We sat outside for the evening

My day started like last Thursday. I shan't repeat (although I ate my toast with G, who'd popped a meeting into my diary for the purpose of buying breakfast, and I'd missed the hint and thought it was a real meeting).

Our split development team has merged due to people being on holiday. I hope this does not get confusing.

I am always trying to figure out how to describe the organisational structure I work in. The technology team I am a member of is probably a department. The department is part of a broader technology group (or is it a division?), but we explicitly service the commercial group (or is it a division?). That's a long way of saying that my department had our monthly 'Town Hall' today, which differs from the divisional 'Town Hall'. Or is it an 'All Hands'?

Our meetings are typically informative but not revelatory. It's 'general' by nature as there are many teams, and while we work on related initiatives, our work can vary enormously. Often, internal guest speakers are invited to come and tell us about something else that is going on in the business. We had two today.

One was from a Product Manager from another group (division?). He was very good. When watching other product managers present, I always look for things I should be doing. B's presentation made me realise that I don't have enough monitoring metrics to see how we're performing. Every slide was full of numbers, "xxx improved by c.8%pts since launch", etc. Then I was reminded I did do lots of numbers for one service, but realised the new work doesn't have any. I immediately came up with some things I wanted to track.

After work, a couple of drinks with members of the team who are not usually in London and with one who is, I started coughing a lot and couldn't work out why.

Then, across London to our regular Thirsty Thursday at The White Horse. I was first, even though I was late, so I bought two drinks, sat inside and waited. C tapped on the window behind me as she grabbed a free outside seat, and we sat there for the evening. Outside the pub, I watched somebody use a distraction technique to try to steal a phone. Very clever, but we saw, and he ran off; the phone was still with the owner.