Monday, 4 December 2006

Monday monday

7:00 Monday morning, I was in the office backing up everyone’s documents and settings ready for the new network installation. Angelo called about 8:30 to say he was leaving home with the rebuilt server.

Around 10:00, people started heading off to St Thomas’s Church for one of our regular networking lunches, capably run by Sue and Anne with Margaret (one of our trustees) co-ordinating the food. Shortly after leaving, Sha-Lee telephoned to ask me if I knew I had a flat tyre. Sadly for me, I took little notice as I was too preoccupied with the immediate business of servers and networking lunches. Anyone who read my blog of 12 November will know something about this.

Although the atmosphere at WCVS’s networking lunches is very informal, the format is fairly rigid: brief introductions, followed by an external speaker addressing an issue of the moment, then lunch, and finally a presentation from one of the local groups. More than forty people had booked to attend today’s event. Last time out, we had a very well received presentation from the Woodside Community Motorcycle Project; this time around there were presentations from the British Arrhythmia Nurses Association and from Watford Borough Council about their new grant programmes. I had fully expected to attend, but we need to resolve our IT issues and so I sent my apologies for the lunch.

As the networking event was starting, Angelo was installing our rebuilt server and testing the settings.

Office space

At 2:30 I met with Shamim from CAB and Adele from Relate. We looked at the prospects of WCVS taking over vacant space in the building they currently share, but it is clearly a non-starter. Even grasping every opportunity for sharing office space and services, and using every space-saving gadget that has ever been patented, we could not all squeeze into the building. The three of us had a productive talk through current local issues and future strategic needs, and an hour later I returned to WCVS.

Angelo had completed his immediate tasks on the server and was returning to Walthamstow. I busied myself testing some of the settings. In the middle of the afternoon, just after darkness fell, Sue returned asked me what I had done about my puncture. Oh dear. Calls to the AA and to local garages soon revealed that I had left it too late to get things sorted out today.

Fortunately, at this point I had an appointment with a chap called Barry, who wanted advice on an ambitious development project he was planning. He waited patiently while I finished off my final calls, and then we had a very interesting chat about his plans, charitable status, community interest companies, the Hertfordshire Community Foundation, social enterprise, fundraising, and so on. As Barry left, Sue asked me if I would like to borrow her family’s spare car for the evening. Such kindness is not to be spurned, and I gratefully (and, I hope graciously) accepted. Sue chauffeured me to her house on the outskirts of Watford and (after meeting her partner and a grand-daughter, and politely declining the offer of tea) I took charge of a 2 litre Citroen diesel.

It always takes a while to become familiar with a new car. This was very different – a diesel automatic with a ferocious brake pedal - and it was dark and raining. I tootled back to WCVS as slow as the other traffic would allow me.

Deployment

At 6:30, I returned to the office. One of our rooms was being used by Mind in SW Herts for a counselling session. I got down to the serious work of reinstalling MS Office on the first of our ten workstations. The counselling session finished at 7:30 and our guests departed. My first trial installation of MS Office still hadn’t completed.

Finally, at 8:00, the installation did complete – with an error msg. Angelo tackled the error msg while I double-checked that all documents were backed up on the local PCs, and then disjoined the PCs from the now redundant old domain. We then recreated a new MS Office installation file, and finally at 10:00 pm we began deploying this across the wireless network.

Only one computer didn’t want to play and that was Sue’s. I tried hard, but it was determined not to join in with its other little friends. I left the office well after midnight feeling some trepidation about whether the deployment would be completed by the next morning, whether the new installation file would work, and whether I would successfully complete the journey home in a strange car.