Posted by The Hooded Hood on November 10, 2001 at 12:56:54:
Folks may recall that I had a minor difficulty with an e-mail virus (sent in a letter from the local council, as a matter of interest). Thanks to Donar for his assitance, but actually within twenty minutes of talking to Ian (Improbable Aardvark) Clark, Ford International's anti-virus guy, he had e-mailed me a specific programme to wipe the problem from my machine, tidy up after it, and make me a cup of coffee with chocolate chip cookies. It just took me a little while to get round to running it. By then I was embroiled in all kinds of work-related stuff which had to take priority over leisure pursuits. Some of you may know that I run a mental health charity, and a few of you may know that thie job entails me sometimes having to champion clients who are getting a bad deal from "the system". This role sometimes gets me into trouble, usually with powerful people who have the ability to affect the funding granted to my organisation to exist. At the moment this is particularly acute, with over half our income this year gone or under threat, and our ability to pay staff and continue services equally threatened. What this means is that I'm struggling to keep paying some staff on a weekly basis (yesterday I wasn't able to sort out the money to keep two staff on for next week until 10pm), and that's diverting a lot of my time and energies. To make things worse, one of my two principal staff members has chosen to retire, meaning I've had to take up his workload as well as my own (can't afford to replace him). The other principal staff member has written to the board of directors and anyone else she can think of suggesting I should be sacked and that she could do the job better. She's refusing to impliment any changes to service, so next week I'll have to institute disciplinary proceedings, which I have very rarely ever had to use in my career as a manager, and which are always painful. The situation's a whole lot more complicated than I'm describing here, but I'm sure you get the flavour. I have never had a situation this difficult or stressful to deal with in my work life, and that's saying something. Anyway, you'll hopefully understand why I've been mostly off-line longer than expected. I have been able to keep up by downloading material at work, but for the main part I've brought it home to read so I haven't been able to answer much. I'll amend that later, since there have been a few interesting pieces posted in the last few days. On a lighter note, I took the family (including my mother!) to see Harry Potter today, and was favourably impressed on the whole. Excellent visuals, nicely and accurately adapted story, and a generally fun plot. It was eerily reminiscent of English public school life from the time I was at school, although we had rather less broomsticks and no girls. It even LOOKED like my old school inside, and I'm sure Malfroy, Goyle, and Crabbe were in the class above me. I had an interesting e-mail from Steve Englehart this week advertising his Christmas present to the world, an entirely-free 25-part children's story by him and Joe Staten which he's putting online at steveenglehart.com It looks fun, so check it out. Well, back to the business of catching up with all the stuff I need to reply to, including Dancer's kiss-and-tell revelation over on the AMB. *sigh* IW