A Hard Friday

It took me the best part of six hours non stop work today, to produce the radio reconfiguration scheduling mail-out for about 180 users in ten groups over two days. It shouldn't have taken so long, except that designing a suitable conditional mail merge, not to mention editing the dross out of the mailing database might have taken longer than using an older label print-out and much manual sorting, not to mention folding and sticking. Lots of repetion with minor variations. The challenge was not to lose concentration and mail schedule letters to users in the wrong groups, so that the check lists for collection and delivery didn't match what recipients had been informed. I only lost the plot once, that I noticed (I hope).

Ashley arrived with the news that the engineers had advised him that they'd be starting later than expected due to glitches in their programming preparation, thereby putting the whole schedule out of sync with the information issued. Ah well, I did my best to order the chaos. I'm dreading Monday and Tuesday already. To add to our trials, our BT internet connection was down again and their support services seemed to be even more chaotic than usual, telling us that our account had been disconnected, promising to ring us back by a certain time and failing to do so. Ashley must have spent two hours on the phone to different operatives, having to explain the situation each time, as none of the information he imparted seemed to be retained and passed on from one section of BT to another, and nothing was resolved.

This was especially annoying as the radio reconfiguration engineer had emailed us a spreadsheet for us to check for the forthcoming work, but offline we couldn't access email. The only BT service working for us was our rarely used 3G internet dongle, and this had to be installed on Ashley's laptop before he could access his account. Once it was working the dongle advised us that only limited use was possible as it needed a software upgrade. Anyway the email was retrieved and the file forwarded to my laptop before it stopped working. As last user of the dongle, my software was more up to date, so I was able to retrieve the file, and together we tackled the task of error checking its 250+ entries, and returning it before the end of business for the weekend. By the time I'd cycled home, I felt fit for nothing, exhausted by so much attention to detail.
 

The evening news reported the death of the four miners trapped underground at Cil-y-Bebyll. Flooding, by waters accumulating from old unmapped mine workings in the vicinity of the latest tunnel may well have caused a fatal tunnel collapse. There was an excellent reprise of article written 15 years ago about the resurgence of small private mines in today's Guardian. Local Vicar Martin Perry was interviewed on Radio. I watched MP Peter Hain on the TV news. In the distant outdoors background, out of focus I think I saw Archbishop Barry talking with locals. He is one of the locals there, born a few miles further north.  It's where I'd expect to find him at a time like this - with the people rather than with the media. My heart goes out to them all.