u/CandyCane147

and was met with a cancellation fee. I called the insurance company up to negotiate this fee. Eventually I agreed to pay it, and they said they offered a payment plan with no interest. I can easily afford the £50 fee, but thought I’d do the petty thing, so I’m paying off the £50 over 6 months.

Started at a new place a few weeks ago. I went to sit in my car and scroll some social media at lunch and I had a coworker come and check if I was alright (or at least that’s the reason they said why they checked on me). Everyone else seems to work and eat at the same time.

Any one else’s workplace like this?

Next Saturday I purchase my dream car. A Golf GTI 7.5 in black.

I’ve always loved hot hatches and their aggressive design, and genuinely prefer them over supercars. Are there cars with faster 0-60s? Yes. But nothing comes close to the character and design of a GTI, and it has one of the best sounding 4 cylinders ever with some exhaust work, in my opinion.

Part of the project is a refurb and a lot of it is provisional sums.

Our own labour force is doing a lot of it (with the help of agency labourers).

Then in terms of subcontractors, they will be on day works - carpenters, dry liners, decorators.

Only little issue is the client needs evidence and solid arguments on variations for every little thing done.

Completely new to provisional sums so any advice is appreciated. Many thanks in advance!

My membership ran out and I can’t see an option to get it again

I already have two projects I’m assisting on which take up a lot of my time and I’m starting to feel a bit stretched thin with this new batch of workload dumped on me.

I think it’s ridiculous that this senior QS is so bad at technology that he can’t even carry out a core responsibility, complains to the commercial director who has then made me do it.

I feel a bit stuck about complaining about this or questioning why his payments are down to me to complete as the instruction comes from my commercial director. The two senior QSs I work directly for know how busy them and I are and we can’t really take anything else like this on. I think one senior QS is particularly annoyed at how much I’m borrowed off him for this and ad-hoc tasks to help other surveyors.

How long does it take to be promoted internally from Assistant QS to QS?

Was recently told by one of my senior QSs in a 1-to-1 that I’ve been doing really well, and to keep my head down, continue working hard and I’ll be QS in a year.

From the company’s point of view, I will be a capable surveyor on the cheap as I imagine I will be promoted to earn around £40k while running jobs with minimal supervision.

On the other hand, they might think I’m just a good assistant and keep me as a donkey for payments and orders.

How long did it take you to go from AQS to QS?

I’ve noticed that the people who are constantly praised for “going above and beyond” at work often aren’t the ones with the heaviest workloads.

A lot of the time, the genuinely busy people are fully occupied just keeping up with their actual responsibilities. They don’t have spare capacity to volunteer for extra projects, attend every optional meeting, or create new initiatives.

Meanwhile, some people have lighter workloads, so they have time to look for additional tasks. They find things to do, take on visible side projects, and end up looking like they’re working harder than everyone else.

To management, this can appear as exceptional effort. But in reality, it may just be that they had enough free time to seek out extra work in the first place.

The people who are overloaded and quietly delivering on a mountain of core responsibilities often go unnoticed because they don’t have the bandwidth to do anything beyond what’s already on their plate.

“Above and beyond” doesn’t always mean someone is working harder. Sometimes it just means they had more capacity to make their work visible.