Tales of Mayhem

This week's been one of those which is a bit like crashing whilst snowboarding. You're careering along at a fair pace and all of a sudden, nothing quite goes wrong as such, but for some reason the world's going upside down and round and round and things are hitting you from all sides and everything's white and then it stops. And you think 'Am I still alive?', before gingerly picking yourself up and doing it all again.

There's a few reasons for this. One is that the whole project is gathering pace, and now we're properly into the thick of it. Once you get into the detail you tend to find out a lot about the people around you - how much they're really involved, whether they're actually bothered about delivery, how good they actually are at their job, what their personal expectations from this are and so on. Can be a tense time.

The other reason is that the Project Manager went on holiday yesterday and that sort of puts me in that position. Which is fine and all, but to continue the analogy-fest, it's a bit like being in the passenger seat of an 18-wheeler and looking over to find the driver's jumped out. I'm intending that when he comes back in two weeks' time he'll find himself surplus to requirements, but I'm not sure I can quite pull off that sort of coup just yet.

So the past week has been productive, tiring, a fair bit of fun and generally ok. Thought I'd share with you the view from our office in Dublin, too. It's rather nice, can be distracting sometimes. I've also managed to upgrade our hotel slightly, possibly a bit further than I thought: one of the chaps who came over last week asked me to get a better hotel next time, as we'd been relying on the client to sort that element of the logistics and although the hotel's alright, it's not great. I gently mentioned this to the client, who said that they only had an account with the one we'd been staying at so we might as well sort it ourselves. I found the next closest hotel on a map and asked our travel elves to book it for me, which they did.

Turns out it's Bono's hotel. Well done me. Thought I'd get a bit of stick about this but apparently it's a sort of thing they do at our place. The thinking being that if you're being forced to spend time on your own, in a foreign city and away from your loved ones etc, you ought really to at least be able to do this in a pleasant environment. Round of applause for my employers, please.

In other news, everyone should check out www.wefeelfine.org. It's ace.