1. 100% mandatory
2. In Glasgow

And I decided to do it as a day trip. My four colleagues went up Tuesday afternoon, but I figured that since I live right next to the airport it was feasible to do it all in one day. It was, but it made for one long day.The shame of it is that I had never been to Scotland. Newcastle was the closest I ever got to the border. It always bugged me a bit that I had done a fair bit of globe-trotting in the past, visiting or passing through some pretty far-flung places but never set foot in Scotland. I can’t say that any more, but on the other hand I can’t exactly say I have seen much of it.

To make matters worse, I went by EasyJet both ways. They really have sucked all the joy out of flying haven’t they? I know that draconian (and possibly futile and pointless) security measures contribute to the misery, but EasyJet have certainly done their bit.

Arriving at Glasgow I took a taxi and was treated to a potted history of Paisley and had pointed out to me where Alex Ferguson was raised, where Billy Connolly used to work and where Robert the Bruce’s daughter fell off her horse. Really. I was also told about every ex-landmark we passed which had been earmarked at sometime as a site for Tesco. At least I got to see a little bit of the locality I suppose – though I suspect the meter was wired up to charge not only by the mile but also by the word. It would explain the size of the fare.

I had allowed a little bit of leeway in the schedule in case of small delays, but we actually took off a little early and made good time so I didn’t have to rush and arrived onsite just a few minutes after my colleagues. I may have been tired from the early start and the uncomfortable flight but at least I wasn’t hungover. They had all enjoyed a night on the town and the dubious delights of a haggis pakora at a local curry house.

The course details had 5pm as a finish time so I had decided not to risk booking the 6:30pm flight back just in case and went for the next one – 7:55pm. It turned out that the course finished early and we could have made that one after all as we told each other at regular intervals during our long loiter at the airport. To make it worse the flight back was a little late and I ended up back home at about 10pm.

So it was do-able, but I’m not sure I would want to do it again. It may be an internal flight, but I have to remember that Glasgow is further away from here than Brussels, Amsterdam or Dusseldorf. It is twice as far from home as Paris – a bit ironic because I could never do Paris as a day trip. Partly because of the time difference but also because you can’t fly there from Gatwick so and up going by train.

All day they have been herded around in groups between various induction events, carrying their company carrier bags full of leaflets about pension schemes or whatever. I’m now bracing myself for when they start getting sat down at a desk to work because I work in the IT department and there is a very real possibility that some of them have never seen MS Office 2000 and many of them will have forgotten what Windows XP looks like.

For ten years’ service we can get a presentation of crystal glasses or a (taxed) cash equivalent of £75.   I think I will go for the cash since we hardly ever drink and almost never drink at home – and even then it would be beer or wine.  I’m assuming the glasses are for spirits, which I’m not sure we even have in the place.

Not only that, we don’t have glass cabinets or mantlepieces where we could display such things, preferring an almost Bauhaus-like lack of ornaments.  I have a cut glass bowl presented by the council  for my time there and it has never been out of its box, so I know the £75 would be gone quickly while the glasses would last forever, but they would last forever in a box in the loft.

Anyway, I am much more excited about the other part of the email, which told me that I get an extra day on my holiday entitlement.  That really cheered me up today, and is a gift that keeps on giving.

Unfortunately I don’t hold out much hope for success.  None of it is new; some of the ideas have been suggested before, others have been tried, but it has never really taken and I think that some really deep cultural changes would be needed to make any difference.  The only difference now is that perhaps ever-rising fuel prices will give people more of an incentive.

Amongst the ideas are the usual suspects: staggering travel times, reducing bus and train fares for off-peak travel, home-working and videoconferencing.   I thik that one reason such ideas fail is the same reason that efforts to get people out of cars and onto public transport to ease congestion also fail – everyone says it is a good idea in principle, but they don’t want to do it themselves, they want everyone else to do it so they can continue driving without getting stuck in traffic jams.

Where I work we have a degree of flexitime, facilities for home-working, some concessions on buses and trains and yet the biggest problem on site is how hard it is to park if you arrive after 8:30.

Of course, if you work in a shop, factory, restaurant, warehouse, and lots of other places then homeworking is a non-starter as are choosing your own hours.  All these ideas are really aimed at office workers and are not aimed too much at the bosses who already have quite a bit of flexibility which they often use.  The problem lies with the lack of trust they put in their workers.

They often think that staff working at home will be dossing around, or they that staff who come in really early or really late will spend the hours they are at work alone dossing around.  I don’t know why they think theat – maybe that is what they do when they are working at home and assume everyone else will be the same?

The idea of rural hubs sounds interesting, but the details could be difficult.  Our company have a few satellite offices and some people work at the nearest site rather than their official base sometimes, but they are always in a company site with all the security that involves.  Would a bank be happy for its staff to be working in a local hot-desking place where they might be sitting next to somebody who works for a competitor or customer?

To suceed, such schemes would need a lot of planning and a lot of investment in telecoms infrastructure and by companies.  They would need some hefty servers to handle VPN traffic for a start.  They would probably want all the laptops encrypted which can add a couple of hundred to the cost of each PC.   It would pay off in the long run, but we have such short-term outlooks that it would be difficult to persuade companies to make the investments when the payback period might be ten years – or when they make the investment but the return is a benefit to society rather than to the company specifically – i.e. when the costs are easily quantifiable but the returns aren’t.

Government grants and incentives would help in that, except we are told there is no money for anything.  Except bombs of course.  We can always find the money to bomb Libya.

Cheaper off-peak fares might work, but only if they are significantly cheaper and only if those managerial suspicions are overcome.

I wonder if more success might come from getting entire companies to stagger their hours.  Like having company A work 7-3 while the companies on either side work 8-4 and 9-5.   I know that some companies in Crawley have changed their hours so that staff can avoid congestion, but there has been no element of co-ordination, just the odd firm finishing 20 minutes before all the other to beat the rush, which will only work until a few more firms do the same. But then that is market forces for you.

I’ll be interested to see how it works out even though I am officially disinterested because of my own situation.

Diego Garcian dancers at the CCAR international social evening

It is not that I am unsociable or anti-social, but as time goes on I do admit that I am more and more content with my own company.  I am happy enough to go out with friends but I don’t feel bad if I am spending a night in – and now that I have all my books, music and instruments together in one place that is more of a pleasure.  All of which is by way of explaining how unusual it was last week to find myself going out three nights in a row.All three events were different excuses for drinking and chatting, although I only actually had a drink on the third night, but thoroughly enjoyed all three.

First off was a night at a bowling tournament organised by somebody at work.  To be honest I am not great at bowling and have only been a few times in my life but went to make up the numbers and show some solidarity with the rest of the department.  We went to the Hollywood Bowl in Crawley, where we had booked every single lane for the evening, so quite a big evening.

When we started the first one of our team to go got what I believe is called a strike.  The second member of the team then also knocked all ten pins down first go.  Things were looking good when the third person did the same.  I rather ruined it when my first shot went down the left-hand gutter and the follow-up went straight down the right-hand gutter.  Things did get better after that, but not by much, and I ended up with a measly 52, which I am told is very, very bad.

In the second game I picked up a bit and my first three goes were two half-strikes and a strike.  Such competence couldn’t last for ever, but I did eventually end up with 122, which is at least respectable if nothing like the 199 one of my team-mates got in the first game.  Fortunately I am not competitive – I guess everybody guessed that when I stodd for the Labour party in Horsham anyway.

It was a fun sort of evening though, but I have to say that the Hollywood Bowl is looking a bit tired these days.  When it opened about ten years ago it was bright and shiny and state of the art, but now it looks a bit tatty.  All the display screens are huge CRTs with ten years’ worth of screen burn on them.  Our one was fuzzy and almost unreadable.  Sometimes our lane would take 5 minutes to think about whether to reset the pins and the whole place now looks no better than the old bowling alley it replaced, which was very old by the time it closed.

Friday night was the Ifield Scouts’ fund-raising quiz night.  I went with a couple of colleagues from work and an ex-colleague. There was the usual arguing about a couple of answers – none more heated than the topic of whether Smurfs were Dutch or Belgian.  Suffice to say we chose the wrong one and the chap we over-ruled is never going to let us hear the last of it.  It was all good fun, as quizzes generally are, and included some particularly nice cakes.

The last night out was the Crawley Campaign Against Racism’s international social evening.  This is usually an entertaining evening out, and this year was no exception.  Entertainment was provided by dancers from the town’s Diego Garcian community, music and dancing from the local Portugese Society, a couple of singers, a stand-up comedian and Mr. Chris Mullins performing solo on his bodhrun after reminding us all (yet again) that the largest ethnic group in town is the Irish.

I was quite impressed actually.  I had seen the drums up on the wall at his house so I knew he played, but I didn’t realise he could play well enough to hold together a solo performance.  Maybe next year we should get him to bring along a couple of friends with fiddles or something.

The great thing about these evenings is the chance to catch up with people I haven’t seen for ages, including a couple of people who left my company a year or two ago.  It was also a pleasant surprise to see George there.  George is somebody I ‘met’ on the Flickr photosharing website a few years ago.  We sometimes compare notes and comment on each others’ pictures, but I had only actually met him once before when we were both taking photos at a vintage truck event.

I felt a bit left out at the end, when everybody on my table won a prize in the raffle except me, but otherwise it was a fine time.

And now back to my hermit-like existance for a few nights, though there are a few seasonal events coming up to drag me out of the nest – not least of which is the Spizzenergi gig in Camden Town on the 2nd.

It all seems like a bit of a busman’s holiday but they do appear to enjoy it and from what I can see there are some very positive results.  All of the attention goes to people who fly out with supplies and get their hands dirty at disaster sites, but there is an increasing number of people making a valuable contribution at home in the evenings and at weekends.

The whole setup is very egalitarian and open source, with every bit of activity being blogged, tweeted, webcammed or put on a wiki and it looks like anybody can start their own event and plug into the CrisisCommons network.  My colleagues have been going to the London crisis camps, but anyone further afield can just start their own if one doesn’t exist.

For well-meaning techie types with time on their hands it might be a more productive use of spare time than writing snarky political blogs.

Farnham Close at midnight

Everything looks so clean and white outside so I don’t want to complain about the weather, but I think I may moan a bit about the timing of it.  It is only about 8 or 10 centimetres here at the moment.  Hardly Arctic conditions, though it has made our street impossible again.  This time our car is stranded on Tollgate Hill so I’ll get the bus into work in the morning – a minor inconvenience but not the end of the world.

There is a bus route that runs past the end of our street.  I won’t be using that because it doesn’t go wher I want to go – I will walk the mile to the shops to get a Fastway.  probably just as well.  I went for a walk at midnight and Tollgate Hill had not been gritted at all and looked pretty much snowed in.  Not sure if buses will be on that route tomorrow.   We are always told our steep road will never get gritted because priority goes to the main roads and bus routes – I wonder what the excuse is for not doing Tollgate Hill this time round?

What is really depressing is that this is sure to mean our rubbish will not get collected on Thursday.  Our recycling has not been collected for four weeks and if it gets missed this week we might have to wait another two weeks.  The recycling bin filled up ages ago and we have now got fed up of having tins and paper piling up indoors so we are going to stop recycling until the council start collecting it.

All that is just nuisance though.  The real problem for me is work.  We have a VIP visitor coming down from London and the various communications departments have spent all week setting up product displays in the atrium of our building – we even have an aircraft in there!   I don’t know what the main train line and the A23/M23 is like  but it is now looking likely the visit will have to be cancelled.

If only the snow had held off for a day everything would have been fine.

Unusually for me, I have a big pile of work in my bag: more than enough to keep me busy for a day at home, but I can’t take that easy option just in case our visitor can make it after all.  Mind you, if that happens I may find myself being the only one there to greet them…  so many of my colleagues come in from the coast, or from Surrey.

Tollgate Hill at midnight. Lots of abandoned cars - even more than last time.

We saw the picture of the plane, nose down in the snow, and were more than a little concerned.  Was anyone hurt? we wondered.  There is no sound on the TV feed on these screens, but Jim saw the banner text going across it and passed on the news “all passengers were removed safely”.  While we were all breathing a sigh of relief he followed up with “but they’ll want their pound back!” and hilarity ensued.

I guess you had to be there, but it really tickeld me.

I will be very upset if the same thing happens at work that happened in February: on the first snowy day some of us made it in, but many did not.   A few more made it in the next day.  The next week we were told by the company that anybody who did not make it in on the first day did not have to use a day or their holiday entitlement.

In other words, those who stayed at home in the warm got a free day off that those of us who struggled in did not get.  Or to look at it another way, those of us who made a conscious decision to live near their work (or work near their home) were penalised while those who decide to live miles away in the middle of the countryside were rewarded.

With Fridays being a half day at our place, I expect a lot of absentees.  The fact that a lot more staff now have laptops with remote access on them will contribute too, as a lot of them will decide to work from home.  I’m a bit tempted as a couple of hours of my day are allocated to a telephone conference that I could just as easily dial into from bed.   If I had thought to bring the number home with me.

I expect all my department to make it in though – we are all going out together after work for a departmental xmas dinner in Horsham.  Fingers crossed that everything will be tropical again by then.

Peter Mandelson at this year's party conference - still waiting for photos from his visit to Crawley

Today was the long-awaited official opening of the new site where I work.  Personally I have been in the new buildings for just over a year, but the industrial building with all the labs and test and manufacturing facilities took longer to finish, and now the company has decided that enough of our operations have moved in that it is valid to get officially opened, and it was Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade, Lord President of the Council, Politician of the Year and Professor of  the Dark Arts who came along to do the honours.

As you can imagine, this caused more than a little excitement and disruption in the workplace.The way our company is organised, there are several individual companies or divisons of the group sharing the site, so all of their managing directors were on-site, as well as the overall managing director for the UK, with HQ and divisional PR people all in a flap.  They had a carefully worked-out plan for the visit, with timings for every little thing (eg “0952-0954 – refreshments offered”) which all got scuppered from the start when the train from London got delayed by half an hour.

Part of the schedule was a meeting with the local trade union reps.  I was really glad to see that included on the itinerary: Labour ministers and MPs visiting a workplace should go out of their way to meet the unions, who are often an integral part of making a company function properly.

When everything started to to run late we fully expected our allotted time to get seriously curtailed or even bumped completely.  We had an eight-minute time slot, which does not sound like a lot, but considering the VIP schedule included a demonstration of about 8 major products in a 16-minute slot, it was quite generous.  It was also the last item on the tour so ripe for getting dropped.

In the end the VIP party did still spend some time with us.  Lord Mandelson seemed to be genuinely impressed by the range and scale of our operations.  He asked us whether industrial relations were good at our company (they are), and we took the opportunity to remind him how many local jobs are directly affected when the government moves a major project like the new aircraft carriers or T45 destroyers to the right or scales it down.

I think we were preaching to the converted though.  Hope so anyway.  Lord M was also very accommodating in posing for a few special photographs, especially when our local MP told him I am a parliamentary candidate.

The biggest surprise was when our little union delegation got to the appointed place we found a great big display sign for Unite the Union.   We didn’t even know we had one.  Must have been the work of the corporate PR people. In itself that speaks volumes about the good industrial relations we have – or have we just got them well trained?

I think it was a good day for everybody.  The senior management got their site openend and were able to remind the government about what a big player we are in government work, the union got its profile raised a little, I got some photos that might come in handy for my election campaign, our local MP got to bring yet another senior minister to the town, and Mandelson himself got to meet all us nice people and had refreshments offered for two minutes.

Bit of a bummer having to wear a suit on a Friday, but such are the small sacrifices I will make for the movement.