Atmosphere changes

Tuesday involved an early start. I was out of the house by six thirty and wandering around a Business Park in stormy Uxbridge well before nine o'clock in the morning.

It was a bloody frustrating day. Tim Nice-but-Dim likes to have me around as some form of security blanket and, as a result, I have to adopt his working pattern. He is the proverbial cuckoo and flits from vacant room to vacant room, moving whenever people, who have actually bothered to book a facility, turn up and glare at us interlopers.

I do not like this approach. It is unstructured, certainly not conducive to effective working and fundamentally fucking rude. If I add in the fact that I could not achieve network connectivity in the client office it is fair to say that I spent a good chunk of my morning hanging on Tim N-b-D's coat tails and achieving sweet FA.

As a result I spent as much time as possible down the road at a relatively convenient Circle of Hell where I could at least receive emails and contact work colleagues.*

The most significant news of the day is that there appears to be some Client in-fighting about what is to be delivered and by when. As a result our time line has been contracted by two weeks and we now need to have our Proposal ready when a number of significant team members, including myself, are on holiday. To make matters worse we still have no clear requirements from the client and, if they manage to pull their finger out, I estimate that we will have about one week to refine our solution before we need to take it through the arduous series of gate reviews prior to release.

This is obviously far from good and both Dante's team and the Client's consultants recognise this but, for the moment it looks like the Client Procurement Director will have his way.

I have played this game enough times to know that there is no point in baulking and all I can do is attempt to define a deliverable that we stand half a chance of delivering in the limited time available.**

I also learnt an important lesson today. Never leave an office in the Greater London conurbation at five thirty in the evening ...

... five miles in one hour! I needed that double G&T in the hotel bar when I finally got there.

---

*"Ah! ..." I hear you say; "surely your iPhone was working?" ... and you would be correct but there is no way that I would regard it as an effective substitute for a full blown laptop. They are great for single sentence communications ... Think Twitter or Facebook status updates but there is no way on earth that you would want to draft a detailed email on one.
** whilst at the same time expecting an extension when sanity finally prevails.