I had just finished a piece of work on this my third day of my new role when I was given a form to sign.
It’s a form of acknowledgement, stating I’ve read through the various policies and procedures of the organisation. I had actually read through half of them prior to being given this form. Having to sign this form has given me a very good reason to read the remainder.
There’re 30 policies and procedures documents. Most are relevant to me. I have to read all of them. The first (which I had skipped) I opened up about half an hour ago, was the Diversity Policy. It was benign and very uncontroversial, which is a good start. The nature of such documents however is such that I’d only move onto my third document when an overwhelming urge to seek a distraction becomes difficult to ignore, hence this entry.
I rang in to speak to a very efficient executive assistant last Friday, who said to me I will be provided with a car park space at the basement of the office building. Tress and I had discussed driving in to work anyway, especially seeing the connecting trams are currently being replaced by bus services while some tram platforms are being upgraded. With a car park facility, we decided we’ll drive in and we’ve been experimenting with different routes, especially on the way home. We’d been mostly stumbling from one wrong turn to the other but today has been much smoother and I now have a better grip of my bearings in this area.
I’ve been taking my lunch time walks these past couple of days. South Melbourne is a semi hippie area of sorts, perhaps a bit more down to earth/grounded version of Prahran. Certainly it’s got a very different flavour to the east end of the CBD, where I’d last been in Melbourne. Turner/Dickson wetlands is even more an entirely different world but that’s for another day. Parklands and a serene lake is not merely a contrast with chic streets, laneways and shops lined along them. They’re comparable to polar opposites. They require a different mindset if I ever make an entry about it, not merely one that seeks to escape reading another dozen or so policy documents.
Tress office in Port Melbourne is some 3km west of mine South Melbourne and it takes a mere 7-9 minutes to drive from one to the other. So driving in makes sense for the both of us. I said to her this morning it feels like back in the early 1990’s all over again when newly married, we’d both drive to/from Klang to KL every day for work, in the same car. She said we’d come a big circle.
I’d left the roundabouts which in many ways characterised my sojourn to Canberra and now here in the southern fringe of Melbourne CBD, a sense of deja vu creeps in to evoke sentiments still in search of the appropriate words to describe how I feel. I’m grateful for the opportunity and certainly for the work, to which I must now return.
Ante 