Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting a ‘day in the life of…’ blog so you can see some of the things that we get up to when we are not talking to you on the phone.
My day starts early with our two children and the usual bribing and cajolery to get dressed, clean their teeth and eat breakfast. We monitor all our clients’ critical systems 24 x 7 and each morning I check the dashboard via my iPhone to see what, if anything, has broken during the night and possibly contact the clients via text or email if there is anything urgent. I also check the phone logs to see what calls we had overnight to the out-of-hours team. This is usually done by around 7 am and it gives me an idea of what the day holds. I drop our boy off at nursery and I am usually at my desk shortly after 8.
I check through any issues we have on our alerting system which is a nice 42″ TV display that has also been known to show a bit of the cricket or tennis from time to time. I review our support system which is a web based platform that we wrote ourselves and use to keep track of outstanding work and customer call history. I then review the items I had planned that day. They can vary between writing code for clients’ systems to writing proposals for projects, meetings with prospective clients or troubleshooting larger issues with the rest of the team. Lunch is generally non-existent for me but we have a nice coffee machine that does proper coffee which keeps me going.
The afternoons are as varied and the beauty of my job is that no two days are ever the same. I get a huge sense of satisfaction from fixing issues or solving a difficult problem using some of our software and the variety keeps me as enthused as I was on the first day of trading over 10 years ago.
Home time is around 5.30 and I pick the boy up and head home for the usual bribing and cajolery of bath and bed for the children and then I usually cook our dinner as I find it a good way of relaxing. A few emails responding to eager customers and a bit of TV then it’s bed time.
Fridays for me comprise breakfast out with our boy after dropping our daughter at school, swimming, cooking lunch, school collection, more swimming and also keeping in touch with the office, replying to emails and dealing with anything urgent for clients via my iPhone which can be fun and games some days. I think wine is involved at some point too when the dust has settled.