View from the 16th Floor

This should really be a post about how my life is calming down again, allowing me time to write blog posts again. Perversely though, I am writing this from a Leeds hotel room in the middle of what is going to be a busy weekend.

A confluence of events came to a head for me at the start of April; all year our company has been preparing itself for a major internal reorganisation, which kicked-in on the first day of the month. As part of that, I have taken over my boss’s job while he has gone on to take a client-facing role. In the month immediately before the changeover though, he took a three-week holiday in Asia which meant that, as well as managing the department, I was left organising our departmental budget for the coming year without his experience, in liaison with a group of Business Heads who were similarly still fleshing-out their new corporate structures.

To add to the stress of it all, we suffered three major outages in the space of two weeks; something which was also hugely embarrassing and, while it has had the ‘silver lining’ of more leeway with our infrastructure budget, it has certainly been a public relations ‘cloud’ that has blighted recent weeks.

That said, my new role has proved invigorating. I think I hadn’t properly realised quite what a rut I was in until I was pushed out of it, but now that the department is entirely my responsibility I am suddenly inspired by the new challenge and am thoroughly enjoying it.

I’m not sure that Brett has been enjoying my new role quite as much as I have though, as I am frequently working late or making early starts where I previously had a fairly relaxed routine. Consequently the job of finding us a new place to live (for when our lease expires in May) is falling largely on his shoulders when he really wants to be finding a new job of his own.

The dust does seem to be settling though (hence the inclination to blog again) and things are looking up as I have a new assistant manager starting in a couple of weeks which should, in turn, reduce my workload further. In the meantime though, I still seem to have an endless list of things I want to be getting on with both at work and socially.

This morning I drove east with Brett & Rosie to view some properties around Brockley and Honour Oak before going north for a photography class and then catching a train to Leeds ready for the fourth or fifth (I am losing count!) instalment of trying to get the Leeds Office firewall upgraded. The flat viewing resulted in the clear thought that we would do a lot better without all the furniture we have, as we could comfortably live somewhere smaller (and hence cheaper) if we didn’t have to plan for all the chattels. It would also probably reduce the moving costs

Strangely I don’t feel any nostalgia for the furniture. A lot of it has been with me for years but none of it has any real sentimental value; I’ll want to keep some of the art and a lot of the portable contents of things – but the furniture itself? No.