Be My Number Two

Well, an interesting few days for me at least.

Monday brought my cycling into work again. Got to the office to find that following Friday's power issues, we now had electricity, but the boilers for the 2 sides of the building were not working. To say the premises were freezing was an understatement. Its no fun trying to work having to wear, hats, gloves, coats, scarves etc. There were not enough electric heaters to heat the premises. We have laptops to work on, and could easily work at home. Were we allowed to go home? Of course we weren't.

Health & Safety Guidelines suggest that premises should not be below 16C. My office was not even at 11C. Despite this, management appeared not to respond to email queries about heating the premises. What our unions reps did clearly didn't work as nothing changed. I eventually left early and headed home via Homebase to buy a thermometer to monitor the office temperature.

As I left early, I was told the heating had been fixed. Sadly not in our office. This is only the 2nd winter running that I have been expected to work in an office without and heating. Its not a very good show for a government department is it? Dignity at work? - forget it!

Tuesday morning, the office was much warmer than before at nearly 11C when I arrived. After some more complaints we were given 2 convector heaters for our office. By lunchtime, the temperature had reached a positively tropical 16C. So after a day and a half, we had an office that was now at the minimum temperature according to H&S guidance.

Tuesday evening brought some respite from cycling as I was spending the night in Crawley. Given my current lack of fitness, I didn't cycle there as its around 30-40 miles. Hopefully when I have a bit more fitness I will be able to cycle to/ from Crawley. A very enjoyable evening was had. An evening that is all too short.

An evening of football that was thankfully not on TV. Fortunately I was too distracted to fret over Newcastle's disasterous performance at Derby. All I can hope for is that Swansea get the backlash on Saturday.

Wednesday again was a train journey to work- obviously as I had travelled by train the previous night. The good news at work was that we had heat with the 2 convector heaters working and also that I got a new lightweight laptop. The bad news at work was that I had no work to do and that the internet kept crashing so I couldn't even surf the net.

I had an interesting chat this evening at work and realised how close failure is to success. The biggest failings in my life were with hindsight often very nearly triumphant successes. It was quite a salutory lesson as well as an incentive to strive the extra step to make sure of success. Faint heart never won the lady or so the saying goes. The only way to get success is to play the game and to try to go the extra yard. To fail to do this is to potentially snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

With that last thought in mind, I am hoping to increase the mileage I do each day from 25 to perhaps 30 miles per day. You may infer from that I am feeling my knee getting better by the day.

America here I come - hopefully