Friday 17th April

‎18-04-2009

It's the end of another week but as usual I'm still here late on a Friday. Oh well at least the weekend is here. Let's start of first with Hayleigh from the prov team:

Hi Hayleigh here working on the prov team...

After what was supposed to be a short week the weekends finally here. Most of us came back to work feeling refreshed after our Easter Break and a stone heavier for all the chocolate we ate. It's been another week of Tickets, Targets, Jabber, Arguments about Bread Cakes (or is that Batches?) (Ed: it's cobs!) and Pool Competitions. Of course every one of the Prov Temps thinks they have won especially Rob who now calls himself the Pool King (though strangely no one else does) Don't think it's all fun and games though we do get some work done. We have been moving customers on to our 21CN trial and dealing with the influx of tickets from customers moving house and Migrating to PlusNet. We are also looking into more automation to help with the greater number of tickets. It's officially been a month now since we started working here and it's been educational. Next is Laura from HR:

Hello, here is how the week has looked in HR.

Barbs - Mon – Wed nice break went to see monsters and aliens and went to Chatsworth! Thurs: Ciphr changes including some changer form and leaver form administration Fri: Performance review stats and more ciphr changes

Amanda - Enjoyed the Easter break and went to BT in London on Weds for a HR meeting. Catching up on return from holidays, including designing the MDLP programme for the next module, a number of employee relations issues, resource planning and developing reward initiatives.

Jen - No monster and aliens for me this week…our employees aren't that bad... Mainly been dealing with recruitment this week, getting jobs advertised and contacting potential candidates, continued making updates to people's holidays in CIPHR, also been researching rewards and benefits, been collating data to improve our HR reporting, plus of course, being on hand to let the swarms of visitors in and out of the building!

Laura - I have not spent that much time over in HR this week but the time I have has been spent sorting out various bookings and tickets for the game on Saturday. I have also been helping Jen out with some spreadsheets she has been working on.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend, fingers crossed it stays sunny!

And last for today Catherine from QA:

Debate has, if not quite raged, then bubbled somewhat today about that old favourite: the temperature in the room. Myself, I think it is actually hotter than the surface of the sun at my desk, but Matt 1, just next to me, thinks it's fine in here. So who knows? At least it's sunny outside, and thoughts turn to tall glasses of chilled lager.... before then, however, what have we been up to? A relatively chilled day, with everyone working away on their own projects. Nigel has been exercising his ninja skills with Matt 1 on yet another Sekrit Projekt. Gavin has been creating documentation, making a front end for a new service him and Gary have been working on to give us at a glance information about our staging platform and doing some project work himself in the corners. Paul has been quiet as usual, working away on his latest project with Rys, and next to him Pete has been doing some work on updating and collating feedback on testplans, and going to the PNoTM meeting to help decide which of the many deserving candidates should get the honour. Sadly though, like Highlander, there can only be one, although unlike Highlander the winner doesn't get a dramatic cloak and a large sword. Shame, really. As for me, I've been working with Matt 2 on some hardware testing and creating my own documentation. Have a good weekend everyone!

And that's all for today. I'm off to London to see the FA Cup Semi Final between Everton and Man Utd on Sunday at Wembley and Simon Munnery at the King's Head, Crouch End Saturday. Have fun and catch everyone again next week.