The future’s bright, the future’s orange

Posted on October 16, 2006
Filed Under Dungarvan, Outside Ireland, The North, books, characters, the future, work | 1 Comment

I haven’t posted for a few days because I was away in Dungarvan, where I have a second home (sounds posh when I say it like that!). My shiny, super-duper new phone wouldn’t talk to the internet so I was unable to post anything. One of the highlights was watching the Dungarvan Harbour Sailing Club take their boats out of the harbour for the winter. Traffic on the quayside was a bit chaotic, there were no Gardai in sight and they had a fairly blase attitude to health and safety but it was quite good fun. The second highlight was finally catching up on a Simon Kernick novel called Relentless. As you can imagine from the title, it’s a blood and guts, crime novel where everyone gets their come-uppance.

I spent 6 hours today dealing with just one client. They’ve only got about 15 staff yet 5 of them felt the need to phone me independently and give me the verbals about totally different things. Sigh. Eventually I just had to walk out for awhile to remind myself that the sky was blue and the air wasn’t.

I’m going to HQ in the UK tomorrow for a couple of days and it’s going to be difficult. I have to be nice to various people while constructively criticising them and their teams. Then there’s the evening dinner with ‘smart casual’ attire where the politics and mutterings happen. Spooks is on TV in a few minutes so I should be able to pick up a few lessons on how to lie to people!! Although Spooks doesn’t tell you how to cope with 6.30am flights and 11.30pm pints of beer.

Apart from today, Thursday is my only day in Dublin this week but it’s not going to be a respite from the madness. Once I get advice from HQ, I’m probably going to sack one of my guys when I come back. H.R. is a bit touchy-feely about these things, I guess they have to be, but I hope they can give me the advice I want! It’s really weird firing someone I hired.

Later in the week, I’m up North again, in the Coleraine area. Now that will be fun. My staff in the North can be identified as belonging to a particular religion/grouping. Because of my name and accent (I’ve lived outside Ireland for a long time), I’m lucky/unlucky because it’s hard to pin a label on me. The meeting on Friday should be fun because the guy is ‘as black as your boot‘. He’s also a Hun and a left-footer (I believe two women can be ‘left-footers’ as well but in a totally different context). This is obviously derogatory but I don’t know why. He’s also a bit of a bully and that’s not derogatory.

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