No obviously loose spoke on the back wheel, but I might try going round with the spoke key, the front wheel had a loose spoke (or 5) which I fixed, due to a wheelbuild I did about 9000km ago finally coming slightly loose, but that wasn’t where the noise was coming from. The back wheel is only 2 years old, although I didn’t build it, so I don’t know how good it is.

Hmm, it didn’t go for my cheese sandwiches so I’m guessing not.

It is weird, can’t work it out at all, only happens when the back end is sharply dropped.

Or maybe they look quiet because it’s a country three times the size of the UK, but with the same population?

And because you have to pay to get on them, so you don’t have so many people using them for shortish journeys. Like m1 Leicester to Nottingham, where there’s tons of traffic both ways going a shortish distance, in France, people might well save the money and use A road equivalents, most of the people on a Peage in france are going a long distance.

My question is around shed alarms. You can get the PIR ones with remote control keb fobs for less than a fiver on Ebay.. Are they any good, eg loud enough? I’m also assuming that you would have to tuck them away in the shed to avoid a swift swing of a crowbar taking it out.

I had a cheap Halfords bike nicked from my shed a year or so back (police thought it was probably an opportunist theft to get something to ride home on). Since then I’ve got a shed alarm like this that has a PIR unit in the shed, and an alarm in the house. Even set just to doorbell chime, it is jolly darned loud, and try as I might, I couldn’t work out any way to get in the shed without setting it off, even knowing it is there. Sensor battery lasts about a year, then the sensor light just goes solid red (rather than flashing on movement), and you see it next time you’re in the shed, meaning you’re unprotected for a very short while each year, but other than that it works great.

I could stick an alarm in the shed, but all that would do is make a noise, wouldn’t stop anyone nicking stuff, whereas I reckon an actual person coming out and saying ‘oi, scumbag’, is a lot more likely to stop them.

My bikes aren’t fancy ones that someone would target to nick though (and it wouldn’t be much money to replace if they did get nicked), so I feel I don’t need the fort-knox style security that some people obviously have, but knowing that I’ll at least hear if anyone goes in the shed is reassuring.

To be fair to them, for a tomato based pasta sauce, I’d bung the tomatoes on with some olive oil for 45 minutes or so to cook down, longer if I was making a large quantity. Which would be a fair chunk of a lesson, even if you can get on with some of the rest at the same time. It kind of depends how much time they have.

And there’s the obvious option of cooking it at home with them and putting it in a jar for anyone who is outraged about bought pasta sauce.

Actually, I bought a jar of pasta sauce the other day for camping, just your basic tomato sauce, dolmio or something similar, and it was surprisingly okay, didn’t have any of that icky preservative that they used to put in that makes it taste metallic and industrial (and makes my wife wheeze, so I always check), and just tasted like a not particularly great but not terrible tomato sauce, was fine for cooking up with some onions and garlic. Nothing like as bad as when I was a student, when it certainly was nowhere near as nice.

No, but I lost a stone in the year after my daughter started eating. Little beast kept stealing my food once she’d finished hers. Humph.

I think it depends where you drive. Paris=London and M25=Peripherique.

Yes. French péage autoroutes are great, and easy to drive on. Everything else is a bit different to the UK, probably somewhat less safe too.

French towns are a special joy, a certain amount of care required in the general insanity when they are busy, not to mention the crazy Priorité a la Droite rule.

And Paris is a complete rule to itself. Things like the Arc de Triomphe, where traffic coming onto the roundabout has right of way, there are about 6 lanes of traffic but no lane markings and everyone still drives at full pelt, being in the traffic in Paris is quite an experience! The other thing about Paris is that because it’s small and the outskirts are mostly well dodgy, you’re far more likely as a visitor to be driving in the busiest (central) bits, whereas in London, you’d be an idiot to drive anywhere near places like Hyde Park Corner, and most people don’t.

Go swimming outdoors: Hampstead Ponds or Parliament Hill Lido, or Tooting Bec are all super, although only if you are a bit of a hard nut, they’re all still at 14 or so degrees water temp, but hard to beat on a nice sunny day, also Serpentine Lido if you want very central. Or if you are a wuss, London Fields Lido is lovely, outdoors, but heated to be nice and warm. Need to arrive early on a sunny weekend though as everywhere nice will get crowded towards late morning/lunchtime.

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/hampstead-heath/swimming/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/hyde-park/sport-in-hyde-park/serpentine-lido

http://www.better.org.uk/areas/hackney/centres/london-fields-lido/

Drinks in big mugs and not too expensive. Don’t mess around with fancy coffee machines etc. unless you really want to become a chic coffee destination (in which case you probably want to buy something in a city). Big lumps of simple food that isn’t too expensive and is quick to prepare – dirty breakfasts, baked potatoes, soup.

Look at places like Petes Eats in Llanberis, Lakeland Pedlar in Keswick, the sort of destination outdoors cafes that have been around ages, they all do simple food in large quantities, for not much money, and actively target outdoorsy types, and seem to do well out of it.

Best road bike cafe around us is the Tor Cafe (link below): not fancy, not open in the afternoons, but when it is open it is usually busy, even gets decent numbers of oldies cycling out there on weekdays in winter. And you can get tea and a double fried egg cob for not much over 2 quid. Brilliant.

http://www.bolsoverwheelers.org/CafeReviews/cafereview032.html

We have a croozer here too. Great for when you want to carry all the toddler junk with you. At various times (not all at once!) ours has been used for loads of different things, like getting the balance bike to the bmx track, picking up a trolley load of shopping, giving a lift to one of her toddler friends, taking picnic stuff to the woods, going to fly the kite, taking all the gear for us to camp with, going swimming, picking up parcels from the sorting office. It is comfortable for her to sleep in, warm enough in the coldest bits of winter and shady in the summer. We’ve done 40 mile plus rides with it, two day rides, all sorts of things, it has had tons of use.

As well as being fun, it is a very practical piece of kit, I use the bike as the main form of transport when I’m looking after Rose, if I’m popping into town, dropping her off at playgroup, going to swimming etc.

The funniest thing is when she and her friend are in there, I took them swimming last week, about 3 miles or so, and the two of them were gossiping at full volume non stop, like a pair of little old ladies all about what they were going to do at swimming, every so often shouting out to me to check things – “we going to swimming daddy? You sure this the right way daddy?” etc. Oh and speed bumps, hitting speed bumps at 20mph is apparently the funniest most exciting game in the world.

We got Rose a balance bike at 18 months, bit of excitement then it sat in the corner of the room for a couple of months while she got used to the idea of it, then she was on it pottering around and down to the park at 20 or 21 months, riding it okay at 22-23 months, scooting along properly fast by 2, and zooming down the BMX track before 2.5 years.

If you buy it early, you can always just leave it around, if you don’t push them to go on it, there’s no reason they should get stressed about it, and they’ll pick it up to play with when they are ready.

Skype on a USB stick with no need for installing:

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/skype_portable

Or get one of her remote work colleagues to request a skype video conference with her, voila, valid work reason to install skype on the laptop.

Going to cycle there, play in the woods, have tea, then see how he settles in the tent!

Oh yeah, forgot to say, camping and cycling, what a brilliant combination. We use the bike trailer at the moment, easily fits all we need in it. Great way to use all that ultra-lightweight hiking gear that you bought prior to having kids. Helps that I live 10 miles ride from the Peak District and 20 miles or so from some really nice campsites, but for most people there is a campsite somewhere within biking distance. And like I said above, might not be true for all kids, but for me, small tent + our toddler is much easier than big tent in terms of sleeping and all that.

A Ready Bed is good in that it contains the child slightly if they are a night time wriggler and not too big for it. Rose (3 now) is fine now on a normal thermarest style thing, and the ready bed doesn’t combine well with a sleeping bag, so I don’t take it any more. The ready bed is great in the very hottest summer, when it is too hot for a sleeping bag.

Rose has a not that expensive summer sleeping bag that is rated at 18 degrees comfort temp, 10 degrees ‘transitional temperature’ or something. It often gets quite a lot colder than that (it was 3 degrees overnight last time we camped), but with tights and a warm vest, and winter pyjamas and thick socks, she doesn’t get cold. Warming her up by putting clothes on her has the added advantage that if (when) she goes for an explore in the night and leaves the sleeping bag, she still has some warm stuff on.

Don’t worry about doing bedtime at normal bedtime – just let them stay up late, and hope for late waking up too; last time I camped with Rose, she went to bed at 21:00 and woke up at 8:30, was bliss. Especially considering it was only me with her, so once she was asleep, I didn’t have much to do anyway, just get a good nights sleep in and a nice lie in (I actually woke up about an hour before her).

The compartments thing, the easiest camping I’ve had with Rose is in my 2 man ultralight hiking tent – just bunged two thermarests on the bottom so it is completely covered, her on a sleeping bag one side, me in a sleeping bag on the other side. If she wriggles around, I can grab her, and it doesn’t matter too much anyway. Dead easy. In the big 2 compartments tent, last time we tried putting her in her own room, we ended up with one person sleeping in next to her and a load of gear wedging her into as small a place as possible, she is a real night-time mover, and would go off and explore, and then get herself off the thermarest and get annoyed because it was less comfy.

Try and camp on the flat if possible – small kids find it really hard to come back up with their sleeping bag if the whole lot slides down the thermarest. Fine in a small tent but in a bigger tent they might well come off the end! There is a real gap in the market for a kids sleeping bag with a built in non-slip thermarest, or a sleeping bag/ready bed hybrid, some kind of warm base that is attached to the kid’s sleeping bag somehow so that they can’t slide off it.

I use clonezilla put onto a usb stick, is dead useful and works great.

It’s hd, so I think the resolution is the same, it’s just frame rates. PAL is 25, ntsc is 29.97 or something, or 30 on some devices.

I think, but I’m not sure, that hd also has the same colour space for Pal and ntsc – previously colour used to be different.

If it’s going on the internet, no reason not to use 30 / 60 fps, not than anyone can tell unless you’re doing slow motion effects on it. Only thing you probably don’t want to do is mix frame rates between diffent clips in one film, as you’ll then be doing some kind of pulldown thing, which again probably no one will notice, but it is a dirty hack (albeit I assume one used any time an old film is shown on tv)

Premiere is brilliant. Native editing of go-pro footage, which means pretty much no import time. Expensive though.

You can edit with various cheap / free things (I’ve even done some stuff in virtualdub with it), or use youtube video editor, but as far as I know there is nothing that is anything like as good. I always find myself going into work to use Premiere on the video edit machine there any time I need to edit HD.

I have lightworks, which is free, will deal with HD footage and works okay if you have a very fast computer, but it is just not on the same level as Premiere in terms of ease of use and speed. I

Also bear in mind that there is a trade-off between fancy looking cake and nice tasting cake – that blooming great thick roll on icing is pretty grim to actually eat. Most kids birthday cakes are horrible roll on icing, with a pretty bland sponge cake inside.

They look fun though. If you want something that tastes nice, I wouldn’t waste time smothering it in horrible icing or making it shaped like your favourite superhero.

Someone ought to (surely someone must?) make an app with a ‘sporadic tracking’ mode for exactly this – ie. that rather than tracking multiple times a second and doing an accurate trace of the ride, ala endomondo etc., just turned the gps on for a single position once every 15 minutes or so. With modern phones, GPS lock is super fast, especially if you’ve recently got a fix, I bet if you did it once per 15 minutes, rather than logging a full track, it could run for absolutely ages.

We got a quinny free off a friend, and it was okay, but we live on a cobbled street and in no time it got all creaky and finally completely broke. Second frame was cheap off ebay, but went a bit creaky. We also stopped using it quite early on, didn’t ever use the carry cot bit (some babies hate them, and also they don’t work very well in hilly places as the kid slides down. It is big and three wheeled, but I don’t see what you get for that, as it is less sturdy than a cheap maclaren in practice, not for going off road or anything.

I also think travel systems are a waste of money – ther’s a good reason they are so cheap second hand on ebay and in such good condition.

We mostly used a wrap sling when small and a slightly more structured sling from about a year.

Bike trailer now, that was a good spend of money (croozer). Ours has done probably 2000 miles now and is nearly as good as new. Just did 20 miles today to the exciting local park with trains and big paddling pool and stuff and she still loves it at 3. 2.5 years of multiple times a week use for 300 quid is pretty good value. Even been on holiday camping with her in it.

We have this one:

http://www.kitchenaria.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=867

When I get round to using it, it works really quite well, is very easy to use, and quick. It is 5 years old now and as good as new. Which it should be for the price, had forgotten quite how expensive it was, ouch.

Prior to de-cotting, her majesty used to sleep away in a Phil & Ted’s travel cot, which is extremely sturdy, and really quite large, whilst still lightweight. She a)liked it, b)didn’t turn it over, and c)couldn’t climb out, which is an advantage over some other things we tried.

Now she is in a toddler bed, we have a ready bed (sort of inflatable thing, pretty cheap). She isn’t locked in it, but she does mainly stay in it, and as long as the room isn’t freezing, it doesn’t matter if she goes and sleeps on the floor somewhere until we find her.

At some point pretty soon, you’re going to have to deal with your kid pottering around at will anyway and drop the side right down, you get to the point where they can climb out of the cot (can’t remember when that was for us, but I think before 2), and it is safer to take the side off than have them dropping down the full height of the cot every time they wake up at night.

Also the OP was ringing everyday about a wheel build that wasn’t exactly an urgent job:

If a shop says to me, “We’ll call you on x day”, if they haven’t called me by the end of x day, I’ll call them. And assuming they’re pissing around not doing things when they promised to, then probably never use them again, as being stringed along like this by bike shops was exactly what led me to buy a load of tools and start buying all parts online. It was just quicker to actually get hold of things if I went online, faster to get things done if I got the tool myself, often the cost difference made up for the tool price the very first time, and actually for most jobs I probably spend less total time than I’d spend chasing up shops to get parts and do stuff.

If you can’t reliably give people a call back when you’ve promised, then stop promising to call people back, and don’t moan about being hassled if people call you back instead. How complicated is that for people to understand. If you are limited in your ability to communicate by phone, then it is only professional to be clear about that (or put in place some kind of system to remind you to call people who you’ve promised to call, like a diary or a list of people to call at the end of the day).

We stayed at La Chappele Saint Claude on the edge of Lake Annecy near Talloires, as linked above. Stayed in a ‘mobilhome’ ie. static caravan. Site is nice, and our door was 50m from the waters edge, where they have steps to get in and a bit to jump off. Was brilliant, Rose (2) is a complete swimming addict, and I like a good swim too, we were in at least twice a day every day. Nicest bit of the lake I think, and because it’s the narrow bit, there’s a nice swim across – a bit over 800m each way, lovely to do of an evening once the waterskiers have calmed down a bit. We liked it so much we’re back there again this year.

We also stayed in the Jura on Lac de Vouglans, at Camping Trelachaume, nearest town Maisod. Nice enough site, beach a short but steep walk through the woods, nice cheap cafe and ice creams just off the site. The Jura is nice and nowhere near as touristy as Annecy, which has plusses and minuses – there isn’t all the adventure tourism stuff, and not so many restaurants, but it is a cheaper area generally and less busy. The nice bit of the Lac de Vouglans I don’t think there’s anywhere you can stay directly on the lake, as it is so steep sided there aren’t many houses close, so you don’t get the same convenience that you get staying right on Lake Annecy.

We’re also going this year to the Italian Lakes, having noticed how relatively close they are to Annecy if you’re willing to buy a swiss motorway vignette. Going to somewhere near Cannobio, on Lago Maggiore, staying in a crazy semi-ruined apartment on a campsite run by someone who is obsessed with flowers, so appears to run a botanical garden where they let people camp. When we’ve been before the lakes were lovely, and nice to swim in, although Italians seem to do swimming in lakes and rivers less than the French, so there was a bit of head scratching going on when people saw me. And Italian food just seems to have a much higher basic standard than French food, which always seems much more variable, (and as a veggie I massively prefer it too).

I had one of you ‘appropriate speed’ types sitting on my bum yesterday, presumably annoyed that I was sticking to a 40 limit that most people ignore. Sat there for ages, about a mile, right up my bum. The funny thing was that it’s a 2 lanes each way dual carriageway, and the other lane was empty most of the time.

So that is my top overtaking bugbear – high speed idiots who obviously want to go faster but for some reason are unable to turn the wheel to the right and would rather just teleport past you. Grr. Same on the motorway when you’re overtaking a lorry. Idiots.

We could we get rid of a few degrees if we did – just concentrate on the ones that are likely to provide students with skills the country needs. This would cut down on the number of students and maybe the state could cover more of the costs – sounds a bit like the way it used to be….

But how can you predict this – like I said up there, people like you would have been cutting funding from pure mathematics and philosophy 100 years ago, meaning that we wouldn’t have computers.

Also, as I understand it the research evidence is in favour of increasing participation in higher education being beneficial for the country as a whole, and making it available to smaller numbers of people and more elitist being a bad thing. We don’t even have that high a percentage of people in university compared to a lot of countries.

Its very wrong for students to have to subsidise research positions

Not that they really do, as various people with more knowledge of the ins and outs of the money have explained above, but part of the point of going to a good university is that the people teaching you are the absolute experts at what they teach. How you become and remain an expert is by doing research. For example on my course a few years back I was taught computer vision and pattern recognition by John Daugman, who happened to be the person who developed many of the algorithms used in visual biometric identification. Because of that, he clearly knew his stuff as far as computer vision goes, was very expert in it, and we didn’t get out of date teaching. You can’t split universities into teaching and research, places that do, that employ a lot of purely teaching staff are worse universities for that.

Research funding is give at full economic cost (FEC) – it pays for staff time, fieldwork, equipment, labs, the use of university resources so there isn’t any left over to put into teaching. In fact, you can’t use money you get from a research council for any other than what you outline in your proposal’s budget.

Although we use gear that we bought for research purposes in teaching sometimes. eg. No one was ever going to buy us 20 grand worth of medical monitoring kit for undergraduate final year projects, but now we have the gear for our research, quite a few undergrads have got their dirty paws on it for various projects. Not to mention getting to set studies up in our nice big research funded lab. So that’s another way that undergraduates benefit from the people teaching them being research active.

Obviously which courses those are is a whole length of debate

Yeah, 100 years ago, who would ever have thought that a slightly unfashionable branch of mathematical philosophy would be vastly economically rewarding? Then computers happened and it was suddenly obvious that logic was quite useful.

I work in a sixth form college. We get some where between £4500 and £5000 per student. For that they get something like 18 hours of contact time in groups of about 20 for about 35 weeks a year.

How a university gets to charge double for an arts degree seems to smack of inefficiency. Certainly buildings are used poorly

They also charge £9k for a chemistry degree / engineering degree / medicine degree, where masses of equipment and things are needed. Some degrees are profitable, but they subsidise the others that aren’t. If you didn’t charge more than cost for some degrees, then logically you’d also have to stop teaching non-profitable ones (chemistry being the obvious one that is always talked about). Which they mostly don’t.

The whole system is also blooming confusing, because of the fact that universities are not primarily teaching institutions, they do teaching and research. They aren’t glorified schools – in some departments teaching subsidises research, in others research funding means that expensive equipment can be bought that undergrads can also get to play with. If you understand that universities don’t just teach and that the two strands are highly inter-related, a lot of stuff about them becomes a lot less obvious than it might at first seem.

And as for buildings being used poorly – if you’ve ever tried to get a room booking for a lecture theatre during the day in term time, you’d not think that buildings were being under-utilised. That sort of blatantly obvious idea has occurred to people in university administration also.

Because universities exist to make money and their reputations are based on exclusivity. You don’t have the wrong end of the stick, that is held firmly by the collective hand of the UK’s university Chancellors.

Only one (I think) university in the UK is profit making. The rest exist to do research and to teach students. They want to attract as much student money, because it can fund more research, and better teaching, but they aren’t trying to make tons of money for itself.

Joe
(and before you ask, no, I don’t have massive long summer holidays – that is when a lot of the research happens, and actually this year I don’t currently teach at all)

It’s like the USA no rights of way system, so nothing like the amount of freedom you get in the UK.

I thought the blue mountains had some nice riding, and manley dam was nice. It felt like a travel to ride a trail place though, none of the long journey type riding that you get in the UK. I think it’s also quite seasonal / weather affected – they don’t ride when trails are wet, or when there’s high fire risk, when I went it was a bit hit and miss as to whether we’d be able to ride.

I preferred Melbourne, both as a city and as a place to ride, did some brilliant riding down there, including some multi day riding.

Didn’t have a massive problem finding trails, but I did hook up with local riders both times, and did have to travel to ride. Bikes on trains was easy for the few point to point rides they do have.

Be aware that everything is very expensive in Sydney – you have to be paid an awful lot more for it to feel the same as living in the UK. Little things got me, like paying nearly 2$ for a mars bar. Might be different now, I was over 5 years back.

Don’t burn your bridges, and assuming you do your current job well, chances are you could always move back to the first company later anyway. And you’re always better off from a money / promotion point of view coming in from outside rather than waiting to be internally promoted and enduring years of pay freezes.

Isn’t there a little ring thing between the nut and the pipe that isn’t screw threaded. Called an olive. Get another one of those from a plumbing shop and pop it in to replace the one currently in there.

You might get away with taking it apart, reseating the current olive and doing it up again.

Don’t do it up really tight – doing up too tight will squeeze the olive and damage it meaning you’ll need a new one. If you did that already you might need a new olive because of that.

Google compression fitting leak for more knowledgable advice.

Edit: complete fail to spot it was a plastic pipe, ignore me!

Know about priority a la droite, google it. Can mean some mental things, like having to give way to people coming onto big roundabouts (think the arc de triomphe is like this) or merging on. Mostly only on small roads in towns at four way junctions, but a few big roads.

Probably Lomo, they do all manner of drybag type product http://www.ewetsuits.com/acatalog/Dry-Boxes-dry-bags-uk.html

It’s a bit like changing the accepted conventions of the dash layout of a car just to appear fresh and funky.

the only reason Metro was put onto windows was the marketing department, to make all Windows offerings look the same, regardless of use

What everyone is missing here, is that the reason Microsoft want Metro apps highlighted, is because they want you to buy your applications from their Windows Store, because they get a hefty cut in everything sold on it. Same as Apple and their app store.

For the end user it is hard to know whether that is a good or bad thing – I mean Microsoft get a hefty cut, but then when you buy a product from anyone except direct from the original developer, there are importers, distributors and all that rubbish taking a cut which probably works out similar to the Windows Store tax. For small developers it is also hard to know – it obviously ups the cost compared to direct distribution, but on the other hand, it makes it easier for people to find and install your stuff.

Random fact, apparently it’s quite common in Scandinavian countries to use your nose to answer the phone in winter, because most thick winter gloves don’t work on touch-screens.

Siri

doesn’t work if you are outside anywhere noisy or moving at any speed, doesn’t work if you have an odd accent, doesn’t work if you don’t speak absolutely perfectly and even when it does hear you okay, doesn’t reliably get all the words in a text right. Oh, and you need to use your hands to use it.

refer to ENT for lazerzzzz to be zapped onto your soft palate!

They don’t do that round here any more – apparently the evidence was that it lasted for a year and then wasn’t any better than before.

If i start falling when running [ or stop crashing when cycling] i will give it some though

To be fair, for adults, if you ride down a flat road, you’re probably no more likely to fall off a bike than you are to trip over when running.

I’d usually wear one because I’m a baldy and it avoids sunburn and keeps my head warmer in winter. If I forgot it I wouldn’t skip the ride though (and I’d happily ride a Boris Bike or a Paris Velib without one).

Our daughter wears a helmet when cycling, because she is a)more likely to fall over than me anyway, and b)more likely to do jump her bike off something mentalist without considering the consequences or her skill level. We’ve seen a few helmet whacks already, she’s crashed hard on mud and going off kerbs, and her best friend had a comedy crash where she hammered down a steep bit of singletrack completely out of control and crashed straight into a tree.

And yes, your living arrangements are your problem not the companies.

When they’ve offered you a job on the basis that you be allowed to work from home based, then it is kind of their problem too. Although this thread is clearly highlighting that if you don’t get it in writing, it is a pain to evidence (although if they really claimed they didn’t allow it, 5 months of allowing it means it is hard to believe they just didn’t notice!).

If it wasnt in your contract or writting (always verbal?) then it was always a Managers discretion. Unless in a contract WFH cant be demanded.

Do you actually know anything about this? If he took the job based on assurances that he could work from home on a regular basis, then just because it isn’t in the written contract doesn’t mean it isn’t in his contract. A contract includes oral statements made by the employer and accepted by the employee. Which obviously you can’t always evidence, although the fact they’ve been letting you do it for months is a bit of evidence I would guess.

http://www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/8/6/Varying-a-contract-of-employment-accessible-version.pdf

They can change your contract, but it has to be clear that this is a change of contract, and they do have to do it right, they probably have to involve HR, particularly if some employees (ie. you) don’t agree. It isn’t just about one manager sending an email around.

Assuming you’re a good employee and they will still want you, I’d be emailing him* saying, “I’m assuming this doesn’t apply to me, as discussed with Mr X [previous manager] on his offering me the job, working from home once a week was part of my package for this job.” They obviously want you if they’ve done the contractor to permanent thing, replacing you would cost a bomb, and be tons of hassle for them, and from the sound of it, you working from home doesn’t cause any problems.

If they cause any hassle, then it’s time to start looking for a new job. You’re obviously good enough to get moved from contract to permanent, so you should be able to find one. And make it clear that this change in contract terms is why you are looking. The only way bad managers will learn about unilaterally messing around with people’s employment contracts is when it hits their performance figures.

Joe

*do things in writing, then at least you know where you stand. And in future send an email after discussions like ‘am I okay to work from home’ even with a friendly boss, just to make sure it is in writing.