Its Saturday morning and sarah has just returned from a flying visit to the UK to have all our possessions packed at the old house and shipped over here. This all went suitably to plan by all accounts, and in just 12 more days I can get out of this bloody hotel room and move into a proper damn house with some furniture. It can’t come soon enough frankly….I’m sitting here catching up on email etc now though listening to the artic monkeys and life feels good.
Anyway, all this feeling has led to is my continuing devotion to study and reading of various natures. This week has had 2 major events.
1. Microsoft finally letting me loose on real work – admittedly I’m still a bit slow compared to most other people there so I haven’t quite got a full workload in any sense, but at least I’m starting. I’ve done much bloody theoretical training the past 4 weeks, its been good to look at some real situations, and get back to solving people’s problems, although I haven’t actually solved any yet as they’re so damn difficult, but then that’s the whole point.
The basic point is that even the easiest of cases within my new workload is at the higher end of anything I’ve done before. This is what I’d hoped for and this is what I’ve got. Now I’ve made by bed I’d better damn well lie in it.
I’m loving it.
2. Swedish Classes starting
I thought that I would love this, but its not turned out quite so well so far. I am learning stuff and I’m enjoying the homework and self study but I’m not enjoying the actual class that much. I think this is probably because I don’t like the teacher that much which is something I‘ve never experienced in Adult education previously, I just don’t like her style very much. I think she may well be a good teacher, we just don’t gel very much. But anyway I‘ll finish the class, its only another 4 weeks and then maybe I’ll change to a different tutor.
Currently I’m reading:
“How would you move mount fuji”
which is a book about Microsoft interview puzzles and logical thinking etc.
Plus of course the usual amount of technical information which has become my style for the past 5 weeks.
I’ve also been playing with speed reading techniques and trials and evaluations following some interesting conversations at work about enabling yourself to take in more information and comprehend it better as well. I’m finding it shockingly fascinating. It may well be something I’ll put some time towards in the coming weeks. In fact it definitely will be if I think about it more now – its amazing stuff. I’ve always been a vey fast reader anyway (well so I thought) so it was interesting to quantify myself against an average set anyway, and then the idea of being able to double your speed is frankly remarkable. We shall see if it works or not…
So yeah the mid week section has just been work – Swedish class – homework – work – Swedish class homework.
Now that sarah’s back though I can just have a chilled weekend 9with maybe a little Swedish homework!).
Last weekend I spent a long time out walking on my own in the nature reserve up the road again. I found a great animal / bird watching hide and spent a while checking out some deer and lots of water / wading birds. As ever it was eerily quiet and I only saw a couple of other people in 4 hours or so, and yet its not like it wilderness, its just 10 minutes from the motorway and right inside the suburbs of Stockholm. There’s just so much space here.
I’m feeling halfway to being a proper employee Swedish resident now, as I got my first pay slip this week and used my sweidsh bank account and that type of thing. It all helps.
I’m going off in a few minutes to eat fish in a big indoor market in the city, which ought to be rather cool as well.
I learnt another interesting thing about Swedish employment law this week as well. Although I get paid holiday from Microsoft, apparently you also get paid by the Sweidsh government when you take holiday. The guys were having trouble explaining this concept to me, and they were saying things like “it seems to good to be true eh, but it really does work like this”. From what I understand it’s something like when you claim SSP in the Uk, or maternity benefit, in that your company may choose to pay you or not pay you under certain scenarios, but there is a minimum covering payment you get from the government in case you don’t get this as an employee benefit, thereby allowing people to take holiday without too heavy a financial benefit. It’s a legal right of any Swedish employee to request a 4 week consecutive holiday between June and august and the employer HAS to grant it.
So basically the more holiday you take in a month the more you get paid!! I have yet to see quite how true or valuable this is, but I’ll know next month when I’ve taken some.
Beyond that, well I’ve booked a flight back to the UK for flying visit of 48 hours on 9 june so I hope to catch up with lots of people then.
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