A mammoth undertaking

By Gillian

So Tuesday night was pretty grotty. The next day, Wednesday, I was due to pitch some ideas to one of our major customers at our company headquarters, which is several hours away down the motorway.  It was an important meeting, on a project I have been leading for the last few years, and I badly wanted to be there.

However, I was concerned whether it was either safe or wise to leave Chris on his own at home when he was being so sick. My first thought was to ask one of our friends to “husband sit” him during the day. But Chris was determined that was unnecessary – he would be fine. I was still bothered though that if anything went wrong I would be too far away to help out. So I took inspiration from our “lone working policy” at work and arranged that Chris would phone our friend Richard every few hours during the day to say that he was OK. If he didn’t make the call, Richard would phone him, and if there was no answer then Richard would drive round and investigate further. That worked well – it might have been a bit paranoid of me, but I wanted to be able to concentrate on presenting my brief, rather than worrying what was going on at home. Thanks Richard!

The arrangement for getting to the meeting was that several of us would travel together, and two of my colleagues (including my boss) who were sharing a car kindly agreed to pick me up from home on the way. We had to be at the meeting by 09:45, which meant a pick-up just after 7am. So I set my alarm for 6 o’clock, giving reasonable time to get up, washed, dressed, breakfasted, check that Chris was OK etc. At least I thought I did. It was late at night, I was very tired after dealing with the out-of-hours team, and I think I was more than a little stressed. Whatever the reason, I actually set the alarm for 6p.m. not a.m.

So my alarm didn’t go off, and I overslept. I actually woke at ten to seven, looked at my clock and jumped out of bed in shock! I didn’t realise that it was even possible to get showered and dressed in ten minutes flat!  I didn’t have time for any breakfast though. I grabbed some fruit and yoghurt which I ate in the car on the way down, praying that there would be coffee and danish pastries available at the meeting – which there were.

Perhaps fortunately I have a reputation for not being good at mornings, so I don’t think that my colleagues were surprised that I still looked half asleep when they got here. But I hope I don’t have too many mornings like that again – far too stressful! Perhaps I should buy another alarm clock that’s a bit more user-friendly. One where the difference between “a.m.” and “p.m” is something more than a barely-visible LCD indicator.