Happy Easter! There, just thought I would start with a timely greeting. It is just coming to the end of Easter Sunday here and the end of another warm and sunny day in wonderful Wellington.
This city always has something going on and the Easter weekend was no exception. For example a festival of hot air balloons appeared on Oriental Bay beach earlier this evening and after that the 2nd day of 'Rock2Wellington' got under way across the bay in the West Pac Stadium.
For any rock fans reading this, then you would be interested to hear the likes of Kiss, Poison, Ozzy, Whitesnake and Alice Cooper have been playing the 2 day event with a supporting stage show by Weta SPFX (the people behind Peter Jackson's movies). Unfortunately, and I do mean this, I was unable to afford the tickets, but sitting here on the balcony I can clearly hear some iconic songs - Poison's 'Every Rose has a thorn' has just finished for example - and later there should be closing fireworks.
Talking of celebrations, we had our own little one on Saturday night. Charlotte, Caroline and I all got together for dinner and drinks for the news that we all now have jobs and a secure future in New Zealand. Yes, Charlotte has been offered a couple of jobs last week, and she will be accepting one of them next week. It will probably be for Tourism NZ as an Online coordinator based in an office around the corner from me in the city. She is pretty excited about the role and the possibility of travel around NZ being linked in with it in future.
I have now completed a week at my job and I am beginning to settle in. Everyone is really nice and there is a mixed bag of nationalities there including English, Irish, Indian, Philippine and Kiwi of course. Two of the guys I work with only joined last October, but one of them announced his resignation on Thursday - I am confident it was not related to me sitting next to him, as he did say he wanted to specialise in Oracle, which is not used so much in his current role.
The social aspects of the job continue to impress me - I do not think a day went past last week without hot cross buns or Easter eggs being handed out - and again Thursday afternoon drinks were laid on at our desks. The only problem was that one of the systems I was working on had failed to do a batch update - and this was linked to the entire Direct Debits being processed for all customers - needless to say whilst I was trying to sort that one out, I did not partake in any drinks this time. In the end I did not manage to sort it before 6pm on Thursday, so I left or at least attempted to leave.
You see my electronic key has a zone and access time coded into it so when I wandered down the back stairs to find the side door locked, my return panicky trip to the front main doors, was not improved by a woeful 'eh-er' sound the lock gave off when I flashed my card onto it. Thinking I was going to be trapped in the stairwell I briefly failed to notice I was trying to access another floor to the one I worked on, thus going a little higher and I soon found my way out. Still my EPA working practice of knowing the cleaners does not seem to be the norm over here - I was the only guy from Tower left in the building and it had only just gone 6!
Well I am not sure what is planned for Easter Monday but I am off to sleep now anyway. Until the next blog...