Frustrations, meetings and spreadsheets

4 – 7 February 2015

Wednesday morning started off well enough. Disappointingly, I didn’t walke to the banket of white I’d hoped for, just bitter cold and clouds that were pretty enough but held no snowy promise. The walk to work was brisk to say the least but the light was good enough to make me stop on Cobden Bridge for a couple of photos. The colours of the boats and houses seemed unnaturally bright and the old boatyard almost gleamed. A couple of swans were mulling about by the little boats and a large barge was slowly making its way towards the bridge while the sun gradually climbed above the trees and houses on the east of the river.

Things took a turn for the worse when I got to the office. There were four members of staff off sick. In an office as small as ours that is a disaster. With so few of us at work there was little chance to do anything but answer the phones and some of the calls were annoying to say the least.

One man rang to complain about the voice announcements on our new buses.
“I want to complain about the stupid, noisy voice on my bus this morning,” he shouted, being far more irritating than any bus announcement could ever be.
“They’re designed to help the visually impaired,” I told him. “They’ve been very well received.”
“Well, I don’t care about that,” he said, “it’s like having bloody Stephen Hawkins telling you where you are every ten seconds and he can’t even pronounce the place names properly. I know where I bloody well am and I don’t see why blind people can’t just ask the driver to tell them when to get off like they’ve always done. It gave me a bleeding headache.”

Then there was the lady who wanted to speak to the managing director. As I was the most senior member of staff in the office she eventually agreed to let me take her complaint. I rather wish she hadn’t. Her main problem was dogs on buses.
“They shouldn’t be allowed,” she said, “and I want something done about it or I’m writing to my MP.”
“Our policy is to allow dogs on buses at the driver’s discretion,” I told her. “I’m sorry if you find this upsetting but almost all bus companies have the same policy.”
“Well, it’s not safe,” she carried on. “What if a dog bites a child? And they sit on the floor getting in the way. If you’re going to allow dogs on the bus you should have cages to put them in.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way but that’s just not possible,” I said, trying hard to be patient and keep the irritation from my voice. “We could hardly ask a blind man to put his guide dog into a cage, even if there was room on the bus to have them.”
“I don’t see why not, and, if you can’t have cages then you shouldn’t let dogs on the bus, even guide dogs. They’re nothing but a dangerous nuisance. There’s a man who gets on my bus every day and he has a horrible dog, it keeps looking at me and he always sits by me too. The man looks dirty and smells like he’s been drinking alcohol. He talks to me and that dog just sits there looking at me. It shouldn’t be allowed.”
Call me judgmental if you like but I don’t think it’s the dogs that are the problem here.

We all seemed to be taking a lot of calls like that. It was hard not to get annoyed with so many time wasters when we could see calls in the queue that could be important. The stress levels were very high.

If anything it was colder on Thursday morning. Still, some of the primroses that shouldn’t really be flowering yet had managed to survive the snow, so that put a smile on my face. When I got to the Millennium flats a plane was coming in to land. There were swans by the slipway, completely unconcerned by the noise but the gulls were flapping about wildly.

The mood in the office hadn’t improved much overnight especially as the Regional Customer Service Manager was in the office holding one to one performance meetings that made everyone feel on edge and nervous, especially the newer staff members who’d never had one to ones before. Everyone was in a flap and I spent a lot of time when I should have been working reassuring people that the performance meetings were for their benefit, a chance to have their say. I’m not sure they believed me.

Each morning seemed to be colder than the last although there’d been no frost or ice. The chill factor was coming from the wind and I was glad of my flappy eared hat on Friday morning.  When I got to the Millennium Flats I stopped for a moment to take a picture of some gulls, or maybe they were pigeons I couldn’t tell, sitting in a tree overlooking the water.

The Regional Customer Service Manager was back in the office for the last few performance meetings so everyone was still on edge and flustered. Then there was a bit of a debacle about the holiday roster. We have a big planner on the wall with everyone’s holidys written on it and another, smaller one, on Jess’ desk. Unfortunately, the two were not the same and the Regional Customer Service Manager wasn’t too happy about this. Jess wasn’t there to ask which was correct so I was given the task of going through everyone’s personnel files to check what holiday they’d had, what they’d booked and make a definitive spreadsheet with fancy formulas to make sure it was all worked out correctly so we knew how many hours holiday everyone had left.  “You can do it tomorrow, when it’s quiet,” the RCSM said brightly before she finally left us.

For the second Saturday running I went in early to open the office. apart from the getting up early part it isn’t really much of a hardship because I quite enjoy the quiet walk in the dark when everyone else is alseep. It might have been more enjoyable if it wasn’t the coldest morning of the week, so cold my fingers actually hurt even with my gloves on. The tide was  very low and this, combined with the icy wind, made the river very choppy. The almost full moon reflected in it as I crossed Cobden Bridge. Lights were just beginning to come on in some of the houses as people woke up and, along with the lights along the moorings, they twinkled on the water and wet mud. As I stood watching a train trundled over the railway bridge.

By the time I reached the river again, by the Millennium Flats, a layer of peachy pink had appeared on the eastern horizon and the mud flats looked like an impressionist painting. Despite the cold I couldn’t resist a quick detour onto the slope by the Boardwalk for one last look at the river and sky before I went into the warm office.

The vast majority of my day was spent working on the holiday planner. When I was looking for work I took an Excel course which came in quite handy with the formulas, as did my experience of creating the ship’s entertainemnt schedule for Silver Helm. The difficult part was finding all the information and working out which parts of the two different paper planners were correct. It’s a good job I like spreadsheets.