todayiamadaisy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
todayiamadaisy) wrote2020-02-02 04:47 pm
todayiamadaisy) wrote2020-02-02 04:47 pm
Is extremely athletic exercise surely necessary?
This week, I received an email from Old Work, requesting me to fill in an exit interview questionnaire with specific instruction to fill in my name in the bottom section. Over two weeks after I finished! Is that normal? My thought process went like this:
1. I'm not filling in their questionnaire; they should have asked me before I left.
2. I wonder what they're asking?
3. My comments wouldn't be all that useful to them anyway. [For complicated reasons, I was employed by one company to work for its subsidiary. This questionnaire was from the company that paid me, not the one I worked for that made me redundant.]
4. Still, I wonder what they're asking?
5. It wouldn't hurt to look.
[After clicking the link to the questionnaire and finding out that I had to log in with my Old Work user name and password, which I forgot as soon as I left] 6. I guess I'll never know.
7. Perhaps I could reply to the HR man and ask for a Word copy?
8. No, I have wasted enough time jumping through hoops for these people.
And then I deleted the email.
January books read
* An English Murder - Cyril Hare (1951) ★ ★ ★ ★
An old-fashioned cosy mystery, short and sprightly. An odd assortment of characters gather in a stately home for an extremely awkward Christmas Eve dinner, when they get snowed in and find themselves being bumped off. Although it's a quick read, it has rather more to say about English class and politics than your average cosy detective story, a lot of which seems relevant nearly seventy years on.
* The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo (1946) (translated Louise Heal Kawai, 2019) ★ ★ ★ ★
Moving to Japan for my continuing Golden Age of Detection binge, this is the first of seventy-seven novels featuring young sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi (and the first to be translated into English). It's a locked room mystery, and it's aware that's what it is: the narrator, an author, name-checks a number of classic English detective novelists, and one of the characters has a library filled with mysteries. It has an ingenious, if unlikely, solution. Classic old-school detection.
* The Tokyo Zodiac Murders - Sōji Shimada (1981) (trans. Ross & Sheila Mackenzie, 2003) ★ ★ ★
I wasn't hugely enamoured of this, in which a particularly gruesome set of murders is treated as a set of unemotional logic puzzles. It begins in 1936, with a written manifesto by an artist who plans to murder his six daughters/stepdaughters/nieces and cut them up to create a perfect woman. We skip to 1979 to discover that the murders actually did happen, but only after the apparently unrelated murders of the artist and another family member. Armchair sleuth Kazumi tells his friend, fortune teller/detective Kiyoshi, about the historic case in a lengthy conversation. Kazumi sees nonsensical clues everywhere, but it's Kiyoshi who solves the forty-year-old mystery in a week just by thinking about it. It's all very improbable, but I rounded it up to three stars for Kiyoshi's amusing anti-Sherlock Holmes rant.
* The Lake District Murder - John Bude (1935) ★ ★
This is the second of John Bude's Inspector Meredith books that I've read, and I'm glad I didn't start with it. This is a police procedural mystery, following Inspector Meredith on what feels like a minute-by-minute basis as he investigates, first, the suspicious death of a mechanic in an isolated country garage and, second, an organised crime ring operating out of a petrol depot. There were flashes of interest (I was particularly taken with the scene in which the senior officers looked something up in the police station's encyclopaedia), but it felt over-long with an abrupt ending.
* The Cheltenham Square Murder -John Bude (1937) ★ ★
Oof, this was a slog. Fortunately for the book, I was intrigued enough by the set-up (a man is shot by an arrow through an upper-storey window) to want to continue, but Inspector Meredith and co. took their own sweet time solving it, making several extraordinary and unlikely leaps of logic on the way.
* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Rome - Katrina Nannestad (2017) ★ ★ ★ ★
Shy, smart, ten-year-old Freja lives with her mother who does research in the Arctic; when her mother becomes sick, Freja is sent to live with a mysterious and eccentric writer called Tobias and his dog. The girl, the dog and the writer end up in Rome, making new friends and getting caught up in a crime caper. This is a really lovely junior fiction novel. If child me had read it, it would have been five stars; adult me thought it was charming.
1. I'm not filling in their questionnaire; they should have asked me before I left.
2. I wonder what they're asking?
3. My comments wouldn't be all that useful to them anyway. [For complicated reasons, I was employed by one company to work for its subsidiary. This questionnaire was from the company that paid me, not the one I worked for that made me redundant.]
4. Still, I wonder what they're asking?
5. It wouldn't hurt to look.
[After clicking the link to the questionnaire and finding out that I had to log in with my Old Work user name and password, which I forgot as soon as I left] 6. I guess I'll never know.
7. Perhaps I could reply to the HR man and ask for a Word copy?
8. No, I have wasted enough time jumping through hoops for these people.
And then I deleted the email.
January books read
* An English Murder - Cyril Hare (1951) ★ ★ ★ ★
An old-fashioned cosy mystery, short and sprightly. An odd assortment of characters gather in a stately home for an extremely awkward Christmas Eve dinner, when they get snowed in and find themselves being bumped off. Although it's a quick read, it has rather more to say about English class and politics than your average cosy detective story, a lot of which seems relevant nearly seventy years on.
* The Honjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo (1946) (translated Louise Heal Kawai, 2019) ★ ★ ★ ★
Moving to Japan for my continuing Golden Age of Detection binge, this is the first of seventy-seven novels featuring young sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi (and the first to be translated into English). It's a locked room mystery, and it's aware that's what it is: the narrator, an author, name-checks a number of classic English detective novelists, and one of the characters has a library filled with mysteries. It has an ingenious, if unlikely, solution. Classic old-school detection.
* The Tokyo Zodiac Murders - Sōji Shimada (1981) (trans. Ross & Sheila Mackenzie, 2003) ★ ★ ★
I wasn't hugely enamoured of this, in which a particularly gruesome set of murders is treated as a set of unemotional logic puzzles. It begins in 1936, with a written manifesto by an artist who plans to murder his six daughters/stepdaughters/nieces and cut them up to create a perfect woman. We skip to 1979 to discover that the murders actually did happen, but only after the apparently unrelated murders of the artist and another family member. Armchair sleuth Kazumi tells his friend, fortune teller/detective Kiyoshi, about the historic case in a lengthy conversation. Kazumi sees nonsensical clues everywhere, but it's Kiyoshi who solves the forty-year-old mystery in a week just by thinking about it. It's all very improbable, but I rounded it up to three stars for Kiyoshi's amusing anti-Sherlock Holmes rant.
* The Lake District Murder - John Bude (1935) ★ ★
This is the second of John Bude's Inspector Meredith books that I've read, and I'm glad I didn't start with it. This is a police procedural mystery, following Inspector Meredith on what feels like a minute-by-minute basis as he investigates, first, the suspicious death of a mechanic in an isolated country garage and, second, an organised crime ring operating out of a petrol depot. There were flashes of interest (I was particularly taken with the scene in which the senior officers looked something up in the police station's encyclopaedia), but it felt over-long with an abrupt ending.
* The Cheltenham Square Murder -John Bude (1937) ★ ★
Oof, this was a slog. Fortunately for the book, I was intrigued enough by the set-up (a man is shot by an arrow through an upper-storey window) to want to continue, but Inspector Meredith and co. took their own sweet time solving it, making several extraordinary and unlikely leaps of logic on the way.
* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Rome - Katrina Nannestad (2017) ★ ★ ★ ★
Shy, smart, ten-year-old Freja lives with her mother who does research in the Arctic; when her mother becomes sick, Freja is sent to live with a mysterious and eccentric writer called Tobias and his dog. The girl, the dog and the writer end up in Rome, making new friends and getting caught up in a crime caper. This is a really lovely junior fiction novel. If child me had read it, it would have been five stars; adult me thought it was charming.