Friday 16 November 2012

CBS - end of the beginning

Today's CBS stakeholder meeting went well, despite my failure to obtain a projector for use in my presentation on finances and constitutional revision. The city centre management office doesn't have one. I had the idea of borrowing an overhead projector from College, and went up yesterday evening to collect, but couldn't find any one on duty to ask when I arrived, pressed for time as usual before Tai Chi class. So, I had to return this morning and collect, then lug it into town on the bus. When I came to use it, I couldn't figure out how to use it to display sheets of paper, having convinced myself that it could do paper as well as slides. So I had to abandon that idea ten minutes before we meeting and work with the handouts instead.

We'd invited Councillor Lynda Thorne to chair the meeting, in keeping with relevant protocol. We received her apology just 22 hours before the meeting. When the date had been agreed, no thought was given to the fact that it's an election day and also an international rugby match day in addition - both suitable alibis for not turning up to duties like our meeting. We were fortunate to have almost a fifty percent attendance on a day like this. Anyway the news sent us into a flat spin yesterday, wondering who to ask instead. In the end, Pastor Gary Smith leader of Cardiff Street Pastors team (one of our RadioNet users) accepted our eleventh hour invite to chair the meeting, and he really did us proud, getting us to an acceptable conclusion that will enable us to move on to the next stage in extending the work of CBS.

I did an hour's work after the meeting but then threw in the towel, unable to do any more, as if I had just completed a marathon. In a way I have, as it's taken three years to get CBS so far along the road to being fit for purpose as an organisation backing a vital operational activity for the benefit of the city. I set out to return the unused projector to College, succeeded in getting on the wrong bus to Llandaff, which took me there via Whitchurch, extending my journey by an extra half hour. I walked home, and switched off, glad to have the meeting and all the preparation worries firmly behind me. I don't do that level of responsibility all that well these days.
  

No comments:

Post a Comment