Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Dull, dull, dull

Hello again, welcome back. Sorry about the delay. I was talking a break from the internet over the holidays. Speaking of which how were yours, good I hope.

Now, however, the holidays are over and it’s back to work. This is the reason for the rather downbeat title of the first blog of the new year I’m afraid. Work. Not my job per se. I want to emphasise that. I actually enjoy my job for the most part. The problem is work, or rather the lack of it.

I work for a consultancy, this means the work generally comes in peaks and troughs. We’re either rushed off our feet or scrabbling round for work, but there’s always something to be getting on with. This first week back though I’ve been experiencing something new. Nothing to do. Not constant, I’ve been able to scrape together the odd hours work here and there, but there have been stretches, such as the whole of yesterday afternoon, where I’ve had literally no work to do. It is dull.

I did all the things I was supposed to do in this unlikely event. When there was no lovely profit making project work to do, I did admin and business management. When this ran out, I asked my bosses for work, I rang round the company, other departments, other offices, asking for work, I rang customers to try and rustle up some work. Nothing.

I then moved on to personal development. I gave my self some training, learned a few new tricks to deal with flood water. I spent some time training some minions (I like to call the juniors that because it gives me a happy face, it’s a good thing really, imagine if I used my powers for evil and got real minions, scary). Then nothing.

Because I look after our teams resource plan now (remember, I told you back in week 3) I know I’m not alone, because I rang round the company and outside, I know it’s a simple case of there’s not much work out there at the moment, but there’s several promises on the horizon.

I read the paper. This is where I start to deviate from the staff handbook approach on how to deal with a lack of work. I played monopoly on excel. It’s a great little spreadsheet I found years ago. If you want it, send me your email address, I’ll forward it to you. It helped pass the time.

In the end though there’s no denying that the new work year has started dull and is putting a severe dint in my shinny new optimistic approach to 2009. Hopefully it will change for the better soon. In the meantime I’ve decided to use any wasted time on other things. Hopefully I’ll put out a couple of extra blogs over the next few days and catch up so that at the end of the year there are 52 things a week. That would be nice.

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