2 posts tagged “christmas lunch”

Apart from today, it's been one of those weeks I'd rather forget all about.

Monday, just about everything we did in the office went wrong.  Our security pass printer had been screwing up for a few days and kept breaking its ribbon, so we'd put a new on in and that kept breaking too.  We'd had long discussions with the supplier over the phone and eventually they sent a loan printer while ours was sent for repair.

But with a new ribbon and printer, the ribbon still kept breaking.  The service desk kept on about too much colour on the pass, causing the ribbon to break, but that sounded like bollocks from day one.  The damn ribbon was breaking as soon as we shut the cover of the printer and it wound on to the next panel on it.  We could get maybe one print out of every ten attempts, rewinding the ribbon onto the take-up spool each time it broke.

While all this was going on, one of the toilets had got blocked and was flooding the 11th floor.  And we had one opening window on which the winder had broken and the opening light was flapping around in the wind.  I can't remember all the other crap that was going on, but it seemed like all my team were cursing at one time or another throughout the day.

Tuesday I was on a procurement course (boring and tiring and a waste of a day, but I needed to know a lot of that information so it had to be done).

Wednesday was a corker.  When I arrived at the office all the lights were off in the mall and reception, the security gates weren't working and the fire curtains had partly descended.  Our receptionist said there'd been a fire at the substation that powered the ground floor, but our floors were OK, as were the lifts, so we were able to work.

Around 9:45 the building manager rang to tell me the battery backup for the emergency lighting was about to fail and the main problem hadn't been fixed, so we were required to evacuate the building by 10am.  We occupy nine floors and although I can broadcast a pop-up message to most PC screens, I'm limited to 147 characters, so I can't go into great detail.  I ran up to the 14th floor to tell my director what I was going to do and to agree what to tell the staff, but precious time is going by.  We agreed the message and I went back to my desk to mail it to everyone and my staff went to clear the conference rooms.  Then we got a message that someone coming in to the building to one of our floors had been told to evacuate and was telling all the staff on her floor, many of whom were temp staff, and some of them were panicking.  So I stopped writing my email and send a brief broadcast message to all floors saying I'd be mailing in a couple of minutes with full details of what they should do.

Then I finished my mail, telling staff to either work from home, go to our Liverpool office, or if they could do neither, just go home and check our emergency message line for information about when the office would be open again.  Having sent that, I dialled into the emergency voicemail account, only to find someone had changed the access code without telling me, so I couldn't record a new message.  The Cambridge office hosts our emergency voicemailbox so I called them  to ask them to reset the access code, then recorded the message.

By now by boss and my director had come down to my office and were using the communications cascade to contact all senior managers to tell them what was happening.  Also, my staff had gone up to the top floor and worked their way down, making sure everyone was evacuating.  Unlike a fire alert, staff were not to use the stairs, as the emergency lighting was not lit, but use the lifts instead as there was no actual danger, the evacuation was just a precaution.

So I sent my staff out while my boss, my director and I sent messages to all the other offices in the network, telling them what was happening.  When we were finally ready to leave, it was around 11am and just as I was going to the lift the building manager called me on my mobile to tell me power had been restored so staff could come back to work.

I managed to catch my boss and director before they left the building and we returned to my office to activate the comms cascade again and for me to record a new message on the mailbox.  I also called my two managers to tell them to come back in and to contact the rest of my staff.  Then I had to post messages on our intranet and mail everyone again, to give them an update report, before I could get back to my normal work.

In the afternoon I had a meeting with the directors to discuss how the comms cascade had worked.  We'd been unable to contact some staff at the top and had to go to the next level, and in some teams the managers hadn't updated their phone lists, so weren't able to contact all their staff.

We also hear that reception staff had been telling some of our people that they only needed to be out for an hour, but the building manager hadn't told me that, so our mailbox message said we didn't know how long staff would need to be out.  So we had to talk to the building manager to ensure that in future they would tell me of the latest details before they told any of the staff.

All things considered, the evac went well although we learned a few things we needed to update, but we lost the best part of a day's work.

Thursday we couldn't find one of our pool cars in the car park.  The last guy who used it was new to the office and insisted he'd parked it in The Grand NCP, but when we checked the log he'd noted he'd parked it overlooking Chorlton St. which is nowhere near The Grand.  So one of my managers went with him to see where it had been parked, and it was in Chorlton St. not The Grand.  It had been there for five days and had incurred a £90 fee.  We have a contract with The Grand and just use a card to get in and out, but it only works at the Grand.  My manager explained that it was a new member of staff, not familiar with the area, who'd made the mistake, and the attendant agreed to waive the fee.  When she went to move the car, my manager saw it had a flat tyre.  She was going to change it, but the jack was damaged so she couldn't do it.  She called out the AA who were there within about 30 minutes and not only changed the wheel, but fixed the jack (with a big hammer).  When she got to the barrier she tried to contact the attendant on the intercom, but he was out of the office dealing with another problem, so she was blocking one of the exits for 15 minute and couldn't back up out of the way because there was a line of traffic behind her.

When she finally got out she went to National Tyre to get the flat fixed.  He took pity on her and bumped her to the front of the queue, fixed the puncture, but when she tried to pay with the department's credit card he waived the charge because it was 'too much paperwork.'  When she got back to the office she was not in a good mood.

Today was better.  We had Christmas lunch in one of our meeting rooms, overlooking the skating rink in Piccadilly (see picture again in case you missed it the other day).

Manchester's Festive Offer

 We were going to go out, but couldn't agree on the type of restaurant, so decided to have a buffet in the office instead.  It was a good end to a crap week, finished off with a guys against girls game of Trivial Pursuit which us guys were winning when I had to leave at 4:10 to pick up my wife from work.

..... to switchboard operator.

My team are all out on their Christmas lunch today.  Except me.  Someone had to man the switchboard while they're all out, and I didn't want to go out with them anyway, so it's me, like Captain Hogthrob, alone at the helm.

Oh, the loneliness of command.

Late December is a stupid time to go out for Christmas lunch.  Every eatery is packed, the service is always stretched and if you're having the 'traditional' English Christmas lunch it's gonna be turkey, sprouts, roast and boiled spuds, and a couple of other veg.  The turkey is usually like cardboard and the veggies boiled beyond recognisable taste. 

And while I quite like working with the people I work with, I prefer not to spend time socialising with them.  We'd only whinge about work and I can do that any time.  When I was on the IT team we never went for Christmas lunch in December; it was rarely earlier than May, which is a much better time.  Places are much quieter, the service is better, and they're not trying to push you out of the door so they can shoe-horn the next drunken mob on to your table.

And so I'm having a learning experience instead, because I've never operated this switchboard before.  Being a 'government' office we get all kinds of interesting calls.  So far I've had a chap who wanted to report a health & safety issue because he'd seen some bloke working on his own at a vehicle scrap yard, someone from a housing association wanting info about reserved rights to buy a council house, a rather innebriated woman who wanted to complain about the shocking state of Arriva buses and someone who wanted the phone number of their local Jobcentre.  And several people who could easily have dialed the number of the person they wanted, and knew they wanted, because they call them on a regular basis.  Do our staff not tell their clients their  DDI number?  Maybe they don't want their numbers revealed, which is a shame for them because I've been telling callers the numbers so they can call direct in future and not waste my time putting them through.