Things to remember early in the morning…

Namely -

1. Your laptop power cable
2. Your mouse
3. Your pile of receipts for various expenses
4. A tie

All of these are especially important if you are going to be in your office in Bournemouth all day and have a very important meeting needing three out of those four items and then your book keeper coming in to pick up your receipts for your latest set of end of year accounts.

Oh well, it looks like I’ll be stopping at a Maplins for the laptop stuff, my book keeper will moan at me (again) and my meeting with be slightly more casual than I’d have liked.

I knew not going to bed until 1am was a mistake last night, but in my defence I only got in from work at 10.30pm and then two large rum and cokes kept me awake for quite some time, so naturally at 6am this morning I wasn’t functioning at my best.

I am a generous and thoughtful boss

It is my PA / admin girls birthday today.

She started working full time for me in April having been part time for pretty much a year. One of the things she mournfully would reminisce about was the fact that being full time she couldn’t go down to the beach of an afternoon to chill out.

Lately she has been working overtime to get a couple of projects up and running that I didn’t have time to be involved with myself. Once she’d proved that she could get on with things with no supervision I have been happy to just give her stuff to do and not worry about it as much as I previously would have done.

So as a treat today, she got a big bunch of flowers delivered to her desk and then the afternoon off to top up her tan at the beach, with instructions not to rush into work tomorrow so that she can have a good night out tonight.

On Wednesday I shall no doubt be back to my usual tyrannical ways

Seating dilemma

When travelling by train I like to sit facing the direction of travel. In fact I’d go as far as stating that I almost insist on sitting in the direction of travel. Now this isn’t a mild case of OCD, rather just a preference as to being able to see where I’m going as I gaze out of the window. As well as a deep subconscious thought that should there be a train crash I stand a slightly better chance of not being decapitated.

Travelling from Oxford to Bournemouth once a week presents an interesting dilemma, now that I am making that journey by train rather than car. (It takes only about ten minutes longer by train and I get a lot of work done on both journeys - I seem to have gotten sensible in my middle age). The train departs from Oxford and heads towards Reading, after which it goes in the opposite direction back to Bournemouth. So, if you sit facing the direction of travel from Oxford, then from Reading to Bournemouth you end up sitting the wrong way.

Now I could move seats at Reading, but that would be silly, especially as the train is usually pretty full from Oxford and even fuller from Reading. So, as I board the train I try and find a forward facing seat and accept the fact that for the first 30 minutes I’ll be sitting facing the wrong way - no matter how much it annoys me.

Rantation (c) Perpetual Spiral

[Insert opening line of expletives and words to show the anger and frustration of Perpetual]

One of the benefits of being a hands on boss, is that I know everything that goes on with regards to my customers. so when someone triffles with either that knowledge, the customer themselves, tries to second guess me, or heaven forbid a combination of all three, I am not best pleased.

All three have happened today from one person. This person doesn’t work for me and doesn’t know the customer in question. Yet because I buy one series of products off them to sell onto my customer, they assume that they know best. The morning and most of the afternoon up to the time of writing (I am forcing myself to chill out - having a delightful cup of Lapsang Souchong tea as well as technically breaking the no smoking in the workplace rules by having a cigar in my office at home), I have been trying to sort this issue out whilst maintaining my calm exterior. At one point, to stop myself from sending the angriest email in the world ever, I wandered into town to glare at people and calm down a little.

To summarise, I have a diagram that really does show the effect of someone meddling when they clearly do not know what they are talking about, or when they will not accept they are wrong.

I can trace their journey down the flowchart as follows - NO, YES, YES, NO. May they spend the rest of their days in that eternal loop thinking about how they should learn to STFU when they are in over their head.

That is all. I just needed to vent, the dog isn’t very talkative and no one in the office wants to speak to me for some strange reason