kicking it old skool

Week, erm, 6?

Well, whatever... we’ve found a home…

Not that lugging all of your personal belongings all the way across London and back every week or so wasn’t fun or anything. But that shit had to end!! We were quite fortunate though, all things considered and hindsight being 2020 and all.

About 3 weeks ago we had to leave our temporary arrangement in the East side of London and in a stroke of luck. a room opened up in the house where Beefcake was staying so we had a place to crash. This too was a temporary arrangement as the landlord was selling the whole place and everybody had to clear out in a week.

It took us a quite a bit of time to find a decent place to stay, one that was both central and still affordable and, needless to say, not a total piece of shit. Apart from that , we still had to deal with the fact that we have absolutely NO street cred in this town. What that translates to is that in order for my GF and I to be able to sign a lease they wanted us to pay 6 months rent in advance!!! To illustrate the financial hurdle this posed, do a bit of math on £340 per week (the going rate for an apartment smack bam in the middle of London) * 52 /12 * 6. Convert that back to Rand, and what you have is a big ass, impossibly-huge fucking hurdle!

Luckily (again), we managed to find a decent Real estate agency who understood our situation and we got away with a much better deal. And just in time too! We literally took occupation last Saturday, on the exact same say we had to leave the previous apartment. So now the three of us are all settled in and comfortable and for the first time I really feel “home” in London. It’s also got a big, big roof terrace (with a view) and braai facilities already setup. How cool is that?!

Getting my interweb connection sorted out this week, already bought a cheap ass little laptop. Can’t believe how cheap broadband is over here, they’re practically giving that shit away. (piggy-backing off some stupid schmucks un-secured wireless access point at the moment. FREE SHIT!! Sweeeeeet :) )

On the job front, no luck yet. I’ve gone for a couple of interviews, spoken to countless job agents and have a good lead on one or two more for tomorrow. At the moment I seem to be falling short on the development DBA side of things as I’ve never really had the opportunity to cultivate those skills. So I’m slugging away on the laptop with some T-SQL and tutorials and so forth. Problem is I STILL don’t have any real-live production type experience, and in most cases, that’s exactly what these guys are looking for.

So I’m pretty fucked at the moment. I’ve become the king of rejection though, so I guess that’s one positive thing. I still maintain that whatever you think you know about London, or whatever anybody at home tells you about how “valuable your experience is” it still means jack shit over here. It’s kind of like an old boys club: once you break into the scene, it’s smooth sailing from there. At the moment I kinda feel like the bouncer wont let me in because he doesn’t like the colour of my shoes.

[G], out

We all need drinks!