A Xmas gift (part 1)

This blog is almost becoming a monthly diary. (A laugh). Anyway, December is a very special month to me really job-wise. Since November I was sacked (no, lay-off, my mum keep telling me “sack” isn’t the correct word) by my previous boss, I started looking for jobs, and of course it was so hard even to get an interview. Few days straight after the sack (end of Nov), I got a phone call from my new boss on one Saturday, requested a meet-up on the following Monday. Sammy is a very friendly and nice bloke (at least from what I heard from the phone), and asked me if I know coding in ASP. “Yes”, I replied. Then the meeting was going so smoothly and at the end of the meeting we already on some irrelevant topics, basically by the end of meeting I’ve already known I’d be working there soon, the date was sooner than I thought, the following Monday. Then I spent the rest of the week bargaining my salary and terms, it was long and a repetitive one. I discovered that he couldn’t take me in as a permanent staff because there were no headcount available, in that case a contract position would be offered. It wasn’t a huge problem for me, however, and then he forced me to agree on a 3-month notice period. “What, did u say 3?” I was shocked. “Because we were annoyed by those ill-hearted people, we are sick to find a new candidate every few months to cover the tasks that you are doing.” He explained. I thought this was totally unacceptable for me, because I knew I’ll continue hunting jobs, at least for a few months. Most importantly, ASP is not one of my favorite languages in my mind (for scripting, I prefer PERL). Alright, I was running out of choices, I have to take it, haven’t I? On the December 5th, I started there as a contract programmer for 9 months with a notice period of 1 month.