Londonward

Have my new earphones last longer than 9 months and a bit, which is what my Sennheisers worked for. To be fair, I used them heavily and handled them less-than-stellarly, but still the usual contact error in the cable pisses me off.

edit Jan 5: OK so I’ve ordered another pair. £16.99, wow. Well, I guess I listen to enough music to make them worth it. Hopefully they’ll be waiting for me when I get back to London. Fun, this internet ordering business.

Seems when working for the LSE, you have to be prepared to wait a long time for your money if you’re new or getting it due to unconventional circumstances. In this case, I’m still waiting (and apparently will be, for another month) for the extra cash the School was supposed to pay me for extra shifts this past summer. Yeah, it’s nearly 3 months now. I am so not impressed.

Everyone concerned is blaming each other, and in the midst of all this us lowly workers are left wanting. And it’s not a little bit of money I’m owed, either - if I remember my claim form right it adds up to some £400! I was hoping to have some extra cash in November to maybe buy something cool (like new clothes, or a new sleeping bag because who knows when you’ll need one) or even stash something away on the off-chance that I’ll actually get into Oxbridge.

Supposedly, there is some back-office wrangling going on to get us paid. Eh, maybe I’ll just end up getting extra money for Christmas presents.

(Though that means a smaller-than-expected paycheck this month. Damn.)

It’s been a ride, the start of term. I’ve been all over the place, with work, with reading, with classes, with lectures… I was getting really stressed out, feeling that the difficulty and expectations had really been ramped up from last year until a friend of mine told me that no, it was still the same. I just didn’t allow myself to feel that last year. Truth be told, despite already being swamped with stuff, I’ve done more reading than in the first two weeks last October. I have to keep telling myself things are probably ok.

Certainly I need to do more independent reading than last year. For some reason, the LSE in all its wisdom has decided to allocate two Fellows (that’s non-academics, basically people researching their PhD, to all you non-LSE people) as the lecturers for my two core courses. While the other is pretty good, the other… isn’t. I hate to compare education to a market, but I’m really not getting my money’s worth at the moment from my own department.

But it’s not just about the reading. Applying myself to apply to the postgrad courses is a whole other hassle, requiring final decisions (course? college?), writing (letters of motivation/research aims, funding applications), as well as finding and pestering people to write me references. It’s all quite a bit of stuff to be had on a plate.

It’ll get better, I’m sure. There’s fun stuff planned for the near future, including a trip to Cambridge this weekend and to Paris (Eurostar, wow!). If I can just make the cash last long enough things will be just fine… I hope.

What a surprise that my salary payment has been screwed up again. This time I’ve been paid for my regular hours on time but the extra hours we put in on a Sunday and a Monday morning in August haven’t been counted. I understand that my direct supervisor is extremely stressed and busy at the moment, but it took until my colleague and I marched into his office this morning that he took up the phone and called the person responsible.

Apparently we haven’t been paid because she is new and had been left with no instructions about what to do with a list of names our department had provided. I can understand that, but she could have at least asked. It now seems like we’ll be paid at the end of October for stuff we did in August. Not a good thing, especially considering I am more than a little skint at the moment.