Springfield Lakes, 6 May 2023
Hi Marlis,
Work
I’ve been with University of Queensland longer now
than any employer over the past 7 years or so and I think I will manage to
complete the year. The job is not at all what I had imagined and while I am
entertained most days, I don’t really get to do what I was hired for. My team
find me very useful because I get things done while they are too busy for their
own good, but while that’s all good and well, it’s not change management work.
After 7 months of waiting, we finally got that system contract signed for the project I was hired to be involved in and things are starting to move, at last! There’s not that much more for me to do at this stage, aside from building a whole training module for the new system users, but that’s not very high on the list of priorities at the moment. My small division is in a bit of a state with people moving into different roles, new people coming on board and so much work that it’s hard to get anything done. And then there’s me who doesn’t have too much to do and finds time for everything and everyone but still gets to leave on time. Life could be worse 😊.
I’ve met my new director, Joanna, and she seems fine, but will only arrive in July, so we’re on our own for another 8 weeks or so. Not that we had much need for a director so far, we’ve been managing quite well without one, but everyone seems to agree this is not a role we can do without. I also organised another send off for a colleague who was a bit invisible as it turned out, despite being there for nearly 5 years. With the help of some colleagues, we managed to put a nice send-off together and she seemed to appreciate it all. I really hope that I will be the next one to leave and no one else does in the meantime, but let’s wait and see.
It's a time of budget pressures at UQ and many other universities and they keep making the same short-term decision mistakes when it comes to priorities. I am very impressed with the professionalism of my direct colleagues but quite underwhelmed with the lack of strategic vision and courage of my executive leadership team. Then again, I don’t have to do their job so it’s easy for me to say that, haha. They are trying to get back to a pre-COVID world and circumstances that no longer exist and have never had to cut down on cost like this before, so they honestly don’t know what they are doing.
I’ve promised my acting director that I’ll stick
around for a bit longer to help with some strategic matters and preparation for
the new Director, unless something really good comes up. I’ve not actively
started looking yet and think I am happy to stay for a while longer, it’s a
great place to work, but there’s no future for me at UQ. I tried to convince
the leadership team to set up a central change office and let me lead it. They
like the idea, but there’s no money for it and that’s the end of the line for
me. I can’t go anywhere else where it’s better and in my team I can’t do what I
came to do because there’s no capacity. Oh well, sometimes that’s just how
things played out. It looked good when I started, now it’s all slowly falling
apart and I have move on to something else.
Nothing to be too sad about though, I’ve made significant change of sorts happen for my team, helped heaps of people, set a new standard for change and how it can be done and probably the coolest thing I will deliver before I leave is a staff training course for change management which will be self-directed, online and so much better than what I made for Deakin a few years ago. I am working on it with some other enthusiasts and when we’re done I think I’ll be proud of the end result. I’ve really enjoyed working on it so far. It’s only 10% of what UQ needs to be better at change management, but it’s 10% more than what they have right now 😊. Maybe in a few years they’ll be ready to set up a change office and we’ll see how things go then.
The staff mentoring program I help out on is going really well and the participants’ comments have been really positive and this week we organised a small networking event and people seemed to enjoy that too. I will probably step down from the organising committee once this is done because it’s all a bit messy and I feel I’ve given a lot and got an equal amount out of it. Okay, that’s enough boring talk about work things, let’s move on to more fun matters!
SES
It’s been quite the experience over the past few
months going through the probationary period yet again. The training was fun
enough and I even learned a some things, but most of it was really a repetition
of the things I’d been doing for the past 5 years or so. I finally got my gear,
as in everything you could possibly want to wear in the colour orange or blue,
and it feels good to wear orange again!
I’ve been travelling to other units (they call them groups here) over the past few weeks to get my required training done and even though it all feels like a huge waste of time, I’ve been with SES long enough to know it’s easier to just go with the flow. Like in Victoria, the people are all very nice and friendly, you always have the one random slightly snarky one but I know that if you ignore them they’ll go away or calm down, either way that’s a win 😊. Last Wednesday we had the monthly maintenance night and I could finally start what I do best: cleaning up. I grabbed the vacuum and got busy with the vehicles and then moved on to the storage area where I really just put things in their place, swept the floor and emptied some bins and it looked so much better for it. I’ll need some serious time in that room to make it really good, but it was the first night out of probation and I didn’t want to overdo it.
This unit/group’s response profile is very different
from my previous unit. We used to go out to lots of storm damage and tree jobs,
but this unit is more about the forensic land searches (assisting police) and
missing persons, who seem to get lost in the nearby mountains a lot. We
recently had a crew go out and they were busy for 16 hours hiking through the
bush and back with some people who misjudged their fitness. Good times…
Our group leader is a friendly guy and he’s trying to get some of the training I already did recognised, just so I don’t have to sit through training again and again which is nice because I can probably do better things with my time, like writing letters to you, reading a book and playing video games. Basically anything else. It’s also good fun to have my SES mate from Victoria, Michael, there as well. Sometimes we just share a look or story afterwards about how things are similar but also very different and have a good chuckle. Give it a few more months and we’ll fit right in, I hope.
Yumi’s volunteering and work
Yumi’s been keeping busy with work, which is picking
up a bit with return clients wanting some work done and new clients getting
started on their projects. Her other job as the volunteer coordinator for the
greyhound charity is almost like a full-time job right now. She’s moving dogs
around, picking up food, running a small warehouse with logistics services for
foster carers from our garage and spare room and doing lots of admin too. She
seems to be enjoying herself a lot and I enjoy that she’s having fun. This
morning we went to a place where a different animal charity hands out surplus
food from large pet store chains and food producers. And we’re not talking a
few kilos, we got 25x 12kg bags of kibble, which retails for $2,500 or so. We
also got 60 boxes with 6 bags each at $30 a pop of very expensive treats that
had gone past their expiry (the dog will never know), so yeah, that’s about
$11,000 retail value. And they had much, much more where that came from. It’s
very heart warming that these big businesses don’t just dump it all at the tip,
but give it to charities instead. Food and vet bills are their major costs and
it helps them stay in business for sure.
She and I both have learned a lot about how this charity business all works and it’s quite interesting and amazing to see how much people will do for free for their greyhound friends. Yesterday Yumi was out and about picking up and dropping of a dog, then today she’s doing another drop off and then tomorrow she’s at a market and doing a meet and greet later that morning. Well, as long as she’s having fun, I am all for it. She’s got her whole inventory organised in the spare room and with the food in the garage it’s really mostly out of sight and out of the way so I don’t mind and Dash enjoys sniffing her up and down when she’s been around other dogs.
The other people in the foster and volunteer team are becoming her dog walking friends and Dash has been on a few walks in various parts of Brisbane now and really enjoys being with the other dogs. He doesn’t really interact with them that much, but it’s good for his social skills as he’s still a bit awkward around other dogs and people. I am fine with letting him be a dog, but Yumi of course has different ideas and expectations, so I just let her do her thing and only object when she starts to go a bit overboard. Yep, we’re just like real parents, but we get to walk our child on a leash and put him in the trunk of the cat, which apparently is not allowed for children beyond the age of two… 😊
Diving day-trip
We got our scuba gear serviced for way too much money
again and now we’re committed to go diving at least 1 day every month to make
it worth the investment. So off we went to Tweed Heads (near Gold Coast) for an
easy dive to get back into things but things went a bit different than
expected. We weren’t expecting much because it was a shore dive and it had
rained quite a bit the previous day, but hey, we were keen to see if all our
gear still worked and if we remembered how to dive after 14 months.
Turns out that we still know what to do but the visibility was so bad that you could not see more than half a meter in front of you. It was a fairly large group and we kept losing everyone else. Well, not Yumi and me, we learned to dive in these exact circumstances, so we were fine, but it wasn’t great. There was also quite some swell and with the new people kicking up clouds of dust it was a bit of a nightmare. After 45 minutes we called it quits and decided to come back in a few weeks to go again.
It was very convenient that at this site you can just walk in from the shore and that it was in the middle of the day instead of some impossibly early time in the morning, which worked really well for us with Dash and his routine. Next time we’ll know what to expect and after a few more dives we might just go and dive just the two of us along the coast which should be fine. I took the opportunity to buy some new gear, like the snorkel I lost on Christmas Island, a dust cap, a retractor that broke and after 15 years some brand new diving shoes that are ridiculously comfortable. I wore them around the house and your feet get quite warm(it’s neoprene/rubber, it breathes 0%) but it’s like wearing heavy socks! I love them, and so does Dash who thought they smelled a lot like his chewing toys. I had to rescue them when he took off with one for some more chewing fun on his mat, haha.
Landcare volunteering
Another thing we got involved with is the Springfield
Lakes Nature Society which is a small group of nature enthusiasts who look
after the local flora and fauna. We thought it would be fun to learn some new
and local things and we were not wrong. We needed to join their monthly meeting
to be accepted as members and it was one of the most hilarious meetings we’d
ever been in. We all laughed so hard about how things were done and all the
banter, but at the end of the day we all had our tasks and things to contribute.
They are the same people who organise the annual ‘Clean-up Australia Day’ that we took part in early March and from what I can tell, they do a pretty good job at getting the public to engage in catching cane toads and removing invasive plat and tree species.
One person is the bird-guy, another is a national authority on frogs and toads and the two people running the volunteer group have a park named after them, so they must have done something right! Yumi and I are really just there to pull weeds and be helpful in any way we can.
On Mother’s Day I will help run a stall where the bug guy, yes, we have one of those too, will do a show and tell for kids and I am supposed to look after the materials and make sure they don’t get taken home by more enterprising youngsters. I can definitely do that, but am not allowed to punch kids or put them in a headlock which takes a little bit of the fun out of it, but no one said anything about tripping them up and name calling so I can let my inner 4-year old run amok if I play my cards right! 😊.
We also took part in a land care/ bush clean up morning and that was good fun. As you probably remember, I know next to nothing about plants of trees and at the end of the event I was not much wiser, but learned the names of 4 new (to me) plants and had pulled a ton of weeds out of the ground. You could really tell that we’d done a lot of work with the 10-15 or so volunteers and it doesn’t get much better than that for my clean up fetish.
Change Management Institute activities
I’m happy to be back at CMI, doing a bit of
professional volunteering by creating interesting events for others. We’re
setting up a mentoring program that is almost an exact copy of what we did in
Victoria in 2018/19 and that was both successful and a lot of fun. I managed to
smash out the whole program start to finish in a few hours, but then the team
needs to get on board and organised which always takes longer than anyone (but
me) seems to think. I’m being very clear about what I will and will not do and
everyone seems fine with that. Next week we’re having after work drinks which
is always a good time to meet new and known faces and see how they are
travelling.
We’re also planning to do another round of Change Awards, which is mostly about showing appreciation for people contributing to the community. I offered to write the plan to get it done and had 10 pages before I knew it. It sounds easy but there is a lot to think of before we get to hand over the trophy. Like with the mentoring program, it’ll take a while to get organised, but at least we have a plan now. It was great fun to do it in Melbourne, but I always felt like we could have done more and better, so this will be an opportunity to do exactly that if it happens at all.
Small stuff
- · Dash is living his best life as he does. Lots of excitement, snoozies, snacks and walks and not a care in the world. I am really enjoying having a dog, even if it was unplanned and a bit impractical at times. We’ve started introducing him to our friends Kath and Michael who have agreed to look after him when we’re travelling to the Netherlands and this Friday we went for a walk and all went well. They used to have a dog for years and their kids will love him too.
- · On the way back from the dive trip I broke my tooth (again) on a popcorn kernel this time, but fortunately I could get the emergency slot at the dentist on Tuesday and I was back to new in no time. She was very impressed that I had stopped drinking soda altogether and I think she made an extra effort to make my tooth look good. 😊
- · Friends and family are all doing well, apparently my dad’s youngest brother had some serious heart surgery be he’s recovering well so that’s good for his wife and four children. And himself of course!
- · The preparations for our Netherlands trip in July/August are going well. The van is booked, we know where we’re sleeping and we’ve even made a list (they asked for it!) of all the things we eat and drink as a vegetarian and vegan so our mums don’t stress out over what to cook. It's all very lovely and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone again.
Okay that’s me done for the past two months, I’ll write again when it’s the middle of Winter or whatever passes for that here in Brisbane.
Be well, stay warm, enjoy Mother’s Day and feel free to call me if you need to.
Gilbert
