Light and Death

Finally there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel at work. This week has been unbelievably hectic; one thing after another with no chance to take stock in between decisions. It hasn’t helped that one of my team has been off sick, meaning I’ve been doing more of the day-to-day admin as well! Today has been just as busy, but at least it’s felt like I’ve achieved things and got stuff ticked-off my to-do list, whereas the last few days it’s just felt like I’ve been getting overwhelmed with new demands before I can deal with the old ones.

Today was mostly spent on new offices; we are expanding our London office into an adjacent building and there are a couple of really irritating last-minute problems cropping up just now. We’ve also recently signed a lease to open another regional office at the start of December and, unlike other recent ‘seed’ offices of one or two people, this one is a full-on ‘let’s jump-start a good sized branch office!’ so there’s a whirlwind of stuff to order to make sure we’ve got a seamless voice and data infrastructure in place for when the office opens.

I actually rather enjoy this kind of thing; it’s not really very hard, just a lot of things to remember and keep track of, and at the end of it there’s a lot of satisfaction as you see people starting to use the network without even noticing it; they plug in, switch on and think nothing of how it all works; how they can email the files they are working on with the guy in Australia (which are actually stored in South America) to the other guy in Madrid while they are still having the video-conference discussing the project for the North American client. (I know that sounds a bit like the recent crop of IBM adverts, but that’s what my job is about.) (And we don’t use IBM anyway.)

So that was the day at work. I got home a bit late and with a headache, but I felt I’d achieved today.

Tonight we watched Death of a President on More4, a fictional documentary about the ‘future’ assassination of George Bush which has been garnering publicity as US cinema chains refuse to play it. It was all realistic enough, using several clever techniques to fabricate the bits that they couldn’t edit together from genuine archive footage, albeit there was rather more aerial-swooping through the night-time Chicago cityscape than most real documentaries can afford. However at the end of it, I was left thinking ‘so what?’ It was neither true documentary nor drama; it didn’t educate nor did it entertain (unless, I suppose, you were a particularly blood-thirsty US Democrat) so I came away somewhat nonplussed about what the point was. I’m glad I caught it on TV rather than shelling out £7 to see it in a cinema!