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Today was a little strange. I am not working but had arranged to go into the depot to attend a meeting between my two bosses.
I have managed to land myself two bosses because I am a volunteer member of TfL’s Incident Care Team. Generally the commitment is not huge – we have a meeting/training session every quarter. Since moving over to my current depot there seems to be a problem with being released to attend the meetings. Although there is a general air of goodwill (once we get past the ‘what is it?’ questions) nobody particularly sees my involvement as important.
I don’t really want to be flagged too heavily as ‘ICT Driver’ but also I do want people to know what it is and what we do. And naturally I want to attend meetings and get to know the rest of the team better – these are the people who I will be working closely with if the shit hits the fan. This is where the problem lies. Despite the air of goodwill nobody will make clear decisions about my attendance. I put in the obligatory memos several weeks before the event only to find that they have been lost. What usually happens is that the day before a meeting I will be asking what’s going on and the DMT on duty will say “Oh just go”, quickly followed by “But come back afterwards cos I’m not sure if I want you to work afterwards!”
This is immensely frustrating. ICT is considered work so if they tack on an 8 hour duty to the 2 hour meeting that’s a long day and I think illegal for a driver to work so long. And that’s without even thinking about time to travel from depot to Head Office. Annoyingly, nobody at work seems to get this. And despite being told to go to work once the meeting is over I tend to turn up to find the desk DMT puzzled at my attendance and telling me to go home. Ideally I could have been told that the day before!
So I asked the boss of ICT to contact the boss (the TOM) at work and launch a little charm offensive so that everyone could be clear about what was happening. A meeting was duly arranged and although I’m on a day off I went in to work. As I landed on the platform and headed up the stairs I saw my ICT boss…but…waiting for a train to leave…huh?! He told me that he’d gone over to the depot only to find out that all the senior staff there were on a two-day team building exercise in Brighton and that nobody knew about the meeting. MGAK! That’s so frustrating. We had arranged to come in and yet again the TOM has not paid enough attention to what is going on and basically stood us both up. I know it will get sorted but it’s just very, very frustrating.
In other news, I bought my new computer. *hugs puter* She’s called Lucy. You have to name your puters these days. Who knew!