Day 82 – 8 May 2014
The Council has invested in some pool cars. I mentioned them back in day 47. There are half a dozen at County Hall and they are there as an alternative to using your own car so that money can be saved. The mechanism is very clever. Once you are registered you go online to reserve the vehicle and the card that you are issued with opens the car and allows you to drive away. The telemetric record all of your driving activities and can charge the service as appropriate.
Unfortunately there weren’t any cars available today, which is a shame as I could have really done with one. Due to a clash of circumstances I started out in Peterlee to visit a BSF school then drove up to Newcastle for this month’s North East ICT Managers (NEICT) meeting followed by a trip to Morpeth for a presentation. By this point I was close to home which would have been ideal except I then had to go back to Durham for a meeting and then onto Crook for the Three Towns Area Action Partnership to present the deployment plan for Digital Durham.
I know that I keep saying this but there really is no substitute for sitting in front for your customers and my meeting with the school first thing brought it all home again. It is also interesting how different all of the Heads are in terms of their personality and their focus. Building a relationship with each of them is of paramount importance.
I managed to arrive at Newcastle for the NEICT half an hour early. Graham had told me but it just slipped my mind. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one and that several of us had arrived at different times. It’s a good job we weren’t running a flexi meeting, we all put the time in but it would have achieved very little.
The meeting was very good. We talked about how much we’d all enjoyed Dynamo14 and agreed to invest in some new apprentices and coordinate their activities across the region. These are exciting times and it feels great to be investing in our future.
By the way, well done to Sunderland last night, I am delighted that they are staying up in the Premier league and am more than happy for them to be 17th.
Learning points for today: Book the pool cars earlier; If you’ve explained something to me and I haven’t understood it then you haven’t explained it, you’ve just told me; I must listen to what Graham tells me and; we need to eat our own dog food.
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – could have done without the driving.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 