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   Jürgen Hubert (juergen_hubert@thefolklore.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 21-Dec-2024 17:45:40 JST Jürgen Hubert

   1/ Let me tell you about my week.

   I am a bid manager by trade. And while I _largely_ like my job, one of the downside is that potential customers and the planners who organize their tenders tend to put deadlines right before the holiday season. Which makes organizing the bids far more stressful than it needs to be, since all the co-workers with technical knowledge whose input I require are also extremely busy with their projects so that they can generate revenue.

   And we had to submit a seven-figure bid yesterday, before noon. And one of the things that made this bid especially aggravating is that the planner not only made it mandatory to fill out a price sheet that required proprietary software to fill, but _also_ required that we fill out a 67 page PDF with manually placed text boxes with the prices and technical information - by my estimates, I must have placed around 400 of these text boxes.

   And this was by no means the only work I had to do to finish this bid - I had to collect supplementary documents and even write some product descriptions based on product handbooks.

   Thursday was the worst - I started working on 5 am and ceased working at 11 pm.

   We finished on time, and submitted it at 9:15 am (by no means the closest finish before the deadline).

   But I was (and still am) so utterly exhausted that when I put on a new pair of trousers in the afternoon, I forgot to put my keys into my pockets - and for the first time in my life, I had to call a locksmith because I had locked myself out of my apartment...

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     Jürgen Hubert (juergen_hubert@thefolklore.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 02:47:02 JST Jürgen Hubert

     in reply to

     3/ I will arrive at the final train station in a few minutes. The rest of the trip fortunately was without further incident.

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     Jürgen Hubert (juergen_hubert@thefolklore.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 02:47:04 JST Jürgen Hubert

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     2/ I googled local locksmith emergency services, and called the first number I can find at 16:20.

     "There will be someone at your place in 20-30 minutes!"

     I called them again at 17:55 and asked them how long I would have to wait. "Oh, the locksmith canceled. Didn't you get a message? No, now it's too late and we can't send anyone else to you - you will have to call some other service." Assholes.

     Then I looked up another service and called him, and _he_ showed up within 15 minutes. He charged €95 because this was after hours, which was reasonable, but I gave him a €5 tip and a good Google review because I was so pissed at the other service.

     Today marks the official start of my vacation as I visit my father in Erlangen for two weeks (and I _definitely_ left my work notebook back at my apartment!). But when I took the bus to the train station, I saw in the train travel app that a train had an accident while moving around a station, and thus the route between Oldenburg and Bremen was blocked...

     After some deliberations, I decided to take a route via Leer instead - going west instead of east. This will add more than three hours to my travels, but I am not in a hurry - and it's better than waiting around the train station for hours and then trying to squeeze into the first train into the direction of Bremen together with all the other passengers.

     Let's see if this week throws any _further_ curveballs at me...