A Day of Frustration and Fright

Fright:
I found out today why all the advertising spaces on the escalator up to Euston from the Victoria line have been blanked off for the last few months.

They've all been replaced with interactive flat-screen display panels - the latest in 21st century advertising. I was subjected to a frightening vision of two dozen panels each containing a frightened-looking child banging on the "glass" from "the other side."

It wasn't until I approached the top of the escalator that these pictures of disturbed and disturbing children dissolved into the message "1 in 8 children in the UK are desperate to get out of poor housing." Not as desperate as I was to get off that escalator I can tell you!

Frustration:
If you ever feel that you've missed out because you don't work in "big business" then please don't. Or at least reflect on what happened to me today. I was asked to come down to London for a 12.30 meeting to revise the risk register prior to resubmission of our proposal for the piece of business I've been working on for the last year. The person calling the meeting knows that we're in the middle of a bathroom refit, but this was "really important." I set the alarm for 5am to catch the 6.05 train from Piccadilly, arriving in Westminster a little after 9. I found myself a hot desk, dealt with a few emails, went to the restaurant for coffee and a bit of networking with a colleague I hadn't seen for about a year, handled a few more emails. So far (apart from the networking) nothing I couldn't have done from home.

About 11.30 the organiser stopped by my desk to inform me that Person A who was supposed to be coming to the meeting was off sick and Person B had been called to another meeting, so the review team was down to him, me, and his boss. He was about to meet with his boss to decide if he still wanted the meeting proper, or whether he'd be happy to go through the register independently and just raise queries. Excuse me but shouldn't you have worked that out before asking me to come down?

Sure enough, at 12.45 he returned. "Thanks for coming down. You can go home now." Jesus. I was mad enough at the inconvenience to myself, but it's not the first time it's happened and you kind of get inured to it. What really pissed me off was that Nikki had had to waste one of her precious leave days to stay at home and look after the bathroom fitters. And on top of that, if the organiser had more backbone he could have insisted that the review be conducted by voice conference. We all had the spreadsheet and we all have phones!

Frustration 2:
A day of very little visible progress in the bathroom. Somehow I expect tradesmen to work more quickly than me, especially when there's two of them, but I think working on my own even I could have painted our new bathroom in a day - and that's exactly what they did today. Just the painting. Looks nice though, doesn't it? As the Dad said though: "wrong colour for round here!" He was suggesting we should have painted the bathroom Manchester United red. I don't think so.