Week 15: Jackie Weaver

I’m having a break from boardgames through the first couple of weeks of February. I’ve been playing with the same group weekly for ~4 years, and while I enjoy it a lot, lately I just haven’t had the brainpower to learn new rules or get myself into the state of mind where I can be competitive. I’m hoping a small break will resolve this.

Part of Charlotte’s Christmas present was a box of tasting-sized gins. Now that we’re out of January we decided to spend Saturday evening trying these while we watched Lucifer (I still don’t like it that much after nearly 2 seasons). We developed a drinking game, you have to drink every time:

• Chloe Decker says her surname,

• A scene contains PG-rated strippers,

• A song is played that contains biblical references,

• Lucifer hits on someone,

• The passage of time is unclear (really you rarely know what time of day it’s supposed to be),

• The bad writing makes you groan (I only recommend this rule if you don’t need to do anything for the next few days).

I discovered a cool new life hack¹ called “going outside”. On Friday I left the house for the first time this week, I fed the cat in the morning and went for a walk in the sun before work, and my day was so much better for it. I know this isn’t like a super insightful tip, I’m writing it to remind myself that going outside does actually make me a better-functioning person.

At work I had a good chat in my 1:1 with Anna (my line manager / tech director). I’ve been working at the FT for 5 years, but my move into Customer Products (the group that delivers FT.com) was around a year ago.

One of the things that’s been playing on my mind lately is that I was already good friends with a lot of the people in Customer Products before I joined, some of whom I now find in my reporting chain – being involved in decisions about things like career progression for these people is part of my job. I’m managing to compartmentalise, but I do end up scrutinising some of my decisions for bias.

The chat with Anna about this was good. She made it clear that it’s an option for me to change some of my management chain if I think it’s getting in the way. I don’t think it is right now but it’s comforting knowing that I can do this if I feel like I need to. The discussion also prompted me to actually talk to some of the people in question and make some of my boundaries more explicit, I’m left feeling better about this. Who knew talking to people would make things more clear eh?

The Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee meeting has given me such life this week. It made for more compelling viewing that a lot of my more recent TV watching. If you haven’t had the pleasure then you need to watch this, the best bits:

I love it when the internet jumps on and massively overcommits to something like this. I found myself reading commentary on law and policy on whether Jackie Weaver did, in fact, have the authority.