Mangō Ripi

My Dear Princess and Dear Friends,

Today I was in Porirua again. You'd be surprised at the amount of work involved in installing VC technology. Today's job was to supervise workmen who were doing wall reinforcement work. 

This is installing a backboard behind the tv* so that it can be securely affixed to the wall. This is just one thing. We also have to make sure the furniture is suitable, the power and data ports are in the right position, that the acoustics are accounted for, that everything is tamper-proof**, that all the stock is in the right place at the right time, that we know who is receiving the stock, where they store it, who grants access to the offices and and and...

I remember this time last year, laughing to you all about how easy this job was going to be. I had no idea. 

I often work weekends, not that I mind at all. It's sort of fun playing with spreadsheets and PowerPoints. I almost find it relaxing when I know that there's no dicks to deal with at work. It wasn't like this with Smock or The Man Who Couldn't Finish A Sentence. If either of those two asked me to work weekends I'd have told them to eff off. 

This last weekend I took our vendor's plan and converted it into a Gantt chart so we could make sense of it. Although the truth is, that once we could see it illustrated on a chart, it clearly made no sense at all. 

Teams were being deployed to two different locations at the same time, then given nothing at all to do for weeks, then bouncing from one side of the country to the other instead of working their way methodically across Aotearoa. 

Shenée hit the ROOF when she saw it. They've been telling her not to worry and that they know what they are doing for weeks. They are really quite patronising toward her. So today she took her revenge. She actually drew on a MAP, their team going from one side of the country to the other for no good reason.

"Can you explain the reasoning behind this?" she asked. "I just want to understand. Please can you explain?"

There followed a long period of, "Well... er... logistics... covid... not the final plan... also logistics... also also also..."

"Not the final plan?" she interrupted. "I asked you last week if this was the final plan and you said it was."

There then followed a quite hilarious bit of semantics. "Well, obviously it's the final version of the ORIGINAL plan," they clarified. "But obviously, obviously, so, so, so, right, so, right, the ORIGINAL plan is now being reworked. Also covid. Right?"

Shenée just blinked at them.

"Yes, but can you EXPLAIN why it ever made sense to go from Rotorua to Tauranga via Gisborne, then back to Napier?"*** she asked again.

Awk-WARD. 

Shenée has well and truly adopted the acronym TALOP (thank you Princess) and is, as we speak, putting measures in place to get the TALOPs to toe the line. And so it was a successful day. I hung out with the nice people in Porirua, the wall reinforcement work was done, and TALOPs were humiliated. 

And those animal names I was laughing about a year ago are a thing. Look, there's the door decal and everything. 

S. 

* Although we are not allowed to call them tv's. They are "displays". I have been so well brainwashed by now it actually hurt my soul to type "tv" above. 

** Tamper-proofing is a major thing. When you start working with the blokes who install and maintain technology all the horror stories come out of idiot users yanking the ends off cables, or directly out of walls or pocketing bits of tech which are not nailed down and just walking off with them. Literally, within hours of our installing the very first room - which contained a poster saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE CABLES - two people had attempted to rip cables out. I call it, "Dad installing tv without looking at the instructions" syndrome.

*** This is like going from Edinburgh to Glasgow via Aberdeen, and then going to Inverness.