Wednesday, 26 March 2008

Although ultimately quite satisfying, this is not a day I will remember with great fondness. I arrived at the office at 7:30 am determined to finish off a first draft of the Community Development strategy for which I already had a structure, a few pages of notes and a head full of half-formed ideas.

I had a mid-morning meeting with our Auditors, our Treasurer John Casstles, and Maria (Office Co-ordinator). Everything seems set fair for a straightforward audit. And I had a few interruptions to help sort out some difficulties over the installation of new telephone extensions pending the arrival of new staff.

Apart from this I worked steadily on the draft Community Development Strategy and by about 1:00 pm I was close to completing. I was pretty happy with things and I clicked on the Save icon for the twentieth time. Immediately I began to curse myself. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. Instantly. All morning I had been working on the draft direct on my memory stick. Bad move. Very bad move. After twenty nightmare minutes of futile computer forensics, I accepted that I had lost my morning’s work. All of it. The amended revised and renamed file had utterly disappeared. All trace gone. Five or six wasted hours. Bugger.

A lesser man would have cried, sworn, abused some colleagues, sought out a cat to kick, stamped on his memory stick, thrown his dummy, and taken an axe to his PC. All these things seemed very attractive and in fact I did use some rather course language to myself. But in the end I spent perhaps fifteen minutes in a semi-trance, and then just went back to the beginning and started over. What else could I do?

I was soon interrupted by a flurry of e-mails from HCC asking if I had yet written to the chairs of the ten District LSPs in Hertfordshire. I had not sent the letter. But I had drafted it and sent it to HCC nearly two weeks ago asking for comments. But HCC now wanted the letter sent tout de suite to raise the issue of the Compact and to promote HCC’s 7 April conference.

About 7:00 pm I finally finished a draft of the Community Development Strategy. I clicked Save with some trepidation and was relieved that the document survived this complex procedure.

Meanwhile, the books I had ordered from Amazon had arrived and I took home CRM for Dummies for some night-time reading.