Lle Llywela

Two years after all staff were switched to homeworking thanks to covid, our building officially reopened this week, so I've been working on site every day as part of the building management team, being on hand to welcome everyone back, show them the new layout and re-arranged facilities and whatnot. Everything is different and yet everything is also exactly the same. Weird how that goes. We are going to be doing hybrid working from now on, a combination of working on site and at home, so everything is now designed to facilitate that.

This morning at 8.15am our data centre manager arrived declaring that we should all brace ourselves because he was feeling so peaceful and optimistic that something catastrophic was bound to happen

At 8.45am the fire alarm went off!

It was a false alarm, but I hold the DCM entirely responsible! He jinxed us!

Homeworking was so much more peaceful...

(Also, it turned out I am the only fire warden on site today, so that was fun)

After almost three years slogging through a system that at times has seemed almost designed to thwart them at every turn, my sister and brother-in-law finally made it to their final adoption hearing this morning, which lasted all of ten minutes. It was a formality. The birth family offered no objection – in fact, the birth father submitted a letter of blessing so gracious the judge almost cried! The forms were stamped and signed, the adoption order was ratified, and I am an auntie again.

More importantly, after 1205 and 864 days in care of the local authority respectively, the children are finally part of a family and free of The System.

So, 324 days after moving in, welcome to the family, Miss E and Little G!

I got to see them all for a few days at the end of July – I'd booked a week off work and my brother had booked the same week off work, so D&R booked an Airbnb nearby and trundled the children down for a few days of picnics in the sun. Luckily, it was a bright sunny week, as it turned out. We even managed an extended family get-together, with lots of socially distanced picnic rugs, so that the wider family got to meet the children at last.

In Other Good News, I had two cousins get married in the same week at the end of July. Yes, after all the stress and heartache, my cousin Gareth and his partner Nina finally made it to the registry office, although not without further hiccups along the way, as having set their rescheduled date, Gareth then fell ill with a nasty infection and ended up in hospital – he was discharged on the Friday and married on the Saturday. It was a very quiet affair, with only parents, locally-based siblings and the children in attendance – and right up till the last minute they weren't even planning to get dressed up for it, they were so disheartened by their situation. But my Big Sis sent them a bouquet of flowers from her garden and that inspired them to make the effort after all, and I'm so happy they did – Nina and the children are going to need those special memories to look back on. Gareth's brother Stephen has been over from Japan this week for a final visit with his brother and seeing pictures of them together reduced me to tears. Gareth doesn't have much time left. He's already lasted longer than expected – and honestly, I think it was sheer determination that brought him this far, he was determined to hang on until they could get married, determined to hang on to as much time with his kids as he can possibly get. But I don't know how much longer he can last now. I don't think anyone knows. He is having chemo to try to buy a little more time, but there's no way of predicting – could be months, could be weeks, could be days.

The other cousinly wedding was my little cousin Vee, who is a junior doctor in London and had been planning an overseas wedding in Italy for the summer, but in the end scaled her plans down to a registry officer with just her sister-in-law and a single friend as witness, because the extended family is too big to have everyone there and they didn't want to have to choose, plus her mum was (and still is) in hospital, so if one couldn't have parents there they decided that neither would! So in the end they had the most minimalist wedding imaginable and then instead of a reception went hiking up in the mountains for the afternoon, with Vee still in her wedding dress!

In Other, Other News, I have now had it in writing that my role has been identified as continued Homeworking for the 2020/2021 academic year, with no anticipated work on campus, this arrangement to be reviewed at Easter 2021. I already knew this would be the case, of course, but it's official now. I've been able to attend campus for a pre-booked half-hour slot to collect my chair, monitor and some other bits and pieces, and that's it – my home office is all set up, working from home is now my new normal for the foreseeable future. It still feels really weird. I really like the flexibility. I like not having to commute. I like having tea breaks in the garden. But it still feels really disconnected – I've gone from spending every day in a building with 250 other people to spending every day alone in my little flat and I really miss feeling connected to the rest of the department and chatting to people casually in passing and being in touch with what's going on in other teams and in other peoples' lives, and actually being able to see my work friends outside of the computer screen. I randomly bumped into a colleague while out for a walk the other day and it was disproportionately exciting to actually see someone in the flesh who isn't part of my regular circle!

But I know I am really lucky, and I do feel very safe and well protected, living in my enclosed little bubble.

I suppose we will all get used to the new normal in the end.

Once upon a time, by which I mean about four years ago, I worked for a very large department comprised of two very different divisions, which decided to de-merge and become separate, standalone departments. My team being a support team, we were a bit like the children of the divorce, with both of these new departments wanting to retain our services. It was decided that one department would get custody of us, with the other retaining access, i.e. we would remain part of the one, while still providing support to the other - running their health & safety administration for them, in particular - and this arrangement has persisted for several years

Now, though, we are handing over health & safety responsibility to the other department, as they’ve had plenty of time to get their house in order, and this resulted in the following conversation:

Dept. Boss: So it looks like you’ve been managing our health & safety to a really high standard. How can we avoid having to do too much work to maintain that? What isn’t essential, that we can drop?
Us: Everything we do is essential if you want to pass audit. That’s why we’ve been doing it. We certainly don’t do it for fun.
Dept. Boss: What if we lower our standards?
Us: If you lower your standards, you will fail audit.
Dept. Boss: We were thinking of benchmarking against one of the other departments, which aren't so rigorous.
Us: You mean the ones that regularly fail audit?
Dept. Boss: Surely some of it must just be ‘nice to have’ rather than essential. We can drop some of it, right?
Us: Once we’ve handed over, you can do anything you want, but please don’t tell us you’re doing it.

*sigh* And yes, that was an actual conversation that was held in an actual, formal Health & Safety Committee meeting that I had to formally minute, which meant finding a diplomatic wording that still captured what they were actually saying. Record retention on those minutes is 50 years (yes, I know!) so there will be a permanent record of the intention to downgrade, if it all goes wrong!

I am not sorry to say goodbye to that particular area of work...

Oh, damn. My former colleague Joan died last night.

It doesn't come as a surprise, we've known she was on her way for a long time now - she was given less than a year to live 18 months ago, so has lasted longer than expected. Still hurts, though. Joan was a quiet, peaceful soul, a pioneering female IT engineer from way back, started here at the Uni in the 1970s and came right the way through. She built our ID management system from the ground up, and left a huge hole when her illness forced her into premature retirement last year.

Rest in peace, Joan.

Dammit

I just had an email from a senior manager asking if I could supply a chair to a desk that doesn’t have one, for a staff member moving into that office as of next week, which - it’s 3.30 on a Friday afternoon! We don’t have any chairs in storage! I can’t just pull a working task chair out of a hat! I am not a magician!

But then I remembered that there’s a spare chair in another office, so I popped over and collected that one and took it to the desk where it is needed, which means…

Dammit. My reputation as a magician is cemented and everyone is going to continue to believe I can conjure up chairs out of thin air at 3.30 on a Friday afternoon!

So this has been a pretty manic week! And I haven't updated properly in forever and don't often talk about work, so I'm gonna. This is going to be a long screed but don't worry, I don't expect anyone to actually read it!

The story of this manic week doesn't start this week. It starts a year ago, when we were a reasonably well resourced team. This team consisted of Boss Linda (building manager and departmental safety officer, working 4 days a week), two full time receptionists (Susan and Amy), two part-time administrators (Catherine, dealing with facilities, and Sarah, dealing with health & safety), and me, the full time administrator, ostensibly dealing with business continuity and meeting support (I have, like, eight meetings and counting that I support), but also filling in the gaps in everyone else's areas of work - seriously, we did a workshop to iron out all the tasks our team deals with and filled three pages of flip chart paper, and I was the only person in the team who could honestly say that they do all of those things, not just some of them. But, you know, we all had our areas of work and that was okay.

Then last May Catherine and Amy both got new jobs and left, within weeks of each other, with Sarah due to go on maternity leave in the August - only she didn't make it to August, she went into hospital on bed rest in the June and was kept there till the baby was born. So in less than a month, we lost half our team, plus we were already counting down to September when receptionist Susan was to begin flexible retirement - and there was no handover for Sarah's H&S work, because of the circumstances, plus she hadn't got around to writing up all the procedure documents she'd been promising me since January, so I basically found myself doing my job, Catherine's job and Sarah's job all at the same time, including having to make up most of Sarah's job from scratch because she hadn't written her procedures.

Last summer was a frantic time. We took on a temp for reception while the new receptionist was recruited, so that helped, but I was still doing three jobs - or, taking the part-time hours into account, two-and-three-quarter jobs. Then we had a new member of staff seconded into our team, Becca's full time hours supposedly meant to almost cover Catherine and Sarah's roles, with the surplus still falling on me. Except that it was never going to work out that way, because she was bringing her pre-existing workload with her, she does HR administration for the department, which supposedly took up 40% of her time - but that still left 60% of a full time person for our team's work, right? Wrong. That 40% has actually proved to be more like 75-80%, and increasing all the time. So although it's been good to have another person in the team, we've had very little practical benefit from her being here, and have gained an extra area of work from the deal. She's also, while pleasant enough, not what you'd call a team player.

The new receptionist Eleri is great though, which does help, but we have simply never replaced the staff resource that was lost last year, plus for the admin portion of the team (which is currently me and Becca) occasional reception cover has become weekly reception cover ever since Susan dropped her days in September - and if Eleri is off on a day Susan doesn't work, we have to cover the entire day. And Becca has never quite got around to actually learning how reception works (I've been trying to get her to spend some time with Susan training since September), so while she can handle a lunch hour, she flounders if asked to do more than that.

In February, Becca got a new job and handed in her notice - just two days before Boss Linda was going on leave, which wasn't great timing. That was the week before last. Now, she is the only HR administrator in the department, which means her HR work is going to fall on our already over-stretched team when she goes and filling that gap has to be an urgent priority, coming on top of all our other current urgent priorities (we're in the middle of health & safety annual management review, plus the aftemath of a major incident in the data centre in January). So there's that. Then last week, while Linda was off...Becca was in work on the Tuesday and Wednesday. I was with her all evening Wednesday - we went with a group of girls from work to see Pride & Prejudice on stage at the Millennium Centre (so much fun, thoroughly recommend!). Then on Thursday Becca phoned in sick, having been absolutely fine the night before, but was careful to leave a message rather than speak to anyone, and it was kinda fishy because...she had a long weekend booked to go up to Scotland for the rugby and did exactly the same thing last year, called in sick the day before going on leave for the rugby. Then this week she called in sick Tuesday and Wednesday as well, supposedly the same complaint as Thursday, a bad back, which, for one thing, you aren't supposed to mix sick leave and annual leave like that, and for another - you tell me how someone with such a bad back they can't come to work manages to travel from South Wales to Scotland, sit through an entire rugby match, and then travel back, and then when asked about it simply goes into raptures about what a lovely weekend it was without mentioning the bad back even once. To be honest, we were actually surprised she turned up at all this week - we'd half expected her to simply go off sick until her last contracted day! She has form, in that regard.

But I'm glad she has come back, because this week has been crazy. It started last Thursday, which was the first day Becca called in sick. Boss Linda was on holiday and Susan doesn't work Thursday-Friday, so it was just me and Eleri representing our team when all the doors suddenly stopped working.

Our building houses the main data centre for the entire university, so it has to be kept secure, so we have access-controlled doors everywhere, and they've been running at risk since before Christmas, because the system is end-of-life and in need of upgrade, but the newer controllers in use elsewhere in the university have had a different fault that's been under investigation, and we didn't want to replace our intermittent fault with the total failure experienced elsewhere, so we were waiting and monitoring...and then our end-of-life system died completely, at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon in half-term, when hardly anyone was in - including Boss Linda, the building manager. So I spent about an hour running around the building with the Director of Services & Operations, pretending to be Linda, checking all the PAC doors, figuring out how critical the failure was, helping to figure out what could be done about it in the short term, etc. I ended up working late that evening to keep a thoroughfare open through reception, because none of the access controlled doors out of that area worked, so it was the only way to get from the front of the building to the back. All the external doors had failed open, when they are meant to fail locked, so we had to get Security out to physically lock the building that night, which meant making everyone who would normally work late, go home early, and then I had to take the grandmaster key home with me and come back in at the crack of dawn to open up and let people into the building.

Then Friday night the same thing, after a manic day of attempted fixes with the problem just getting steadily worse and worse. And Monday morning the same thing - I've had to go in early to open up every day this week, in fact.

Monday was the craziest day, because it was the start of a window replacement project that had been arranged before anyone knew all the doors were going to break. I got into work about 7.35am to open up (my contracted hours are 9-5). By 8.15 I had contractors stacking up in reception - contractors arriving to move CCTV cables, contractors arriving to take down window bars, contractors arriving to replace the windows, contractors arriving to fix a roof leak...and contractors arriving to work on the broken door controllers. And then another contractor arriving to work on the fire alarm panel, which was in fault because of building work next door, which is on the same system. PLUS all the staff who actually work here, having to troop through our store room behind reception to get into the building, because none of the other doors worked (and I can't describe how much fun it is to spend an entire day yellling at people over the intercom because they don't believe you when you tell them the door doesn't work). AND then Boss Linda arrived - and I'd talked to her line manager on Friday and made him promise that he'd contact her over the weekend and warn her about the door problem, so she wasn't blindsided by it on Monday...and he forgot, so she was blindsided by it. And that was all before 8.30am.

So Monday was a busy day, and the week has just gone on from there. Every day has been insane. I've barely touched any of my actual own work.

Eleri is on holiday this week, but Susan is back, so we at least had a receptionist here until Wednesday - but Susan doesn't work on Thursdays or Fridays, so we already knew that Becca and I would have to cover the desk between us for those two days, but then with Becca calling in sick (very fishily) I was getting really worried about not having any cover at all for these two days, but luckily she has turned up - just when the worst of the week is over, because they finally got the doors working again at about 3.30pm on Wednesday.

More or less. They were still a bit dicey on Thursday - new controllers operational, but they kept dropping cards, so various people were experiencing intermittent faults still. But by and large the doors were working. And, touch wood, seem to still be working today. Although personally I'm not gonna trust 'em until after the Easter break, which will be the real test - will we develop the same holiday profile fault the rest of the university has had?

So the doors are working again. Thursday we still had window contractors on site, and window bar contractors turning up to replace the window bars, so there was still a lot of running around, plus I was tied to the desk all morning, although Becca was at least in work to relieve me after lunch. But Friday, I thought. Becca can do the bulk of reception for the day, maybe I'll actually get some work done, because I've had work stacking up all week that I've barely even touched, there's been so much going on. But no - because Becca has never bothered to learn reception duties properly, I was up and down all morning dealing with queries she couldn't handle. Plus the roofing guys were back out because the back corridor is leaking again, so I was up and down dealing with them, and now I've come down to the desk to do the afternoon shift, and there are people coming and going all the time so I still can't get anything done, and the fire alarm guy is back and seems to be having an absolute mare, he's been pacing around cursing for most of the day, which I'm assuming means he can't fix the fault, and he's so stressed he's making me stressed!

And all in all, I'm really looking forward to the weekend!

On Monday, I get to lock the spare reception keys back in the key cabinet, after having to take them home with me every night for over a week. And at least I'm not carrying the grandmaster around with me any more.

But then Susan is on holiday next week, so we still have daily reception cover to arrange between us, and I've been booked for another halfday on the desk while Eleri does emergency HR training to take on some of Becca's work (I refuse to touch HR, I've got more areas of work than I can fit into a week as it is), so I'm still going to be spending too much time on the desk to do any of my own work!

Hopefully there won't be any contractors or crises to deal with next week, though.

This rather incoherent blog post has been brought to you in about a dozen different installments over a period of days!

1. Well, the new semester has just barely begun and already Freshers Flu is rife all through the department. Atchoo!

2. This is how my city has chosen to mark the Rugby World Cup:

It just appeared one morning. Hilarious!

3. It's been one of those weeks. I went back to work on Monday after a week off to find that one of my colleagues had died while I was on leave! Not a direct colleague within my department, but the maintenance manager from Estates. Bless him, Ron is the only person in the entire university who has their name highlighted in my telephone directory, I rang him that often, because he was the person I liaised with every time about redecoration projects and repair work and all the rest of it. I knew he was unwell, and had guessed from small clues that it was cancer, but he didn't like to talk about it - always brushed it off and maintained his image as the chirpy little sparrow. I spoke to him just a week before he died, he was still in work, although probably shouldn't have been. Turns out, it wasn't the cancer that killed him, though. He took his own life. That's what's so awful about it. He had cancer of the oesophagus and was due to have surgery just a couple of days after he died, but he'd already had three rounds of surgery and it kept coming back...it seems he just couldn't take any more. He took an overdose. It's really horrible to think of him being so scared and unhappy and not feeling able to talk to anyone about it. :( Rest in peace, Ronnie.

4. On a more pragmatic note, I have all kinds of outstanding jobs with Ron that will probably never now be completed!

5. Also this week, we've had a two-day bus strike, which coincided with train problems and Rugby World Cup road closures, so that thanks to a combination of all these factors I ended up walking to and from work for two days straight, a journey of over an hour each way. Which...I actually quite like the walk, because most of it is through parkland and along the river, and will picspam on that subject another day, but still! Good thing the weather's been so lovely this week, crisp and clear. I'd have had a harder time of it if it had rained!

6. When I moved into this flat two years ago and began to turn the wasteland out back into an actual garden, I made a point of planting a lot of bee and butterfly friendly flowers, to encourage insects. I wasn't, however, expecting to end up with a whole colony of these guys!

This, apparently, is a speckled bush cricket, although it looks more green than speckled to me. I've got loads of them, they've been living mainly in my mint and salvia all summer, but the one I photographed was chilling on a rose leaf, enjoying a spot of late afternoon sun. This is the rose:

Pretty, yes? It's called Harry Wheatcroft and was the very first plant to be planted in my garden.

7. During my week off work the week before last, I didn't really do much beyond hang out at my mum's house helping out with the new baby, because Chelsea was really unwell after her traumatic birth, but I did take a day to go for a walk along the promenade and cliff path in Penarth, which is always lovely. Look at this view across to Flatholm and Steepholm and the north coast of Somerset:

Timing is everything - while admiring the view, a gorgeous square-rigged tall ship came sailing along from the west, past the islands...

And around toward Cardiff Bay:

All she needed was Captain Jack Sparrow!

8. My Uncle Colin is in hospital having a coronary bypass today - and while his wife is in New Zealand visiting their daughter and grandchildren, as well! Get well soon, Uncle Col!

9. Layla-May is three weeks old today and gorgeous:

We had a minor bomb scare in work this morning. That was exciting at 8.40am when I'd barely even walked through the door and hadn't officially started work even. False alarm - suspicious package left in the porch - but better safe than sorry. At least we weren't evacuated for long this time.

It was really eerie around the centre today. We've had lane closures for a few weeks now while the security fencing went up ahead of this NATO conference, but today the roads around the centre were closed completely and it felt really fricking eerie - so quiet, no traffic, only police, so very many police. This is apparently the biggest security operation this nation has ever undertaken and I can believe it. So many police! The centre was like a ghost town all day - and then I had to fight my way through crowds (hoping for a glimpse of a VIP) to a bus stop (not even my usual bus stop, that was closed) in search of a bus that might take me even part-way home. Made it away before the worst of the crowds and demonstrators built up.

Loads of helicopters going over now.

I hope all the heads of state enjoy their dinner at the castle tonight. The banqueting hall is very lovely, I'd rather like to have a meal there myself, if only money were no object. I'm not sure what their discussions can achieve in only two days with so much turbulence in the world right now, but I hope something positive comes of it all.

Another week and we get our streets back to normal.

A few months ago, I attended a liaison meeting between IT, Estates and Security here at the University - this was not unusual, as these meetings take place regularly and supporting them is part of my job, but as this particular meeting drew to a close and the request for Any Other Business went around the table, everyone said no until we got to the Security guys, who said yes: they did have more business to discuss. There was to be a NATO conference in Newport in early September, they said, and the security arrangements were likely to have a knock-on effect on the University here in Cardiff. The conversation that followed was peppered with "don't minute this, but..." and "we can't put this into writing yet, but..." and "don't write this down, but the police have told us..." and so on. It was a long conversation. I boiled it down to a single sentence for the minutes, because none of it could be minuted! It was an illuminating discussion to be part of!

That was months ago. We're now just a week away from this NATO conference and I will be glad when it's all over! Most of the security arrangements I heard about way back when have now been made public, at least within the University, and at least at the level of those who need to know. South Wales is preparing. We've got road closures in effect already - my bus is having to take an alternate route for a full month, which I'm not happy about, and the city centre is now gridlocked every day. We've got massive fences up along major roads and along the river. There are fences and barricades at key locations in the city centre and around the castle. At work, we've had the police and the Counter Terrorism Unit out to inspect our security and offer recommendations, which have had to be put into place quick smart. Three of our University buildings have to close completely for three days next week; and my building is on standby, because we're very near to the area where demonstrators are expected to cause trouble, so might have to go into lockdown, no one in and no one out - I suggested laying in supplies, just in case, and my colleague started listing sensible things like cans of beans, so I said no: chocolate and teabags! Priorities!

So much fuss, for a two day conference.

I hope Barack Obama and the other delegates enjoy Wales, but I doubt they'll actually see much of it.

I'll be glad when it's over!

Today in work we had a retirement presentation for a very dear colleague. John formally retired at Christmas, but hasn't actually been in work since last summer, when he noticed while driving that he was having some issues with peripheral vision and went to see the optician, who referred him to the hospital, who diagnosed a large and aggressive brain tumour. For John, it was the end of life as he knew it - everything just stopped, because treatment had to be immediate. For everyone here in work...I don't think I've ever seen a workplace so united in shock and upset. It isn't an exaggeration to say that everyone loves John. He's worked here for the best part of 40 years, knows this department and this university inside out, and you won't find a single person with a bad word to say about him. He really is an absolute sweetheart - gentle and placid, supportive of his staff, a calm head in any crisis. The crowd that turned up for his presentation today had to be seen to be believed - even people who themselves retired years ago turned up for it. It was lovely to see him again - looking changed, to be sure, his treatment and surgery have taken a pretty visible toll, but he's in better shape than I expected, and still his sweet, generous, thoughtful old self. I just hope the treatment is successful, because if anyone deserves a long, happy and healthy retirement, it's John.