Monday, November 15, 2004

Whoops

There was a big accident on the motorway over the weekend - a petrol tanker overturned after a crash, killed the driver, and spilt petrol all over the motorway. Unsurprisingly, the road was closed for a long time, and it needs to be resurfaced.

By this morning, they had opened one lane of the motorway. The traffic was therefore horrendous, according to the traffic report that woke me up. And it was where I was due to be travelling to.

So I did what any sane person would do - I decided to work from home. I e-mailed the client to say I would not be starting the on-site work until tomorrow, and then settled back in bed with my laptop, a pile of paperwork and an even bigger pile of files to review.

Well, in all honesty, the Baron was still in bed, so we settled down to something a little more fun than work, but since I am not paid to do that, we'll gloss over that bit and get to the work part.

A little while later, I started to update my calendar to reflect the change in plans. It wasn't a big deal, since I had five days allocated to the review, and in all likelihood only needed three to complete. Then it hit me.

Fanfuckingtastic. I had cancelled the wrong review. Same client, but different departments. I had e-mailed the department relating to next week's work to tell them I wasn't coming in today. Since they weren't expecting me, that probably didn't come as a great surprise to them.

However, the department under review this week were still expecting me. And I need all five days allocated to this review as it is highly technical, time consuming, and mind numbingly boring. Since I have a tender presentation to give on Wednesday I am seriously running out ot time on this review already, and I haven't even started. But since I am at the same client the following week, I can probably do the two reviews concurrently and fit everything in.

I called them to tell them I would be starting tomorrow. Only to find out that no-one is free until Thursday, but it was good since no-one was around today to actually do the review with.

So, in a roundabout way, things have worked out well. I can stay at home until Thursday, and catch up on other bits and pieces (the pile of ironing the size of Wales springs to mind) and my clients are happy with the change in plans.

Just call me the Penfold of the auditing world. I have the T-shirt.