Hello! Well, it's been an absolute eternity since I last volunteered to edit the End of Day post, so there's a good chance of some glaring typo's, grammar mistakes and general chastising from Be3G! It's been an absolutely glorious day in Sheffield, just in time for the weekend, so everyone's been in pretty good spirits and looking forward to the break after another 5 days in the office (we normally call this a week). We'll start the proceedings with Barbara from our HR Team. Jens holiday absence this week has been felt (by me), I’ve been undertaking all front desk duties instead of some, whilst I’ve been here, along with our fantastic volunteers Laura Ellis, Jim Cox, Brad Knights-Toomer, James Bailey (Ed: I'm currently typing this from the reception desk!), Damien Pope, Matt Taylor stepping in before and after my shift – so thanks guys. I’ve also finished our HR KPI’s this week, and changed a paper based HR system onto Ciphr.net, which in the main will be used by Gem if people leave. We have a pensions visit lined up for next week, and so I’ve been organizing and taking bookings for that too. Amanda’s been out and about preparing and delivering the 4th module of our MDLP program over the last two days; so that all those attending are up to speed on ‘Commercial Awareness and Sales Culture”. She’s also attended a CIPD Employment Law seminar…and just in case you didn’t realize, even Heads of HR have performance reviews; Amanda’s had hers this week with Anthony. Gemma has been heavily involved with internal recruitment this week; has updated managers with their team’s holiday summaries; and has analysed absence figures for February. Anyway toodle pip, my working day is about to finish – have good w/e everyone. We move swiftly onto the Comms Team with Friday Parr, who's been at the energy drinks again. What day is it? Yeah it's Friday, you know it. So what did we do today? A little of this and a little of that with some of the other thrown in for good measure. Yes it's been a normal week on Comms, well as normal as we get anyway with the band of reprobates sat at this desk. We think PJ (Mr Jackson, not Mr Marsh) is coming around to our way of thinking too, he's been seen making strange noises and getting into the comms spirit (or the comms spirits, after all it IS Friday). You had enough of me rambling yet and actually want to know what we did eh? I've got an idea, I'll tell you. But be warned, I've made most of it up as Mand, Matt and James are all away from the desk, and Bob is lost in Barcelona somewhere without his bank card. So today James has been herding 6 legged goats and sporting a rather nifty handlebar moustache. He disagrees and claims he's been posting in the forums. Not sure which to actually believe though. Matt's been comtemplating getting his left ear pierced twice more, we think he's going to link all the piercings together with a piece of string and then line it with mini sweets similar to this. Once again I'm probably just making up things in my head but better out than in. He tells me he's looked at some internal processes and done some task work. I think he lies. Mand ate 14 bananas, a kiwifruit, 2 fruit bats and a 1963 Chevy Corvette Stingray. Not sure if any of that last sentence is true but it sounded good. If she was at her desk I'm sure she'd tell me that she's been looking at problems and going through some task work. So that leaves me, Chris the Caffeinated as I shall forever be known. Today has been a typical Friday, trying to get everything in place ready for the weekend. Ensuring that anything needed for this week has been done and making sure that I've left Bob plenty to do on Monday. I'll leave you with this, it's a great topic for conversation. Remember that in 2 days tomorrow will be yesterday. Thanks Chris, I think! Now we have our first entry from the Business Improvements Team, curteousy of Luke. So today after lots of grief from the CSC (well James Nelson - who is the spitting image of James Corden) for no EOD yesterday, I have written an EOD. Rich had half a day as he was going to his dad's 60th Birthday weekend. Happy 60th Mr Smolenski!!!!! Maria was Working From Home and sounding incredibly busy (and frankly too busy for a Friday). Tommo took a kicking in pool, did some bandwidth forecasting, worked on the 21CN Trial & KPI reporting. I have been on several conference calls, all very interesting: 21CN pathfinder (weekly call with BT Openreach and finally looking at the Sim process - Simultaneous Provides (ADSL & PSTN order at the same time) as this is an area we would love to improve for customer satisfaction. Have a great weekend all. Thanks Luke! Now, onto Andy in the Web Team. Greetings! I'm high on the friday feeling at the moment, it's just gone 5 as I type this and a weekend of freezing at the football (hopefully more sucessful than Tuesdays effort) and birthday celebrations (not mine!) awaits. It's been a funny old day with lots of small tasks for me, as well as palming off todays editing duties to Mr Bailey 
So the rest of the team? Mark, James and Jonny have been off today. Duffy's been wading in the problem pool for most of the day, Nick's been testing things (a lot of that being for me, thanks Nick!) and working on support pages. Gary's been working on new projects, along with Sam, Dan and Phil. Colin's made improvements to an internal tool (ACES) for Faults as well as problem fixing on an internal tool and some developments on a small NADS... and couting the hours til his Holiday. Holiday eh? Did I mention I'm off next week too? So this'll be my last EOD musing for a while. See you soon! That looks like that might be it for tonight folks, so I'll reiterate Luke and Barbara's sentiments and wish you all a very pleasant weekend! Good luck to our boys out in the West Indies - Final chance to level the series! James
Friday, March 6th