Spring was in the air in mid March 2013 and I was sniffing out every little sign of it, quite literally. The smell of freshly cut grass dominated my walks to work and I had a little company by way of new iPod and an audio book that surprised me a little. At work I was summoned into a worrying meeting with the COO. Did this mean my job was on the line?
20 March 2013
For a little while I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a little iPod Nano or, as I prefer to call them, Nanoo’s (if you’re old enough to remember Mork and Mindy you’ll know I’m not mad, maybe). It’s not that I don’t love my old first generation iPod Classic, I do, but I thought a Nanoo would be great for long walks because its so much smaller. You can also get a fancy little arm band thing to put it in which frees up a pocket. Long story short, I got one and this morning I tried it out for the first time.
Last night I downloaded my first audio book, thinking it might make a change from music on long walks, especially as I’d enjoyed the war stories so much. I chose Three Men in a Boat read by Hugh Lawrie and, after a few false starts where I messed up the Nanoo controls, set it running as I set off. At first I thought there must have been some mistake because the narrator didn’t sound like Hugh Lawrie at all. Funnily enough I was expecting his Dr House voice, I’d quite forgotten he was English which is odd, not only did I love Balckadder but I spoke to him on the phone a few times when I worked at Dream Factory. He booked a holiday through us and wanted to make sure his wife and children didn’t get hassled by the press. He was a lovely man. How could I have forgotten that? The only problem with the audio book is that it is so funny I laughed out loud a couple of times. Probably looked like a looney walking along laughing to myself. Oh well, some things never change.
The morning was cold but the lack of rain and mist made for a nicer walk to work even if it wasn’t exactly what you’d call sunny. The sky was trying to be blue, but not succeeding very well at it. When I turned down the cut way I noticed a strange smell I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t a bad smell, actually it made me think of spring.
At the steps I realised what it was, they had been cutting the grass. The smell of freshly cut grass is a wonderful thing, unless you suffer with hay fever I suppose, I stopped for a moment and breathed it in, noticing as I did that the grass cutters had cut carefully around the clumps of daffodils. A group of swans were messing about in the shallow water too. I love to see the swans. The smell of grass followed me along the path and, when I came to the grassy area by the houses I could see why. The grass cutters were still there, one on a sit on mower and another with a strimmer, to cut round the tress and flowers. Does this mean spring is really here?
The good news of the day is that I have three out of four booking forms for the cruise with no music and the final one should be with me tomorrow. Two of them have even sent me their photos and biographies for the cruise book. Unfortunately they still haven’t decided on a name so, for the moment, they are the band with no name on the cruise with no music. I guess I can’t call it that any more now though because there will be music, my worry is what the quality of that music will be as they’ve never played together before.
“They can’t be worse than the quartet where the singer was so bad we actually had emails from the ship begging us not to ask them back,” Alice said, trying to make me feel better. Apparently the rest of the group were good enough but, having a completely out of tune soprano sort of took the shine off a little. Lets hope she’s right. From the two biographies I’ve got they sound good, lots of awards and performances in prestigious venues, hopefully it will work when they’re all together. If not I will just have to remind Arabella that she booked the out of tune soprano so I should be allowed one rubbish group too.
The rest of the morning was spent going through the scores and passenger comments from the last cruise. Usually it’s pretty cut and dried with the scores and the comments tallying. Today not so much. The quartet scored fairly low, nowhere near as low as the out of tune soprano you understand (that was record breaking) but still pretty dismal. The funny thing is they’re a very popular group and the report from the Cruise Director had said how well received they’d been, in fact extra seats had to be brought in. Then, when I read the passenger comments, almost all were very, very complimentary, with just three being slightly negative and then only about the choice of pieces. All very strange. Even stranger, there was a similar problem with the guest speaker scores. Maybe someone has made a mistake in the calculations?
After lunch there was good news by email, the band with no name now has a name and I have the final booking forms, biographies and photos. Now I have to keep my fingers crossed and hope there are no cancellations, changes or problems before the cruise, oh yes, and that they can actually sing.
Next I decided it was about time I got to grips with the library cataloguing programme. The idea was to have a catalogue of all the books including their Dewie numbers on the library computer that passengers could search. After all the waiting for permission to load the trial it turned out it wasn’t as good as I’d expected. To say it was complicated would be an understatement. When I finally did begin to get my head round it it became more and more obvious it wasn’t what we needed after all.
It took about five minutes to input the information for one book. As there are over three thousand in the library it would take years to input them all. The programme had all sorts of super dooper things to keep records of people taking books out and bringing them back, plus fines for late return. We don’t want any of that and it makes the whole thing way too complicated for elderly passengers, who may not be particularly computer literate. Not impressed at all!
In the end I spent a couple of hours messing about with Microsoft OneNote to see if I could create something that would do what we wanted. It didn’t look bad at all and I could copy and paste a lot of the information in which was a bonus. The problems came when I contacted the ship to ask if they had One Note on their system there. The answer was no! Grrrr. So I contacted the IT guys. It seems they can load One Note on the ship but it will cost about £60 for the licence. I was hoping for a free solution but it’s still better than the $250 the programme I was testing would cost. I’m not going to give up on a free solution just yet but at least I have a plan of sorts. We will see what Arabella thinks next week.
Late this afternoon the COO called me into his office. Worried was not the word. I sat in front of his desk with my fingers crossed under the table trying to compose my face for whatever was to come. Given the way things have been going, with people made redundant, a whole office closed blah, blah, blah, I was pretty sure I was going to be told my job was on the line and I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself by crying.
“There have been a lot of rumours flying around the office with all the changes going on so I’m bringing everyone in individually to tell them what is happening,” he said. My mind was working overtime I can tell you. Was the office closing? Was my job going? Turns out neither. The powers that be have decided to move all the cruise section to Southampton. Our office will be growing and the people who work in cruising and have lost their jobs in West Sussex will be offered the chance to relocate. It doesn’t mean my job is safe per se but it’s a lot safer than it was this morning for sure. More will probably be revealed when Arabella has had her meeting with the directors on Monday. Fingers still crossed but the blood is coming back into them a bit.
What with all the messing about with the library thing and then the meeting with the COO, I did pretty well on avoiding eating my snacks today which can only be good. Gigi offered me a lift home but she wasn’t leaving until about six. I thought about it but decided I’d rather walk home with the rest of Three Men in a Boat and get the extra exercise. I’m pretty proud of myself for that. At least the rain held off for the walk home. In fact there was a rather beautiful sky going on. All setting sun glowing under low cloud with a bit of silver lining at the top. It felt like a metaphor for the day.
