No weeknotes last week as I was pretty blogged out after my unexpected splurge of posts!

This has been a hectic week despite it only being 4 days (Monday I was travelling back from Harrogate). I’ve also ended the week by realising I’ve totally screwed up my plans for the weekend – I’m still in London to support our stand at Silicon Milk Roundabout tomorrow but I’ve just realised there is a train strike tomorrow and that my ticket home was actually for Sunday evening 😬 I’ve managed to hustle and get a bed for tomorrow night and a train Sunday morning (and rework my schedule for Monday as there is another strike so I won’t be in Cardiff.) It all worked out okay-ish but it made for a stressful hour or so!

Anyway I’m staying on Brick Lane and tomorrow I’m sure the job fair will be fun so it is all good.

There were some major highlights this week – had lunch with Stu Arthur, CTO of my old company and all round top chap. Gave me an excuse to go to Pieminister in Cardiff and shamelessly gossip for an hour. Time well spent.

I also gave a talk internally about my travels in pursuit of great street art neighbourhoods – I’d put together a nice looking deck but circumstances meant I only scripted the first couple of slides and rehearsed none of it…so the fact I nailed the timing and people seemed to really like it was a miracle. Loads of other street art folks in the department as well which I LOVE.

I had a meeting about my probation as I’m about half way through – all was good and I feel like I am really start to make the role my own. I’ve got a real feel for what I want to achieve in the role now and it is becoming clearer how I might do that and whose help I need to make things happen.

On the downside we had a talk about where we stand with knowledge of the Service Standard and especially Assessments and I came away from that really down hearted. The team coordinating things have been working really hard but for reasons we’ve come to the formal end of this activity very late and it really isn’t landing. Some of the feedback demonstrated such a misunderstanding of the point and the opportunity of the guidance and the process as to make me want to scream. I just want to dive into it and help but it isn’t directly my space and I have limited local experience of the journey they’ve been on. Still I am passionate about this area and just want to get into it.

A side effect of this discussion was I realised that I simply cannot find the rhythm of Teams meetings when there are more than five participants. It’s fine if it is just listening to a presentation or something but if it is supposed to be a discussion I feel like it is like a Sorkin rip-off – everybody is just monologuing at each other. I prefer to listen and write responses in the chat once I have a clear idea – but this is selfish as it doesn’t work for everyone. I need to find a better approach.

Had a couple of calls with potential applicants for our vacancies but despite the massive promotion so far the applications have been limited. Fingers crossed there is a rush this weekend.

Okay I’m going to call it…watch Stallone in Tulsa King if you have the means – its a lot of fun.

Hopefully Twitter survives the weekend – if not I’ll be here, blogging into the void.