Art and Work

Well, it was a short week at work, but it was certainly eventful.

The course I had been on for the first half of the week finished around 4pm on Wednesday and I had a couple of hours to kill before the company’s Summer Party so I took myself off to the nearby Tate Modern to see what was new in art. I must be getting old because pretty much everything I saw was dreadful (in my humble opinion, at least.) And they didn’t even have any big installations to marvel at in the turbine hall!

The company party itself was quite pleasant; free drink in quantity, free food of reasonable quality and a chance for lots of informal chatting with people I don’t see so often around the office. I left early though (which was probably no bad thing given how much I’d drunk) because we had tickets to see the ‘Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre’ show at the Battersea Arts Centre Comedy Festival. In the end, the name turned out not to be ironic and the show was totally unremarkable. Maybe, as with modern art, I’m not in the avant garde, so I wish them well at the Fringe.

Thursday was my first day back at work and was inevitably busy with ten days worth of mail and other catching up to do. One of my team handed in his resignation which, while not wholly unexpected, felt a little surreal in the moment and added to the business of the day.

Today was consequently also a busy day. I needed to get the recruiting cycle underway but also think this may be a good opportunity to re-jig the team slightly, so needed to consult with various people to make sure that (1) I had my head screwed on right and, (2) that the powers-that-be would buy-in. My concentration wasn’t helped by a failure of our external telephone lines in the London Office in the early afternoon (a major BT outage, apparently affecting roughly ten-thousand of their customers in the SE London area!) which classed as a potential major incident for us and so needed managing. In the end though I got the first draft of a Job Specification written and off for review. Hopefully we can advertise on Monday.

Tonight we had a lazy night. Brett cooked lamb (yum!) and I discovered a mini-mart on the way home from the station that does a big selection of Greek desserts (more yum!!)

And so to the weekend…