Meetings and a mentor

Today I got an email from a lady saying she would be my mentor for my chartership, so there's some good news. Hopefully things can now get going a bit more.

Last week was fairly busy - a couple of meetings and a few interesting incidents. We had the meeting for the evening and weekend team people. This went quite well, considering that they had somewhat of a right to be grumpy. I just came out and said that I abdicated responsibility for the mess-up with the rota (which had led to them having to make up their hours) because I wasn't even in employment at the time the decisions were made. Anyway, everything seems to be sorted out now, although there are still discussions to be had about changes to opening and working hours next academic year.

The university has gone through the HERA (Higher Education Role Analysis) process, and people's pay has been re-evaluated. It's supposed to make the pay scales clearer so that we will all be on grades and not spinal points. To be honest, I'm not all that sure how it works, as I hadn't joined the university when it was started. The new scales come into play on 1st August.

The university are also making changes to the way the working week is structured for support staff. We are going to be working '5 out of 7' days, which means that we can be asked to work any 5 out of 7 days, including Saturday and Sunday. Apparantly academic staff are already doing this. We're going to have meetings (yet more meetings) about this over the next few weeks, where we can ask questions of the people who made the decisions. I would like to know what happens if you say you can't work on a Saturday (or Sunday, or any other day I suppose) for religious reasons. I would have thought this would be contrary to legislation about religious discrimination. Maybe I should look it up.

We also had a meeting about the changes within Library Services since ISS has come into existence and about changes that are going to take place in the near future. We didn't really find out much information, except that the remaining library people in our office will have to move rooms before the beginning of August.

Our neighbours seem to have suddenly increased the volume of their TV over the last week. I have no idea why this should be, but I hope they turn it down again soon. Maybe I will have to write them a note. Aggh.