Pass the Oxygen

Today has been long and hard ... Ooh, Matron!

In response,  "if only Mr Williams".

Most of the day has been spent on conference calls with the gaps filled with urgent emails. Have we made progress? I'm not so sure. Have we survived? Yes, definitely. The day is not over yet and I have a further call at nine o'clock this evening with a US colleague. I am not able to guarantee that I will be tea-total but sobriety will reign and I will limit myself to only a small glass of something with dinner. 

Away from work I took T&M for a wander around the Three Miler, or so I thought...

... Just outside the Village we came across two ladies walking their dogs in the same direction. After  general greetings and niceties we are now in the socially awkward position where they are trying to continue their chat and I am beside two people I don't know when I would much rather be on my own. One of them made a comment along the lines of "you can push on if you like, unless you want to listen to a chat about design" which suggested that they were going through similar thought processes. So I upped my pace and made a little headway on them. The thing is that they have they easy part of the bargain here. All they have to do is slow their pace for a while and we will soon have a comfortable distance between us. The problem was that they hadn't worked this out and seemed to now be using me as a pace maker. So there I was striding out like some exercise mad power walker to maintain a comfortable gap.

There was over a mile at this pace before I reached the top of the hill and made my escape via a footpath across the fields and could return to my normal pace. I was not surprised to find that I was home a full quarter of an hour earlier than I expected to be.

The evening was quiet but for the call with the US. I spent an hour on a very useful call but it is a shame that it didn't take place a full two weeks ago. I am wondering if, somewhere, my escalations have finally had a slight effect?