"honey, I'm home!"

Imaginary Spouse: "Hello dear, how was your day at the office?"
Patrick: "Well, for the first time since I took this job I can genuinely say it was great!"
I.S:"That's wonderful! so you're finally starting to feel comfortable in the job? did they find you any of the kind of work they talked about at the interview? are you feeling like part of the team now? has the crushingly dull data analysis become a joy?"
P:"nope"
I.S: [confused] "oh... well then in what way was it great?"
P:"well the great part came at half past four when my boss took me to one side and told me I don't have to come back on Monday, but that I'll still get paid until the middle of August"

Yup. The whole Marketing Analyst thing hasn't been working out too well... in fact it's been making me pretty miserable. None of the work I was hired to do has shown up, and the part of the job that was supposed to account for about 15% of my time, and be an exciting and valuable learning experience, turned out to demand almost all my time, and be both mind numbingly tedious and really really hard.

So, after exactly five weeks of me beating my head against a brick wall, being mostly very unhappy and not really very useful, the company are terminating my contract early. I get a month's notice which I don't have to work (effectively a paid month off to look for something else) and I get to walk away from this having learned something, even if it isn't what I was expecting to learn.

Essentially what I've learned is that I should stick to more creative roles in future because that's what I'm good at and what I enjoy. I'm still figuring out what exactly that means in terms of what comes next, but I'll keep you posted.

I'm actually posting this on Saturday afternoon not Friday at all, but the whole "honey I'm home" thing doesn't work if the date says Saturday. What I actually did after work on Friday was go and hang out on the grass beside the Parliament in the sunshine with the gang, until the sun had gone down and it got cooler when we all went back to Liz's to drink a bit too much sloe gin and laugh together