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.

Professional porn

I had to take part in a conference call this afternoon. Sometimes it is easier to get people together on the phone for a discussion rather than schedule diaries for a meeting. Whilst a phone call doesn’t allow you to read people’s expressions and reactions, it does mean you can decide whether a meeting is worthwhile.

Back in January / February I did some work for a company and put together a technical specification regarding a new service they wanted to bring to market. As is often the case, these things then go a little quiet and then all of a sudden deadlines change and things pick up pace.

So, I find myself on a phone and web conference this afternoon, where the host has the ability to share what they see on their own desktop with the other participants. After about 40 minutes talking about merchant service accounts, HTTP interfaces and all manner of clever things to make quite a good service even better, I was given the ability talk through a Visio diagram (drawn by yours truly) that the host had on his own desktop.

As he was then trying to find something else, he was flicking through the various programs he had open at the time. Bear in mind there was myself representing my business and his web developer / pseudo distributor for this product and all three of us could see what was going on on his computer.

He then flicked through his open programs to Internet Explorer, which had a somewhat graphic porn site on display. Suddenly my web conference had gone from Visio diagram to hard core porn.

The sound of this guy backtracking and making excuses reverberated down the phone, and I swear that for about 10 seconds, time stood still and a tumble weed rolled through my office.

Tomorrow I am putting his price up. Somehow I think he’ll be good for it.