Coffee Shop Wankery at Atrium.

Since moving to Manchester, I've been on the look out for a job after I left Genesys Worldwide given my former colleagues were dossing off on holiday or half-arsing the job with AI resulting in confused customers, baffling sales pitches full of buzzword bingo and jargon and ultimately, ever changing priorities which made no sense and often meant focus was lost on growing the business and bringing in money; but also because my PGCE fell through in September, which on reflection, I think was actually a blessing in disguise given some of the conversations I've had with people who have completed PGCEs and gone on to teach. The narrative very much seems to be that it's job which follows you home into the late evening and is often thankless.

Irrespective, I decided to give a local job fair a mooch to see if it was up to much. The short story is that it wasn't. I would not class Utility Warehouse as a job given it is a pyramid scheme, nor would I particularly class training providers trying to sell training schemes as relevant to those looking for a job. The only decent offering was an engineering company who were quite unfortunately not looking for software developers.

Job Fair over, I decided to head for a coffee at Atrium Coffee across from Manchester Central Library. I've had this place saved for a while, it's in the heart of Manchester close to co-working spaces, tech hubs, the libraries and financial hubs - perfect for networking.

The picture above shows the central library from my spot in Atrium. The trams run across in between the library and atrium which adds to the atmosphere and liveliness of the place.

I'd say the coffee and cake were pretty good too. Very smooth and not to bitter. A solid 3.7/5. Definitely not the best I've ever had but decent enough to have regularly. The banana and chocolate loaf was also pretty decent, albeit obviously not freshly baked.

I sat for a while reading "The Secret History of the Five Eyes" by Richard Kerbaj which was particularly interesting as it iterated over the Petrov Affair. The most disturbing aspect for me was that Petrov was routinely drugged and photographed naked by ASIO officers as a fallback method in case he didn't defect or found out about his handler. We are spoon fed the idea that the West is the "good guy" but under these circumstances, that is questionable.

Above is a photo of Evdokia Petrova, Petrovs wife. The men escorting her are armed soviet diplomatic handlers. Thankfully, she was intercepted and defected with her husband. It is highly likely if she had not defected, she would have faced a soviet firing squad.

After reading for a while, it was time to leave so I booked an Uber and went to wait for it. In the time it took the uber to arrive, I managed to snap some cool photos of the city, especially the first one. Ideal stock photo quality.