OSBlues

What a strange title for a post I hear you cry.. I couldn’t think of any sensible name for a post about a day off work to do some DIY involving redoing our kitchen so that’s what we’ve got!

When you run your own business or are a key member within an organisation you don’t really get holidays as I was reminded several times today. Partly my fault I guess as I hadn’t informed clients that I was on holiday and I’m normally first choice for them to call rather than my colleagues. The new office will surely help each of us get a holiday when we need one rather than just a day that we aren’t sat in front of our machines but still constantly doing work related tasks.

Well the DIY didn’t quite go as planned as the plumber didn’t turn up, do they ever? We were expecting the plumber at lunch time and he had ‘promised’ he’d be there… at 5 0’clock he phoned to say he was stuck on another job and will be arriving tomorrow morning to do the work. We’ll see. Other than that we managed to rip out most of the old units, remove loads of tiles from the walls return a new kitchen unit that had been delivered broken and buy a new back door. Buy a new back door, that sounds easy, well it wasn’t. We went to the DIY store and picked up the door which we had chosen weeks ago and were pleased to notice last week that they had reduced the price by £30, great we thought. So, we buy said door and all the extras we needed to fit it and the bill comes to a surprising amount considering I was paying with a large amount of gift vouchers left over from our wedding last year. As we are walking across the car park I stop and check the receipt to investigate where all the money went.. We’d been charged the previous price for the door, not the reduced price, so we headed back in the shop. Simple, we think, return to the customer services desk, get our money back. It must have taken about 30 minutes to get the £30 refunded, I would explain the full story but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway, it was that ridiculous.

Well, on with DIY tomorrow… Hopefully the plumber will turn up.

Yesterday was spent viewing and discussing new premises for the business. We have now been trading for nearly 18 months and up to now have had no ‘real’ premises. The offices we’re really nice and I’m pretty excited at the thought of having somewhere like that to call ‘ours’. We looked at a serviced office a short distance from my house in a really nice business centre which is hopefully within our budget. I was very surprised how many things were not included in the price considering it’s supposed to be serviced, I always assumed (probably wrongly) that serviced meant you got everything for one price so you knew where you were financially. Costs not included were things like electricity, water, phone line rental and silly things like use of the photocopier and such. All in all though we were impressed with the facilities and think it will give the company a more professional look and help to win new business. The office is also going to help team communication, allow us to solve problems quicker by being all together and aid knowledge sharing. Morale will also be stronger and we’ll have more of a sense of being part of a team rather than individuals working from home. All of this can only be good for our clients.

Well, here we go again with a new version of OSBlues. This is going to be a personal blog with many technical ramblings, I hope you find something worth reading here.