Picked a beautiful calabrese broccoli from my allotment this afternoon (unexpectedly had a chance to get down there very briefly as the Octopus guys packed up early) and nabbed some free woodchip for my paths - rare as hen's teeth these days as it's worth too much to the council to give us it for free)
* Dinner will be chickpea and sweet potato satay stew for dinner - an IP recipe
* Pittas and trifle sponges baked and frozen for Christmas Eve and next Saturday (will need another trifle sponge for Boxing Day)
* Into the long cat-sitting period now

Gratitudes:
* Lovely 🐙 guys - much quieter and very considerate (I feel they've been told I'm a tricky customer and to make sure I'm happy at all points! 😬)
* Cats were pretty chill about the workmen today
* A walk to the allotment
* Lots of work
* Mr MV going into the interview feeling that he's not going to be devastated if he doesn't get offered the job
* A nice time in Berlin
* Oooh, and a kickstarter game that Mr MV had contributed to turned up yesterday - he'd totally forgotten about it. It's called a Clowder of Cats (I think) and you have to stack wooden cats in a variety of poses - good fun and will get lots of use over Christmas I think!

Have a good evening all, I'd better get back to work now.

KajiKita

Mr KK used to do a lot of snagging on new build homes and he never knew what he would walk into. A civil customer who would work with him to rectify the faults, or one who would b1tch and carp and moan at him about other people’s work. He always sympathised with the disruption and tried to keep any additional mess he had to make, to the absolute minimum but it was remarkable how varied people could be in their response. He was the go-to for a long time for this kind of thing as he is very level headed and calm. I suspect you’ve got the equivalent of Mr KK there, in the team from 🐙

KK

themadvix

I absolutely have KK - he's been mentioned as the top guy and I can see why. He's got a brain, experience and the right attitude (I also heard them discussing bonuses earlier and in some metric (I wasn't listening that closely) he was at the top - not boastfully mentioning it, just it was a fact). I *want* to !!!!!! about the others but I also appreciate that these guys probably have to work with them sometimes! In my complaints I've only mentioned the main issues (as I wanted them dealt with), but the list of deficiencies of the first lot was long!

badmemory

I had a friend who used to work in the office of a small business & she said that you could tell what the people had been like that were havinig things sorted.  They would either come back complaining about the people or the ones that had done a dodgy job.  One they never quoted for again & the others tended not to last very long.

Staffordia

If a Christmas market is on your radar for next year, may I recommend Wroclaw. Lots of stalls with gifts, as well as the mulled wine cabins. Fairly compact and eating out was very reasonable.