Thursday, 7 December 2006

Watery encounters of the first kind

When does a puddle become a flood? I drove to work this morning through torrential rain. Driving to the back of WCVS’s offices along the romantic-sounding “Service Road Q” I encountered such extremely large puddles that I genuinely feared my car would stall. Fortunately I survived a watery disaster. For now.

After arrival at 7:00 am, I was soon working on our Reaching Communities bid. A check of my e-mails revealed that Three Rivers CVS had received a rejection for their bid to Reaching Communities. I felt awful for our close neighbours, but tried to put it out of my head. There were one or two interruptions over continuing problems on the network (and to check and authorise the December salary payments) but I made good progress. Around 10:15 I paused to check whether my morning’s meeting at Bushey Hall School was at 11:00 or 11:30 and was mortified to discover that it had started at 10:00 so telephoned my profuse apologies.

Watery encounters of the second kind

Shortly after, I left for a meeting at Nine Lives Furniture in Rickmansworth - and the heavens opened. I quite enjoy a heavy downpour when I’m safely in the dry, and I am pleased to report that the rain miraculously stopped shortly before I reached Rickmansworth: I had escaped the day’s second brush with damp disaster.

Queen’s School

From Nine Lives, I rushed off to Queen’s School to meet the Kerry, the Deputy Head and Connexions co-ordinator. She seemed very personable and a no-nonsense sort of woman; so naturally I liked her. I was there to introduce myself (as a new Connexions contract manager) and Farzana as a new Personal Advisor working at Queens.

From Queen’s I hurried back to the office, and worked further on our bid – ever conscious that the deadline was less than 24 hours away. I had a brief meeting with Anne and Vanessa to plan the final few stages to getting our application completed. Anne and I ploughed on while Vanessa and Sue devoted their energies to preparing our conference room. Despite the difficulties of the past week, I think everyone felt a real buzz about the office.

21 hours and counting

Then we received a DVD that the police wanted shown at the Sunflower Centre meeting we were to host the next day. We had no DVD player, and so had to set up a PC and projector. Except we had no PC with a DVD drive, and so I spent a fruitless hour or so trying to download decoding software; all the while wondering how I would complete the budget forecasts to accompany the Reaching Communities bid (deadline for posting was now “21 hours and counting”). Then I remembered that a laptop I had at home ought to have a DVD player and I hatched a plan: I would leave Anne in the office collating the remainder of the bid, and I would go home to check out the laptop there. If it worked; fine. If not, I would bring in the home DVD player. And after doing this I would spend a few hours working on the budget, and then get into work early the next morning to finish off the bid and set up the projector for the meeting.

Watery encounters of the third kind

But when I arrived home at 8:00 pm I found the house in some disarray: my water-borne disaster had finally arrived.

About the time that Jackie and I left for work in the morning, the ball-cock in our header tank had failed. By the evening, the tank had been overflowing for about eight hours. The slow motion deluge had passed through my son Bobby’s bedroom and through the airing cupboard, then down into the living room through the ceiling rose, and into the kitchen through the stud-wall partition: wallpaper peeled off the walls, carpets squelched underfoot and stored bed lined was wet through with filthy water.

Having arrived home earlier than me, my step-son Bryan (18) had acted quickly to turn off the stopcock, and Jackie had contacted a plumber, an electrician and the insurance company. But meanwhile, there was no electricity and no heating. With an inexorable inevitability, we got in Fish’n’Chips and sat around cheerfully talking about the Blitz and the Three Day Week. All the while, I fretted over arrangements for the coming day.

By about 10:30, an emergency plumber and electrician had finally restored essential services, and I was able to resume work about 11:00 after Jackie and Bryan set off to bed.

14 hours and counting

Fortunately, the laptop had no difficulty running the DVD so one problem at least was quickly resolved. I then addressed the difficulty of how to display seven different budgets, each running over five years, on one side of A4 paper. I was fast running out of time to resolve this problem that had perplexed me on and off for several weeks: the deadline was now 14 hours and counting.

Around midnight, I had one of those Eureka! moments and finally saw the solution. I will not attempt to explain my thinking here: while I consider it an elegant and creative solution, anyone else will doubtless think: Obvious! why was that so difficult, dummy? and that will rather spoil the moment for me.

By 2:00 in the morning, I was fast asleep with the alarm set for 6:00.