13th March

Its a Tuesday. I almost wish its Friday - its unlucky and if it was Friday at least I would then have the weekend to look forward to.
The trains are running well. I'm enjoying my book. 2nd part of Book 3 in the Game of Thrones series.

As I walk into the office Cherie tells me that we must find a laptop for one of the people in the office whose machine has been infected by a virus and who wants to work at home on the following day. After a 5 minute discussion it transpires that there is no such requirement. Silly waste of time and effort.

Were still trying to recover from the virus infection of our email system. A few machines have been hit and they generated a large number of emails which clogged up our system. Our IT team have been clearing these out. I agree to send out an email to all users warning them about this and suggesting that they change passwords (as well as telling them how to do that). The system crashes whilst I'm doing that,

Disaster has struck again! Our server room has lost power completely. We do various bits and pieces on it. The electricians are no longer on site. We all out a emergency one and he helps us get it back up and running. The guys who have been working with us have come back down from Nottingham and come up with some ideas on what we need to do.

The IT guys are great. They calmly figure out what needs to be and can be done. Cherie is good support and manages the interface with the management board. V useful. John is a bit obstructive and confuses the messages going out as he just listens to what the last person has to say and pushes it out as if it was gospel. I just wish that he would keep quiet, listen to everything being said,  pull the ideas together and then come up with a proposal for what happened. I've had four different views and still haven't figured out what's right. There are still some more pieces to be put into the puzzle.

Fred turns up and we figure what we'll do. I want to see two different supplies into the room. At first I meet resistance but when i explain that it gives us a fallback position if one input fails, people see the sense of it and its the strategy we aim for. We put a message out to people and arrange to shut the system down at 5pm.

I get a call from Richard telling me that he has come across a car we might be interested in. It sounds good and I say that I'll call him back to fix a viewing.

Our email system is back up for a while. I read through a stack of change requests from the contract manager. He has been quite backward at coming forward and has been a bit of a waste of space. I saw most of these and agreed them about 19 days ago but he has only now got round to issuing them. I also get one from the roofing guy who has messed us around and who wants more money for the work he has done. Oh well. We'll just have to see how that goes.