Two Days in One

Up until today I had been making an effort to keep this working week under control and had been making reasonable progress. Both Monday and Tuesday were acceptable in terms of hours worked and included time for walks with the dogs.

Wednesday arrived and could probably be best described as the calm before the storm as Thursday was to be a war room session down in London to scrutinise and hopefully reduce my solution costs. I really could not believe how quiet Wednesday was. I had a few evenly spaced calls, the usual hassle from someone in India, who doesn't really know what is going on but needs to make a fuss in order to justify their presence, and very little else. By the time the clock had struck four I was chopping kindling and and settling down in the lounge in front of the log burner.

Thursday, however, was the complete opposite. I was out of bed before six and trundling over to Evesham in a freezing Land Rover to make the ten to seven train down to Paddington. I then spent a good forty minutes negotiating a tube system that featured a temporary closure at Paddington due to volume of passengers and a halted Jubilee Line train at Baker Street due to a "Passenger Incident" at London Bridge. I eventually wandered in to the war room at about nine thirty to hear the dulcet tones of IM issuing from a conference phone on the table. I ignored him, and the call, and set up my stall ready for the day. At this point I had already accumulated over three hours of travelling time and the working day had not yet started. It was going to be a long one.

The aim of the day was to review my solution costs with each of the SMIs, the Delivery Team that are currently providing service and the Sales Exec ...

... and that was the problem. The Delivery Guys wanted  more men on the ground and the Sales Exec thought that we could do it with 4 poorly trained simians from a location in the Far East. It is fair to say that the day was long and hard and not very fruitful. By six o'clock the SMI's had sensibly switched off their Instant Messenger applications which forced a close to the day.  If I hadn't stood firm the Sales Exec would have had me ringing them at home and having calls running in to the evening. He really does have no sense of personal space and time. As a result there will be more calls tomorrow to try to get to the bottom of this mess.

 I think the interim position is that the costs were actually higher than when the day had started. We have a better understanding of them and are able to justify much of them but the Execs face on my departure was the most thunderous I had ever seen him.

I did warn him this is how it would go.

It was another three and a half hour journey home which netted out at a fifteen hour working day; two days in one.