In the hills it’s an overcoat colder.
Come by, see me…
If big things, life things, are waves at your door,
Come by, see me…
Come grab a sleep on my floor.
No more courting the squall…

Monday

Woken rudely at 6:30 by a request to be allowed to go downstairs and watch TV, which I denied. Got up not long after 7 and had everyone dressed and eating breakfast at about 8am, which seems miraculously early by recent standards. The good start to the day lasted until about 9:30am when I was pinged on Slack to ask why I wasn’t in a meeting I hadn’t accepted. The answer of “I’m in a different meeting” wasn’t well received, even though the organiser hadn’t actually checked whether I was free before sending me the invitation on Friday afternoon. My mood wasn’t helped by the next meeting being cancelled at late notice when one of the key attendees didn’t show, nor by the frustration at being unable to give one of the vendor employees joining my team any work, because somehow he hasn’t been given access to our systems, and no-one can agree on whose fault it is – the resourcing team are blaming the access team, and vice versa.

More meetings after lunch, including three that ran together and all overran, even when I gave the other attendees plenty of notice. I might have to start just pulling the plug at end time; while I can’t help disparate people inviting me to different discussions one after the other, I can at least be brutal about the fact that they’re being rude to others who also need my time. Pottered in the garden after dinner; something, probably one of the local squirrels, has been digging up my carrot seedlings. Grr.

Tuesday

Not quite such a great start to the day as yesterday; by 8:45 the kids were still in pyjamas, but not too terrible. Straight into a discussion with one of my team about how to proceed with an issue he’d had; told him to park it and move on, it’s taken up way too much time already. Straight after standup, another question, this time about how to get a piece of information from one system to configure a dependant one. Architecture meeting was half the usual length, but twice as much trouble as usual; I’ve been pushing back on work my team don’t have time to even consider and someone’s been riled up as a result.

The afternoon was where it all started to come apart; as a follow on from the issues raised in the morning, D and I had a meeting with the architects requesting the work. Turns out that despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I couldn’t give an answer for when the work will be done, she’s already promised someone very senior that we’ve agreed a delivery date. To say I was absolutely livid was an understatement. Fortunately I think it’s going to backfire on her, most likely incredibly badly. Closely following in the horror stakes was a meeting which I declined to attend, believing it to be a waste of my time; D decided to go and was apoplectic to discover that certain members of other teams were arguing against us behind our back; there’ll be fireworks later there too, I’m sure.

Finished up the evening on the usual Tuesday night FaceTime call, which went on rather later than I should have let it. Oops. My only excuse was that I was enjoying myself.

Wednesday

Despite not going overboard on the beer last night, woke with a splitting headache which didn’t respond well to paracetamol. Got the kids dressed and breakfasted and settled in to the first call of the day, a four-hour cloud security review call which is itself the first of three. That went reasonably well; turns out we’re already implementing a lot of best practice.

Lunch break was decent, marred only by a cry of “Can you have a look at the camera, Dad? There’s a big black line on the screen…”, which heralded the fact that one of the kids has hit it (hard, it’s meant to be shockproof) against a solid object; after turning it off and then on again it’s stopped focusing completely. Argh. I’ve ordered them a cheap replacement from Amazon and told them that the next time they’ll pay for a new one themselves. Attended a bunch of meetings in the afternoon, which were mostly productive.

Finished up the day with another father/son bike ride, managing about six and a half miles in our hour. Not what I’d call intense exercise, but good for the mind at least. Got to bed early, hoping to make up some of the previous night’s sleep deficit. Hah.