John Linton ....for many of Exetel's suppliers and its becoming more of a nuisance than I can remember it being in past years..
Another week starts, at least for those people in conventional five working day week jobs, and the new financial year is well under way though many commercial operations that Exetel deals with are still trying to sort out what happened in the previous year. Even the new Nvidia chips being deployed by investment banks in the US:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/04/j-p-morgan-shows-benefits-from-chip-change/?mod=WSJBlog&mod=
wouldn't help them get their results out faster because it isn't the facts they want presented but the best possible spin on the actual facts which requires a fiction that computers can't produce without human 'intervention'. I tried to map out what I should attempt to accomplish over the coming five days, as I invariably have done for the past seven plus years, but failed to come up with a sensible 'plan of action' that would usefully use the new "working week" for the first time in as long as I can remember. This is, of course, entirely my fault but the underlying reasons are, perhaps, more disturbing - which are something I must try and resolve. For whatever reasons people within and outside Exetel seem to have no urgency in making available information that is needed to make an increasing number of decisions.
I suppose most people, possibly everyone, gets 'slow patches' in their working lives but I can't remember that ever happening to me, or Exetel to date - not because I am such a fearsomely good 'planner' of my work day responsibilities but because I am quite the reverse - always assuming I can do much more that it turns out I am able to accomplish in any time frame and therefore never having any 'spare time'. All my life I have consistently over estimated my capabilities and capacities with the obvious result that I never complete any task on time and therefore always have a backlog. So now I find myself waiting for tasks to be completed by other people before I can proceed to the 'next step' of my part of any given program/initiative and far too many of these activities involve one or more of our suppliers who, at this time of year particularly, move at glacial speeds. Add the delays caused by Exetel employees participating in these tasks for the first time and you have a scenario where nothing gets done at all - at least by me.
So, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I don't have a fully planned week which means I am going to waste a lot of time which I don't know how to sensibly use - and at his stage of my life seriously annoys me. I don't know why Exetel has begun to join the ranks of the excuse makers having for so long been a company that has only run on two time frames - difficult tasks are completed 'before lunch' and really difficult tasks are completed by 'COB' on the day in question. Maybe it's a sign that I need a more demanding job to give me more to do because the long delays in getting things, even the simplest things, done in either of those time frames lately is seriously making me wonder whether there is any point in getting out of bed in the mornings.
Maybe I need to go back to bed and get out the other side - the side I got out of was clearly the wrong side.
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