A two-pronged attack

I arrived at work this morning to find an email in my inbox from Katie at Sheffield. She wants to interview me by telephone "to look at [my] career history and ability to step into a role such as this." It's been arranged for 9:30pm next Tuesday. Also she told me who the role was with finally - Hamilton Hindin Greene, "one of the few unincorporated and independent stockbroking and investment advisory firms in New Zealand." I still know nothing about equities and securities though. I must remember to ask what was the change in circumstances that led to my initial rejection being turned around.

A second bit of news of the job front (leading to the title of today's post) was via an interesting chat with Fred, the previous MD of cocoa, the one who appointed me head of the department. Firstly he was not disappointed with me about leaving, which was a relief. I was quite worried that he would be, but it seems that he is very understanding about changes in circumstance. He's now doing this group facility thing of looking at key issues that may potentially affect the company in any commodity, so has a close relationship with all of the senior management. It seems that one division that is really light on structured analysis is MAST - so molasses, alcohol, biofuels, rubber, palm etc etc. The MD of that division is a guy who used to be in the Cocoa division years ago and who I did some work for previously (investigating the relationship between El Nino and fish oil production in Peru and global fish oil prices, if you're interested). Fred has suggested that this guy and Marcelo get together and come up with some sort of proposal for them to both kind of employ me for project-based analysis, working remotely. And on a firmer basis than the consultancy thing Marcelo mentioned before. Fred's really positive it could work, which is great, and it's definitely worth considering, I reckon, and it won't hurt to talk it over. I said to Fred that I'd be keen to discuss further but would want some definite contract, rather than just a promise of ad hoc work, and he agreed that that would be important for job security. So, that's an option then. The plan, Fred thought, would be to sign me up initially for a year and then see how it went, maybe with a six month halfway appraisal of the situation. It would be nice to go over there not having to worry about a job, for sure. The downside, of course, would be that it would almost certainly guarantee me being back over here for a month at some point to officially hand over to my replacement, and also probably to do the travelling and introducing handover thing. I emailed Marcelo today to ask what's the latest on telling my Research colleagues my news.

No news either on Joanne's relocation/deployment thing yet.

My dad was down this weekend, his last time visiting us in London. It was good to see him. Joanne and I had a grand and massive packing session and got quite a lot done. It's very difficult to assess which of your possessions you're going to need for the next five months or so, you know.

Ooh, and Marvin and Tianhao are coming over tonight to look at the car. Fingers crossed...