Tuesday, 23 October 2007

The Big Move

Today we all moved offices, or at least eight of our ten members of staff swapped offices. It was a day of some chaos.

People have an impressive capacity to use physical labour to strengthen social bonds. I’ve noticed this often, but the rigour of this deep-seated impulse always impresses itself on me. Everyone worked really well to get the moves completed, but I particularly noticed the contributions of our three youngest members of staff: Farzana, Maria and Saud.

In the midst of all this, I was liaising with the office of our local MP Claire Ward to make arrangements for a visit tomorrow down to Westminster. I also spoke with Moreen Pascal about some work on equalities she is undertaking for the Herts Infrastructure Consortium. And I enjoyed a long telephone conversation with Paul Ruskin, Cambridgeshire’s IT guru, about IT in Hertfordshire. One of the projects I am working on is to sketch out the major lines of an IT strategy for the voluntary sector in Hertfordshire. And then Angelo (our technical IT chap) arrived to check the PCs and talk about IT strategies. Angelo and I abandoned the work at the office and went off for an early lunch to talk. As ever, Angelo had some excellent ideas and we talked through all sorts of possibilities.

Back at the office, I moved computers to their new locations while Angelo sorted out some trickier IT problems.

By the end of the day, everything looked pretty much back to normal apart from my office. Wonderful Maria had offered to stay and help me sort things out, but I felt I really needed to do it myself to make sure I know what files and papers I had.

Amid all the debris, I met in the evening with Matt Cadman. Matt is the driving force behind Watford's community radio station Fresh FM. He has big ambitions for the future but he needs support and particularly he needs to gather around him the right people with the right skills.