Shhhh! Someone may be listening.
So I didn’t have too much chance yesterday to get stuff typed up, that said for those of you with any vague interest in the road traffic accident of my professional life. I spent the vast majority of yesterday either checking cameras or quietly talking to people. By quietly talking I mean of course having absolutely no OFFICIAL record of my conversations. Instead of having several swathes of incident reports I now have something akin to a rough idea of what went wrong.
Let us be suitably polite and use some anonymity, we have licensee x and licensee y. To be referred to as LX and LY from here on in. LX is a rather pleasant chap who has only in the past couple of months gained his licensee status, quite new to the whole M+E thing and originally an inhabitant of South Africa. LY is a bit more experienced and hails from the antipodean joys of Australia. Both LX and LY are rather nice and on the whole pretty much everyone gets on with them. So when I got a chance to have a chat with them about their apparent disappearing act I was looking forward to terms such as “The goat ate my uncle”, or “I was suddenly abducted by aliens”.
Thus I was rather surprised by the answer for where they had meandered off to. Please bear in mind that LX and LY work as contractors for an external firm whose name is related almost directly to a navigational device which relies on the electromagnetic shell of the Earth for its functionality. This may or may not be the same firm that was up for US hearings with respect to screwing the US army in Iraq for catering costs and indeed I have run out of circumlocutions. So anyway that’s whom the work for. And both LX and LY and I chatted independently of each other and well, they both came out with exactly the same story without prompting…
The story being that they had been instructed to head over to another site that their company was running the catering for and manage that one as there had been some “staff shortages”. The argument from their more senior members of staff being that with 20+ members of a catering team on site already they probably didn’t need to have a licensee or two on site anyway and that they could be more useful elsewhere…
Hmmm… LX also admitted to the suitably dumb arse manoeuvre involving a tannoy and openly admitting his awareness of recreational drug use. So at the moment we have two relatively junior members of staff admitting cock up and well having been directly instructed to leave the site. Apparently there was an email.
Yup, that’s right apparently there is an email confirming this. Well more accurately there _was_ an email but it has been deleted according to LX. Now most of us jaded types would be quietly applauding the coherence of the story but also about ready to rip into little pieces the “its disappeared” line of argument. The problem being I really don’t think LX is telling porkies. So After a bit more prodding and weedling I did discover that he wasn’t the only one with his password and logon details. Actually, the alleged individual who had told them to shuffle over to another site had those details too….
Now all I have to do is contact the IT department and make sure the back up on the server is safe (it will be). Then, well then I get to see which way the house of cards is falling.
So last night another astounding debacle into the world of how not to control large numbers of people. I had scooted early anyway but a couple of fun phone calls had me heading back into town as far as London Bridge before being told not to bother. So a hint of mild annoyance this morning. Chatted to one of my bods last night and found out that the H+S man had apparently started to smell blood over the state of play and was stood at the front door clicking people in and out of the building. How fun! An estimated 850 people going into two rooms whose total capacity is, 360. I get the feeling that there will be tears before bedtime today.
He ho, and off to work we go.