Northern bound

I need to head to the north tomorrow for a couple of days. I have meetings in Manchester tomorrow lunchtime, meetings with a customer in the afternoon and then drinks / food with the people out of my Manchester office in the evening. Thursday sees more meetings in Manchester and then an afternoon in Harrogate.

Although I’m looking forward to the trip, and visiting the Manchester office is well overdue, I didn’t really want to be away for two nights. It means that the dog needs to go to the kennels and this time, rather than take the train I will drive up.

However to sweeten the pill I’m stopping at Silverstone on the way home on Friday where I’m helping do a road / track test of the Jaguar that I drove the other night. Not to tempt fate, but the last we did a track test with the same magazine at Silverstone, the two cars we were testing ended up broken by mid afternoon. The engine blew on one and the gearbox went on the other. Still Luffield was most enjoyable sideways and both cars got 4 1/2 stars out of 5 when the article was published.

Here’s hoping for another good day at the old airfield…

Occasional rightness

A particlar customer of mine works under the impression that if there is ever an issue with a service, that that issues lies with a supplier rather then within their own organisation.

This came to a head on Saturday evening when they declared a current issue to be our fault. As I read the first email on my Blackberry, the light flashed as more emails arrived. By the time I’d been able to assess the situation I had five or six emails, all declaring the service to be sub standard and demanding it be rectified immediately. There then followed a phone call between myself and my sales director which you could have described as ’strained’ or even ‘terse’ for that matter.

I knew the problem did not lie with us. I had a feeling that we had done everything correctly and my gut feeling is something I know I can rely on. So, I got everybody to hold off phone calls and had a look at my systems. In the meantime the emails kept coming. I was firstly amazed by the number of people working on a Saturday and then disappointed to see the cc list growing. In my experience that is a usual sign that someone is trying to hide something, or to cover their tracks so to speak.

Thirty minutes later I knew exactly where the problem was. As I expected it was at the customers site and not with us. I sent them some quick evidential proof so that they could a) acknowledge it was their end and b) fix it.

This morning I took great pleasure in sending a carefully crafted response to the issue to the full list of people cc’d in the emails. It laid out step by step what had happened, why and exactly where the issue lay, along with recommendations to help them solve their issue. At 4pm they asked to implement the recommendations to prevent the issue happening again.

I’m still waiting for the apology though. I fear I may be waiting some time…

Trains, planes, less trains and more cars

Nothing is ever simple in my life it seems.

I was so engrossed in my final meeting yesterday that I missed my evening train from Manchester Airport. This meant we had a very small window to drive to Manchester Piccadilly to I could get the train there. We raced across to the station, only to get stuck in traffic. Clearly we were not going to make it. I rang National Rail enquiries to confirm what I already knew – that was the last direct train back to Oxford. There were other trains but they involved multiple changes and invariably for the later ones going into and then out of London.

So we decided to try to beat the first train to its next two stations on its way south. We failed, traffic was against us at every stage. I either had to stay up in Manchester last night and come back this morning, or find alternative transport to get home last night.

I had an idea. I could hire a car from the airport and drive home. As a Hertz Gold Club member, I had visions of the finest Mercedes being laid on for me, so when Hertz informed me they had no cars whatsoever I almost capitulated to inevitable defeat. I stuck my head around the Avis office and asked them if they had any cars and they did and joy of all joys it was only going to cost £70 for a one way hire.

They asked me for my driving licence and I had this terrible feeling in my stomach, just the other day I’d taken my photocard out of my wallet and it was on my desk at home. Luckily the DVLA was still open (at 8pm who’d have thought it?) and they verified my details. Ten minutes later I was driving out of the airport in an understeery automatic Peugeot 308.

When I got to the Avis drop off site in Oxford, I saw the train I should have been on, just pulling out of the station.

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