reddituserid01

It’s 5pm somewhere!

Various procurement roles - travelled across Europe, US, India (a lot) and Philippines. Work travel is great if you’re commitment free and have a flexible employer who will let you push back the return flights, or take a couple of days before - ok if you are doing a 2 week trip and have the weekend to yourself, awful grind for anything longer than that. Also need to factor in any T&E policy - are you going to be able to go to nice restaurants, enjoy a beer by a pool at the end of the day, or figure out what you can eat for dinner at a cost of $15 in NYC. Now have a young family and avoid work travel wherever possible

Questions like - will you get that time back (no) can you leave early the next day if you work late (also no), do they pay you overtime (lol). They both worked jobs where once you’d done your hours you were done and anything additional was either credited as additional holiday, or paid at time and a half (or whatever the agreed OT rate was), but could not get their heads around the concept that a salaried office job based around project delivery just wasn’t an environment where any of that would fly.

My parents (retired shift workers) were obsessed with me claiming toil and / or overtime with my office job where I’d occasionally stay late (like 30-60 mins).

Did they get food poisoning and throw up? It’s standard for a lot of schools to request / require 48 hours gap since a child was last physically sick before returning to school. Obviously this cannot be proven, but if the school does have a position around return to school it might help your case to include this when making your case. That said, a week is a long time to be off for food poisoning - not impossible, but at the upper end of the scale. Do the kids generally also have a good attendance record? All of these things might have informed the decision to issue the fine, so if it’s their first absence of the year, reference that etc

Dropped my stove top kettle on the floor, braking off the cap on the spout. Emailed Le Crueset telling them what I’d done and asking if they stocked spare caps so I could repair. They sent me a brand new kettle!

Verily

Futureheads cover of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love [HoundsofLovehttps://g.co/kgs/KiGX9b](https://HoundsofLovehttps://g.co/kgs/KiGX9b)

That time being approximately 30 minutes after you have gone to bed on the 1st night after the baby is home with you!

Yep - senior sourcing / procurement roles around IT and logistics will put you up and around the 100k mark. A lot of companies with dedicated procurement departments will invest in getting entry level roles professionally certified (CIPS), and if you have the certification along with analytical and people skills it can be a good career.

Walmart already deployed AI to help manage their contracts. Similar concept to the cashier working 10 tills, allows their procurement team to shift through a heap more contracts that would typically languish as tail spend. Right now it probably only makes ROI sense for a company the size of Walmart, but as this becomes standard practice it will likely filter down as one of the standard tools that come with contract management software. [how Walmart automated supplier negotiations](https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-walmart-automated-supplier-negotiations) Also - as a procurement person you will absolutely need to get up to speed on the potential impact of generative AI on things like copyright - it’s a huge area of potential change - where is the model pointed at - is it infringing IP? What about any outputs generated, does your company own them? I suspect there will be a lot of litigation to come in this area which will have a knock on effect on contracts and due diligence in purchasing.