Thursday

Thursday already!  I’m going to have an easy day today after everything I did yesterday!  I must point out at his stage, that the whole thing was a joke between Wendy and me!  Please stop getting on the band wagon.  I wasn’t having a dig and I certainly wasn’t on the,” who works hardest” train.... working ladies or stay at homes, like me.

I have every respect for working ladies who combine full time jobs, with looking after the house, taking care of the children and the multitude of other things we ladies do.  I do know how hard it is, I have done it myself, if only for a very short time! Combining part time work is bad enough.

I also appreciate how very lucky I am to be able to stay at home and still have a more than adequate life style. It wasn’t always this way.  We struggled a lot when the children were small and Simon was at Uni.  That said, I don’t want to swap places with the ladies that work, thank you. I like my free time and think I deserve it after bringing up 5 children.

My free time will be a bit less in March as Coralie will be returning to work.  She is just going back part time, 2 shifts a week of 12 hours each.  I am going to care for baby Evan 2 days a week.  He needs to be weaned by then Coralie!!!!!  LOL! 

Now for a little bit about my employment history, so you can see that I have worked in the past!!  I worked full time from leaving school until 6 months after I got married.  It was all office work.  I left because I was 5 months pregnant and didn’t feel that great.  I didn’t work outside the home for another 8 years.  The time it took to have all 5 of my children!  Please note that I said outside the home; I did an awful lot of work inside the home!!

When Joshua was about 6 months old I took a job working as a sales assistant In Boots just on Saturdays, so Simon looked after the children.  I enjoyed that one day a week enormously.  It was a bit of an escape and it also gave me a tiny bit of much needed extra cash.  I stayed there a year.

At the beginning of the school year in 1989 a friend from church who was the deputy head of the local secondary school offered me the job of evening receptionist.  It was a few hours each week day evening plus Saturday morning.  It would be more money than Boots, so I decided to take it.  It worked well as the school was about 3 minutes walk away and Simon was always home to look after the children.

I stayed there for 5 years and when Joshua was old enough for play group, I also worked the mornings in the school office.  The play group was on site so that worked well too.  I enjoyed my time there.

When Joshua started at school proper, I decided to look for full time work to improve the money situation.  I got a job with Pearl Assurance. The full time work lasted less than 6 months.  It was simply too much with everything else.  I was fortunate that they allowed me to go part time and I just worked the mornings. I took the children to school, and then went to work.  I was there to pick them up from school.   I stayed at Pearl Assurance for 4 years, eventually leaving because I just hated it.

We worked out that it would be better all round if I just stayed at home for a while.  We had to do a bit of belt tightening, but it was fine. I had a year at home.  At the end of that year I took a temporary job in Boots as a photographic sales assistant for the Christmas period.  The idea was to earn some cash for Christmas.  I really enjoyed it and in January they offered to keep me on part time, 3 days a week from 10am until 4pm.  I took it.

Although it could be boring at slow times, I did like that job and the hours were very convenient.  I didn’t much like travelling into town on the bus 3 times a week though.  I eventually left over a principal...........  As you know I suffer form migraines.  Thankfully they aren’t usually as bad or as frequent now as they were back then. 

The last year I worked there I had 3 periods of sickness due to migraine.  The company policy if you were off more than 3 times with the same illness was that you must go to head office to be seen by their own Doctor. I was made to feel like they thought I was making it all up, despite the fact that on several occasions my own supervisor had been with me while I was throwing up!

I did go to see their Doctor who was a lovely man and basically he just asked me about it and checked that I had the right medication from my own Doctor and that I knew how to use it.  I still have to wonder if they thought my own Doctor was stupid or something.  Anyway, the upshot of it was he reported back to my manager that I do indeed have migraine and that if I should be off sick with it they would just have to get on with it and this could not be counted on my sick record as it was an ongoing handicap!

I went in the next day and spoke to my manager, who confirmed all this and then I handed in my notice.  She was shocked and said everything is fine now.  My reply was, it is most definitely not fine!  I went to see this Doctor to prove a point but you made me feel like I was a liar and I can’t accept that.

 I also didn’t like the fact that if I was the kind of person that did tell lies they had just given me carte blanch to have time off sick whenever I wanted.  Not to mention that if I was sick with something else, say a cold, then I could just say it was migraine and it wouldn’t affect my sick record. Ridiculous!  I bet there are people out there that would do that too.  So, I left on a point of principal.

I left there in 2002 and over the next year I tried a couple of temporary things with just a few hours a week, Sainsbury’s, the post office and after school cleaning.  None of them suited, so I decided to stay at home.  In 2003, Simon mentioned that his school wanted people for exam invigilation.  It would just be on a casual basis in the exam periods, nothing much.  I gave it ago.

When I started it was just a few hours here and there on odd days all confined to the main exam period of May and June, with a few bits in November and January.  Then after 2 years, the Teaching Unions decided that they didn’t want teachers to invigilate exams as it ate into their precious free time!  This coincided with the exam boards deciding that there was a potential conflict of interest to have class teachers in examinations.  There had been a couple of high profile examples of mal-practice with teachers aiding children to get higher results.

So the era of outside exam invigilation begun.  I was made Senior Invigilator as I had been there longest.  This came with new duties helping the exams officer.  Over the following years I went from that few hours here and there to a whole lot of hours.  I had work every single month of the year and May and June were more or less full time.  We were present not just at every public exam, but for every class room test!  I think they went too far in some cases.

An interesting point to ponder I thought, was the fact that because some of us were there so often, we got to know the children really well across all age groups.  We got to know them in year 7 and worked with them right through until sixth form, year 13.  Could this not possibly be a situation that could have “conflict of interest”?  The only way that they could stop that is for invigilators to be employed directly by the exam board rather than individual schools.  That way, you would always have different people in and they wouldn’t know the children. 

I liked the work and enjoyed some of the children although others were just a nightmare!  In July 2007 Walton school as you know, was closed and the new Voyager school opened.  I transferred over.  I stayed until Easter this year, when I had just simply had enough.  The children were terrible, there was no management and it was going rapidly downhill.  I was glad to get out as was Simon at the end of the year.  He is much happier at the Academy.

 So let’s look back, since I got married 29 years ago I have worked for less than a year full time, but I have done part time work for 18 years on and off. Since then I have been at home enjoying having time to do what I want when I want.  I have no plans at the moment to go out to work at all.  I think I have done enough.

Wow! That was a saga!  I hadn’t intended to write all that, it just kind of ran away with me! I have also been on here longer than I had intended and I haven’t done a thing.  I know I said at the beginning that I was going to have an easy day but I do need to do a little bit, starting  with the hoovering.  I carried the hoover upstairs over an hour ago!  Best get started, back later.