It’s been a whole year since I officially started this management lark. I mean i started doing the job more than a year ago, but the 1st feb was when they started paying me.

It’s been quite a ride, 2 months in my boss left, so 5 months in I was acting head of service then we had a baby, and then I came back restructured the entire team, and started changing how we work. Last week we got a new office, and tomorrow (well today). we are having an away day, where I am considering delivering quite a radical* vision for the team.

but i tell you what.. it’s fun

* radical for public sector born things anyway.

Today we moved to our new office in work - finally we got out of the open plan nightmare where far to many people where trying to work, and the noise was ridiculous.

we now have our own office just for the web team, and gosh it was quite,? I think it’s all a bit of a shock and it’s going to take us a while to get use to it. before we where put in open office hell, we had a quite nice office in the main council building, a wonderful 140 yeah old masterpiece, built when the city had loads of money, and didn’t mind spending it. Since then we’ve scuttled between the non-descript 60’s building that make up the rest of the councils’ office buildings - but at least as of today it’s our own non-descript 60 office.

For this week we are squeezing our dual monitors onto call centre desks, and trying not to knock each others tea over.? until they can get around to putting our rather plush (and much bigger) desks up on Friday. this of course means another desk move. but that’s OK.

This morning I worked out that I am now on my 6th desk since starting here 613 days ago, that’s a little over one desk every 100 days. and I get my 7th next Monday.

It’s probably a sign of how much better my current job is compared to that one I had in that place, that I hardly ever get ranty. I don’t think I’ve been blog ranty in almost ever. Today was a very ranty day.

I’m not going to go in to the details of the rantiness, but there was lots of people taking sticks from the wrong end, it blowing up to stupid proportions and people who work for me getting treated unacceptable. oh and broken servers - I stepped away from that last one, and decided to rant about it tomorrow. because there was no real way I could have improve the situation and in the mood i was in by then it would have only gotten worse.

I’ve employed one of my old JMU tricks and I have written an incredibly ranty? set the world to rights word document now. I doubt it will ever see the light of day, but it should help me sleep.

At the end of the day I got a text message to put me to shame, a friend at work is having his first baby, well he’s not “having it” his wife is, today they went for the scan. and the text I got was.

“Babys are cool! puts youtube and boxing into perspective”

and I thought, yes it does. and I’ve gotten two of those - I’ll go play with them instead.

The thing about having anytime off in the winter, is you quickly forget just how dark it is when you leave the house in the morning. of-course it’s not really* you just forget.

*Technically it is darker (by one minute on th 3rd Jan compared to the 24th Dec), that’s because even though the 21st Dec was the shortest day, the sun continues to come up later each day until 5th January, it’s the nights that get longer first. I have thought about this for all of around 30seconds I my rudimentary understanding of the seasons means i can’t tell you why it happens like this - the BBC claim it’s because the earth doesn’t go round the sun in a circle.

Well It’s been almost 4 weeks but apparently I have to go back to work and I think Daisy doesn’t want me to go back about as much as I don’t

“It’s going to rain so you can’t go”? (It’s clear blue sky this morning)

“I think your not very well, So you can’t go”

Still it pays the mortgage, and I’m in the position of liking my job much more than I did when I went back after Daisy, Just don’t let anyone fool you. You can’t like a job more than being at home with your family.

Look :

The Gaston Leisure center pool now open at 8:15 on a Sunday - who said I sat around all day doing nothing?

[Swimming Debacle]

The beeb have gotten a number of ‘doting’ dads to give them accounts of what it’s like to take a side step on the working treadmill and spend some time with your children. It’s quite an interesting read, and made me reflect back to the time i nearly did that, and how my life is now compared to what it could have been.

As I’m sure we’ve mentioned before, the original plan when Daisy was born, was for both of us to go part time, and share the time with Daisy this made loads of sense both personally (I wanted to spend time too) and financially (better tax breaks), but for reasons of Ruth being indispensable and me being a side show, It never happened. what actually happend was in their efforts to keep Ruth she never came back, and by forcing me to work full time, they lost me to a better job.

Now at the time we we’re sad, but if you think about where we would be now; Ruth would still have that annoying political mud-bath of a job, and I would be wasting away doing the same old projects that came around every 12 months. Instead - Ruth stays at home and loves not working with pooters (and some of the people). and I have a much much better job, talking to people and getting stuff done*.

Where are we now ? Well both through the need for money, and the joy of work moved up the career ladder and Ruth has been freed from the shackles.

This does mean I don’t get the extra time I wanted with Daisy which does make me a little sad. I’m glad she’s getting full time parenting, I think that’s real important, and even though I’ve moved on and up, I have consciously stayed in an environment where leaving work at 4:30 is acceptable (i get in at at least 8:30 so don’t complain!) and taking work home is an exception not the rule. So I still get plenty of time each day. I’m not a arrive home at 6:40 and keep the child up sort of dad - I’m much more a get in and have Daisy climb all over me for a few hours type.

Reading about the dads who spend more time off does make me jealous, and maybe one day I will get to a point where I can work maybe a four day week - but at the moment I also way-up how Ruth and I feel - and we are much happier and that must be a good thing for our kid(s).

*this is of course relative, i see that public sector getting stuff done is not quite the same as private sector getting stuff done, but it is miles beyond university getting stuff done.