(no subject)

Today, the area manager at the office where I'm based at the moment basically offered me the currently-vacant team manager's job if I wanted it. While I'm flattered at the prospect of being offered what she tells me is a £10K a year raise on my current salary on a plate (and apparently not much competition for it, since she said they've had no applications for the job from anyone who's actually appointable), she couldn't understand why I just started laughing when she said it.

Why on earth would I want to saddle myself with that? It'd take substantially more money than that before I'd think about it, but I'd be walking into it with my eyes open and for a limited period because I was using it to climb the corporate ladder. I'd rather hang onto my nice new relatively stress-free job for a while, where I can just go 'this needs doing' and walk off, knowing it's not ultimately my arse on the line if it doesn't get done.

Her parting shot? "Don't knock it till you've tried it." Yeah, right. I saw my previous manager get carted off in an ambulance when he had his second heart attack, dearie, you don't have to tell me anything...

(no subject)

In other news (since I'm sick of talking about work and nothing else here, and apologies to anyone who's equally bored with it), I finished A Wizard of Earthsea last week and am now almost halfway through The Time-Traveler's Wife. I'm very glad I didn't discover it was one of the blessed Richard and Judy bookclub books otherwise I would have passed it by and that would have been bad.

It's a clever idea, with a lot of interesting concepts in it - a man (Henry) who finds himself 'chrono-impaired', travelling back in time when under stress to important times in his own past life and also back to various times in the childhood of the woman (Claire) who will eventually become his wife. I'm not quite sure where the author is going with this one, but it begs the question as to whether Claire really ever has a choice about all of this, since it could be argued that Henry's involvement in her childhood, careful as he is the majority of the time not to tell her too much about her future, makes her into someone different from who she might otherwise have been and therefore into someone who fully expects that they will eventually get involved with one another as adults.

Next up is either The Tombs of Atuan (which scared the crap out of me when I was younger) or Anansi Boys, I haven't decided which yet. American Gods was excellent, though a lot of the fun for me was trying to guess from the descriptions which gods or hero figures Neil Gaiman was obliquely describing. ;)

Oh, and I still haven't seen either Harry Potter or Narnia or King Kong yet. Definitely going to see the first while I'm off work, might see the second, probably won't bother with the third...