a material world

Hello and welcome to April. I hope you all had a wonderful Easter. I didn't do much - I spent Good Friday with Ben, worked on Saturday morning and then got my Belle tattoo finished (shitty photo is here if you're interested!) and then Sunday morning was spent giving chocolates to my family in the morning, and eating lots of food and drinking lots of beer with Ben's family in the afternoon. What did you all get up to?

It's 10:30PM and I was in bed because I have to get up in the morning but being me, I can never shut my brain off at night so I've come to a decision. I may change my mind come morning but hopefully if I tell other people I'm doing it, I'll stick to it haha. I've decided that for the month of April, I'm not going to buy anything/spend any money unnecessarily. Obviously this means I'm allowed to pay rent and buy food etc. but everything else is not allowed. Naturally, being Kayla, I have allowed myself three exceptions: birthday presents, the tattoo I have booked in for mid-April and my Supanova ticket.

No new clothes, DVDs or books is going to be my challenge. Especially clothes because the weather is cooling down and winter clothing is my absolute favourite. BUT! If I can last, I'm rewarding myself. Before I went to Europe last year I bought myself a lovely new camera but when I was in London, my bag was stolen :( I bought myself a new one but on one of the last days, a girl on my Topdeck tour was taking a photo for me and she dropped it and the lense broke. I haven't replaced that one because I was terrified of my bad luck but I've decided that if I can last this month without wasting money, I will buy myself a new camera right in time for my best friends' wedding in May.

Okay, let's see how I go...

sleep well tonight

I swear things in my workplace change more than any other workplace. That's what it feels like, anyway. Usually it's a bad thing and I sit here complaining about it but never doing anything to change it. This time, though, I think it's a good thing. A really good thing, actually.

Last week, I was called into a meeting with my manager and 2IC. They explained that over the next few weeks we'll be seeing an increase in work and because of that, my 2IC has decided to step aside and take on a new role. To explain it better, we do sales processing for an electricity and gas provider. Instead, she'll be doing quotes so every time a customer asks for rates etc. to be mailed or emailed to them, she'll be organising that. So she's going to be busy learning that process and then organising the last two months or so of mailouts that have been neglected by some idiot who was supposed to have been doing them all along -.-

Anyway, the point of my story.. With all her time being taken up by that, I have been asked to step up and fill her role. She will still be 2IC of our team so I won't have to deal with staffing issues or anything like that but I'll just be in charge of processing - the data, allocating work to the staff, sorting out any processing errors, dealing with the sales agent errors/team leaders/queries etc. It's not a big difference, I usually fill in for her when she has days off or finishes early so I don't have to learn anything new. But the big change - I have been made a permanent staff member!

I've almost been there for two years but I have been casual that entire time. There's roughly 200 people working in our center for this company and there's around 15-20 permanent staff so I never really thought it was going to happen. Admittedly, it is a pay drop but overall it's going to work out much better because I'll get sick pay, public holiday pay, annual leave etc. and I now feel more stable and secure there. The biggest reason I accepted it though - I feel like 'permanent' will look much better when I'm applying for a home loan than 'casual'.

So, yeah. Not much has really changed at work and my payslip is about to look much sadder than before but I am so ecstatically happy. I've worked my ass off and I feel like I'm finally getting some recognition for it and it's finally paying off.