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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Just started a two week family visit to Singapore. The twelve hour flight was exhausting and everyone was struggling with the jet lag. My kids fell asleep at the dinner table, which was both adorable to see and sad because they were clearly at their limits.
    We just had a 12 hour sleep, so hopefully we can start the second day with renewed energy :)
    We’re going to need it, there’s a ton of social obligations to keep. It’s been 7 years since our last visit.











  • Please don’t get me started about the Sailor Moon thing 🙄
    I’m the owner of that community and it’s been getting a bit tiresome to see nothing but Sailor Moon stuff come by. I’m not saying anything about it though and hope people will get bored with it and it’ll blow over. In then end it is a harmless phase and everyone is having fun, I don’t want to ruin it for others.
    But I’m looking forward to the day that it’ll be as welcome as another beans post :)






  • Bad, the PVVV, a far-right party, won the elections here in Netherlands. I woke up to the news that they won 37 out of 150 seats (2nd largest has 25 seats). Geert Wilders is such a… nationalistic, short-sighted, opportunistic, loud-mouthed, Putin loving… asshole! Sorry, I really need to get this out of my system.
    Thankfully they’ll still have to form a coalition with other parties and I really hope they’ll fail. Either that, or they spend a few months in government and show how ridiculously inept they are and let the cabinet fall.




  • Took part in a work provided health check, and was pleasantly surprised. My cholesterol levels need to be better, but other than that I’m actually in pretty good shape! It’s nice to get some good news once in a while.
    Other than that, I’m in a general good mood. Feel like I’m a bit more in sync between my internal and external self, if that makes any sense :)


  • Oh yes, that’s how I got my current job. I used to be an external contractor myself, said I was interested at working full-time for my employer (it’s a very stable and fun job) and had to go through an entire circus. It was guaranteed I would get the job but I still had to:

    1. Write a resume (with cover letter!?)
    2. Wait for the job to open up on their recruitment website (only for 15 minutes so I would be the only one who could apply)
    3. Have several interviews
    4. etc.

    All because their HR software requires certain steps to be followed or it’ll refuse to process the application.

    For our last contractor recruitment (new position, not a rehire) we got rid of our external selection agency (responsible for the first stage of resume scanning) and decided to do it ourselves, specifically for the reason in my last little rant. We didn’t trust them to select the right candidates because they had no experience with our line of work and just blindly searched for keywords.
    It was nice to get to see all incoming resumes but I had to pick through 40+ of them manually. And because of procurement laws, I had to grade all of them on a 20 point list of criteria we got to decide. On top of that, an applicant (or their recruitment agency) can challenge the fairness of the process if they feel we rated them unfairly on a specific criteria. So it was important to have a proper substantiation for every single judged criteria. That was over 800 times I had to check for proof if what a applicant claimed lined up with what their resume said.
    And again, it was the recruitment agencies that really ruined my days (yes, plural). You could see that the recruiter altered resumes, wrote nonsense cover letters and did whatever they could to get past the criteria. At least half of the people who applied were clearly not suitable, but I still had to explicitly say why they weren’t suitable for every single criteria.

    Sorry, this is really something I can go on and on about.
    It’s definitely a nightmare, but that’s what you get when you work in the public sector I guess.