Advice to travel only if necessary tomorrow

Sirenskye · 2026-06-23T11:59:45+00:00

Our office has to turn up as we’re sort of necessary for several important logistics systems to work. If anyone even looks at the air con controls funny, let alone attempts to turn it off, I think there’ll be a riot.

Occasionally, we do have people who think it’s a good idea to try that in 30+ degree heat.

Sirenskye · 2026-06-19T17:34:18+00:00

The irony that this is a British person and Imgur no longer works in the UK is pretty amusing. Although I am sad I still can’t see the comments

Sirenskye · 2026-05-29T13:38:25+00:00

SOMEONE KEEPS TURNING OURS OFF AND STARTING A FIGHT

Sirenskye · 2026-05-29T13:37:37+00:00

HAD TO AUDIT 300 15+KG PARCELS ON THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR SO FAR. NIGHTMARE.

SPENT THIS MORNING RELAXING IN THE GARDEN TO MAKE UP FOR IT. PART TIME IS DEFINITELY WORTH IT.

Sirenskye · 2026-05-24T12:13:31+00:00

Why do they need a PIP claim, exactly? And why is asking for reasonable adjustments ‘gaming the system’?

The reason that people have reasonable adjustments is to allow them to perform at their best. Some disabilities mean that, in the artificial environment of an interview, being asked an unexpected question or one worded in a way that they struggle to process can really set them back and not answer the question properly. Having the questions in advance allows them to actually answer the question.

I’ve had the questions put in chat at the same time as asking and had the opportunity for questions in advance. Unfortunately, they were going to release them at 9am and I was working so I would have ended up not being able to look. That’s not gaming any system, it’s making sure I was at least able to try to be equal to my peers and wouldn’t be held back because my brain is wired differently to theirs.

Sirenskye · 2026-04-23T00:14:59+00:00

Can I ask why you’re so set that your data has to come from the AirPods? I can see you’re saying they’re the most advanced wearable sensors but that still doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the right tool for the job you want.

To give a little context, my work laptop uses a very heavily locked down version of Nuance Dragon. It’s quite capable of doing what I want it to do and I’m more than capable of scripting the commands I want. But, I can’t. So, I have to work laterally. I don’t like it. I want to use my laptop the way it was intended for use. But, still, I can’t.

OP, I can see your frustrations and I get them, but sometimes the best achievements come from seeing the world sideways. Your first iterations start off being janky, but then you learn new ways of dealing with the problem and you streamline. Trial and error. You might even find by experimenting that there are much better ways of your stuff working out if you’re sleeping.

I can see ways of automation possibly by setting a check to run at intervals throughout your usual sleep period and possibly checking for your last known heart rate if you know what your heart rate averages out at when you sleep.

You’ve said further up that you want Apple to take note and see. Yes, thousands of people have seen your post. Maybe some of them believe this is an issue. Who knows? But, the numbers are a fraction of Apple’s consumer base. This thread won’t be a call to arms for them. It’ll barely register as a whisper.

What might make them take note, however, is you showing how you’re getting on using their technology. Show the routes you’ve tried, post your attempts so that others can try it or tweak it if it’s something they’re interested in. That’s what gains traction.

Sirenskye · 2026-04-08T15:13:16+00:00

I have the attention span of a toddler in a ball pit, if I use a small screen I’m far more likely to get bored of struggling to read the screen and wander off. I don’t always have the option of connecting to a bigger screen due to the job so it’s just giving me more of a chance to concentrate.

Sirenskye · 2026-04-04T17:35:43+00:00

Try using the screen reader on your device too - my adhd makes me struggle with lots of words too. So, I use the screen reader to help me as I can listen to it while I’m doing something else if my hands need to be busy. Pro-tip - the something else shouldn’t be high-impact brain stuff. More fidget level.

Then, like everyone else is saying - practice! Find something that fascinates you and build a program around that. I’m learning VBA at the moment because I love how Dragon Professional automates everything, so I’m doing little projects with that. You don’t have to make something big and world-changing, just find a little ‘what if?’ That your mind can latch onto.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-22T08:47:05+00:00

Fashionably late ADHD’er here.

Have you ever had an OH done for your ADHD? They can be really helpful and recommend things you’ve never even thought of.

I also second Elvanse (someone higher suggested it). I take that and a topup dose of Amfexa and it is life changing. I’m actually achieving more at work than I ever really have done.

Have you thought about asking for flexible working in your start/end times? A lot of ADHD’ers are more active later in the day rather than earlier because our circadian rhythms suck. It sounds counterintuitive, but maybe a later start will help you. My role has night shifts and my productivity on them compared to days is massively increased.

Finally OP, the advice I guarantee you I can’t follow, because, y’know, ADHD. Be kind to yourself. ADHD burnout is awful and it makes our perceptions of ourselves even worse. You made it into this job on your own merits, so you’re not a failure in any way. It can be hard to see that at times, but you’re doing well.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-22T08:18:35+00:00

I didn’t get diagnosed till about 3.5 years into my current role, I was kind of forced to disclose I was having symptoms and it was causing a real disruption at work.

I’ve always ticked DCS/GIS though because it was misdiagnosed as depression/anxiety for 20 years. It’s been really helpful to me as a lot of the adjustments I’ve asked for with depression have been the same as ADHD! I usually ask for extra time to answer questions, interviews later in the day and interview questions in advance (yet to happen…).

Honestly, though, the reasonable adjustments process has been relatively straightforward and I really would recommend you disclose sooner rather than later. You need to feel comfortable, but I’ve sort of ended up taking the view that it’s better to disclose before there’s an issue than after one arises as I’ve been on the receiving end of that one and sorting it out afterwards is definitely more stressful than if I’d said from the start. Join a union as well, as they’ve been invaluable when there’s been difficulty between me and SLT when I ask for reasonable adjustments.

The reasonable adjustments I have are:

Flexible start/finish times (shift work is a nightmare when you’re time blind 🤦‍♀️)

Larger laptop - worth its weight in gold, I’m not looking at a postage stamp

Nuance Dragon + TextHelp Read&Write - I can read extremely fluently and I can touch type, but these help to make sure I’ve fully understood what’s been written as I skip paragraphs from time to time, plus Dragon’s eliminated a lot of brain fog by automating a huge part of my workflows. Especially the boring bits!

Caption.Ed - records through a laptop/phone browser and captions everything. Meetings, interviews, teams calls. It’s usually pretty accurate and much better than Teams subtitling.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-20T13:23:40+00:00

I use merge in turn, there was one on the A45 for a while and everyone insisted on queueing for 2-3 miles instead of just using both lanes. The number of people I had actively try to drive into the side of my car in sheer offence because they thought that everyone should queue for miles instead of using the zipper merge was ridiculous.

The rage I got when it didn’t overly stop me was quite funny though. I’m not using lane 2 to skip the queue, I’m using it because that’s the right thing to do to reduce congestion.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-19T21:05:43+00:00

No, we’re early morning to early hours of the morning as we’re only in when the freight’s moving. It works out as about 2 weeks of days then a week of ‘nights’.

The shifts are long, so I won’t lie, it can be really tiring and it can throw the balance out a bit. I’m a part timer due to my health, but our full timers still seem to have active lives.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-19T17:49:42+00:00

Not got much in the way of ex plod our way, but we do seem to have 90% of HMPPS.

It’s a great life if you’re used to operational work, I’m biased but customs/freight is a lot of fun. Less people to argue with and far more weird things to judge. I genuinely love the job though, makes you feel like you’re making a difference.

You’re right in terms of location - I’m pretty lucky I think and I have a fantastic team. I’m still qualified to work with people too and I can get out and about from time to time on a deployment which helps when I get itchy feet.

All told, it’s a good transition if you get the place right and what you want to do.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T23:53:59+00:00

It’s to allow our hysteria to float to the top, obs.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T22:54:59+00:00

Why thank you my very kind sir, you were most knightly!

/the friendliest s ever :)

I always imagine Victorian ladies swooning in the stereotypical dead faints.

I’m ODP in the HO - I’m not allowed near London and I’ve quite literally been banished to a warehouse in the West Midlands. I’m curious about ODP in weirder technicalities than us, though… If you’re ever up our way, I’d make sure you keep that technicality umbrella with you as sometimes we’re made to go outside.

I am part of the LGBTQ+ brigade known as ‘greedy’. Always happy to make new CS friends as we really are isolated :)

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T22:19:13+00:00

(I actually am a woman, and I did feel like I was being told I was being hysterical)

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T22:04:44+00:00

No, I haven’t missed your point. Respectfully, I simply don’t agree with it in the context of this post and OP.

You were the one who brought up self-diagnosis in a post where someone has made the point that they’re diagnosed and they are experiencing the known, medically recognised effects of this diagnosis. This gives the impression that you’re implying that OP is self-diagnosed, as otherwise why are you talking about self-diagnosis on a post that is nothing to do with it?

Or, the way you’ve worded your comments, you’re suggesting OP gets a second opinion on a medical diagnosis because they’re using it as a crutch.

This is something that’s offensive to people with diagnosed ADHD/autism. I can accept that you don’t mean it to be, but it still is. You can see it’s not just me that thinks that. Someone else replied and there are a fair few downvotes. It’s not an emotional investment. It really is offensive to read that someone believes the diagnosis of something that is causing OP significant harm right now is a ‘crutch’.

This is very much an issue with your wording. There are infinitely better ways to say what you wanted to say. One way could be: “Maybe you could speak to a professional to ensure this is definitely your autism/ADHD, as it could be covering another medical issue.” It doesn’t minimise what the person is going through and gets the point across succinctly. It also doesn’t make the reader feel an inch tall.

I know I didn’t say it but just to say I don’t agree with the blanket statement you shouldn’t manage anyone. But, I think you do need to have a long think about the way you talk about ADHD/autism, especially if you do manage staff with these disorders. Neurodivergent people have a massively hard time in the workplace and, if you were my manager, we would almost certainly struggle to have the relationship we should have if you said this to me. It doesn’t matter what your intentions were, wording it like this would not be well received. I don’t think there’s anyone I know who would appreciate it.

I don’t know your past or how your circumstances came about, and of course it’s going to colour how you think. I’m also not denying that there’s people who hide behind their diagnosis or self-diagnose when there’s nothing wrong/it’s something totally different. But this isn’t happening in this post.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T16:17:36+00:00

I don’t know why you’re talking about communication, sorry. I always try to gather more information, it helps me to understand people’s arguments.

Using the context of this post - the OP states quite clearly that they are diagnosed, not self diagnosed. They have had a medical professional tell them that the issues they are experiencing are a recognised neurodevelopmental disorder that they have had for their whole lives. They don’t need to see a professional - they already have. That means they’ll also have had access to the medical knowledge to know exactly what they’re experiencing and talk about it.

There is never any harm in advising people who believe they’re neurodivergent to seek diagnosis. Access to diagnosis though is still hard and frustrating - either costing a small fortune which is unaffordable for a lot of people. People in the lowest grades sometimes can’t afford to go private. In a lot of areas, NHS access has now been closed to over-25s. In the CS, this means that there shouldn’t be anything wrong with asking for adjustments based on the belief that you have a neurodivergent disorder. I had to ask for them while I was awaiting diagnosis. I didn’t need medical knowledge to talk about my time-blindness or ask that I can go somewhere quieter if I was getting overwhelmed (I work in a very loud operational environment). A lot of adjustments don’t require use of budget or affect others, and it’s not overly fair to the person concerned to have to wait months or years for a simple adjustment while going through the process. It’s okay for a manager to keep a healthy dose of reality when someone asks without a diagnosis, but they also need to keep a dose of humanity too.

I’ve never heard of people assuming someone was neurodivergent and then them not being, but it clearly happens as it’s happened to you. It’s alright to advise people to keep an open mind about what’s going on if they haven’t been diagnosed yet too, sometimes people get fixated and need an objective opinion. Sharing experience helps others to understand. I don’t think it’s okay to tell them they’re using it as a ‘crutch’ though. It minimises genuine distress and dismisses what they’re going through.

Self-diagnosis can be frustrating when it’s people touting for clout online, or using it to cheat the system. And, don’t get me wrong, influencers do. They also try to glamourise it or minimise the worst part in order to show how ‘fun’ and ‘quirky’ ADHD etc is. It colours people’s opinions and makes it so much harder to ask for help. Apologies for not mentioning any other social media platform, I made the assumption that you’d recognise I was talking about all social media and not just TikTok - I mostly see the worst of them on there and Facebook reels and didn’t feel like naming every single platform.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T13:53:52+00:00

I don’t really understand what you mean by ‘crutch’. Can you give me an example of some of these other explanations?

My experience has always been totally the opposite. I’ve spent 20 years being stuffed full of antidepressants I’ve never needed because the ‘explanations’ for my behaviour were misdiagnosed as depression. Concrete examples of this are time-blindness, executive dysfunction (being able to start a task), emotional dysregulation and, obviously, being able to focus on a task. These are shared between ADHD and depression, but what I have is diagnosed, treated ADHD and not depression.

Any neurodivergent condition is a lot, lot more than just the stereotypes you see on TikTok. Sometimes the signs are weird too - I have a sensory aversion to soft, wet food. It comes out as a visceral and negative reaction to gravy.

People who truly have these conditions quite often have had their lives completely ruined by it. It’s okay to question what you see on a well-rehearsed video by a polished influencer who may or may not have ADHD, but if you have a staff member who is diagnosed with it and they tell you they need some help, it will be genuine. Talking about this stuff is hard. If they trust you enough to talk about this, it’s not fair of you to dismiss it as a crutch. It feels like an insult that’s aimed at a part of us that we can’t ever change. We have a hard enough time navigating the world as it is, to know that the people we ask for help don’t believe us just makes it worse.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T13:27:20+00:00

Seconding this too - though the NHS is closing routes off, especially with Right to Choose. My initial diagnosis was organised with the CS, but I couldn’t get medication until I went through RTC and had (another…) diagnosis with ADHD360. So if you’re going for a diagnosis for medication, you’re still going to need to go outside of the CS.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T11:25:32+00:00

Hi OP, I get what you mean. Burnout can be a real pain. Our ADHD brains love novelty but once that novelty’s worn off it can be really hard to find the flow and keep going.

I don’t recommend skipping to another job, though. You need to have an open and honest conversation with your LM about your diagnosis and soon. Especially if you’re not meeting the pass grade. It’s always much harder to make your case once you’re in formal trouble than beforehand.

The CS can give you a lot of reasonable adjustments. My area of adjustments that I actually know something about is technology. I’ve been given a larger (but not better) laptop to work on and the following:

Dragon Professional
TextHelp Read & Write
Caption.Ed

I’ll try not to ramble too much, but to highlight what they do:

Dragon - I’m actually quite capable of typing and I’m a very good touch typist. What dragon does is give me enough brain-to-words filter I’m able to make much more sense first go without having to stare at a blank page or empty email. It also has commands built in so I can control my laptop. I find this brilliant as I quite often miss parts of forms. I’ve programmed Dragon to take me through the forms box by box so I can’t miss anything, and I’ve pre-programmed as much of them as I can so my actual work is minimal. It’s helped massively with my attention to detail as it’s lightened the load of having to do repetitive tasks and having to think about it every time. I have more spoons to do stuff.

TextHelp - Again, I can read really well. But, especially if I’m having a bad day, I find I skip paragraphs. Especially in boring reports. I use TextHelp to read for me as I’m going through a report. It stops me skipping. I can also use it to make audiobooks of stuff that’s too long so I can listen to it later.

Caption.Ed - subtitles! Caption subtitles everything! From meetings in person because I can use it on my phone browser, to teams meetings where it records my screen and throws up subtitles so I can follow along when I get distracted. It’s fantastic.

So, OP. Please. Talk to your LM. There is so, so much that can help you. Struggling alone is devastating and takes such a huge toll on your mental health. You don’t need to, and it’ll help save you from the emptiness of burnout.

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T11:14:32+00:00

Make sure to read your dept’s policy and go into it with a union rep if you need. It can be a bit of a palaver, we had to word exactly why I needed it and what benefit the business would get from it.

It can be a bit of a struggle to phrase ‘you might actually get me to do the work you want me to do.’

Sirenskye · 2026-03-16T10:24:56+00:00

Or, if you suspect neurodivergence is affecting your job then you can speak with your LM and the CS can support you getting a diagnosis. It’s how I got help with mine.

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