One of the advantages of working from home is that my commute to work on the days I am here is just a minute along the landing from the bedroom to the office. The disadvantage of that is the trip home is the same length and walking away from some of the craziness which seems to be happening at the moment takes longer than 10 steps.

I turn on the laptop, login to work and check the mail that’s come in from the States overnight. I have an 08:00am conference call with Europe and about half an hour before that to check the internal knowledge sites and erooms, read the mail and check on the stats for my weblog. I watch the icon spin as the RSS reader scans my daily read of weblogs and feeds. Some are updated and I read a few and wonder if I will ever write as well as Francis, Tonya, Meg or Petite. Last in my list is the stats feed from my weblog and I look at the diminishing number of hits and wonder if it’s worth it.

The call starts slowly. We use Netmeeting sometimes to share documents and websites and it seems to take an age to get connected to Belgium and for the conference leaders desktop to be shared. We talk about the need for better knowledge based systems and I wonder if this year I’ll score better against this objective and how I can get the buy in of the people who want to branch away from the corporate products and install something new, sexy and costly. We have actually done better in some respects in using Sharepoint than what’s shown on the call and we part with me promising to send then the stuff I’ve written and for us to swap ideas from now on.

One call drifts into another. Europe, UK and then the quiet time at lunch when the American early risers arrive in chat at work and want to say hi and ask how the weather is here. I can see L is online and I know she has a stressy day ahead, I’m sure the last thing she needs is another conversation right now. As another meeting invite arrives tomorrow’s calender is full from 9:00 to 18:00 with no breaks.

The call I’m on is “listen only” one so I can surf around, do a little online shopping and talk to people in my teams. We all seem a little irate at the mail entitled “urgent urgent urgent” which is asking for names for a tender document the owner of which has missed her deadline and seems to be passing on her confusion and lack of organisation to everyone else on this mail. To be honest now few of these bizarre requests surprise me. We seem more than able to mess up on a consistent and grand scale every week.

Spring must be close :it’s 17:00 and still light out - the sky’s a little red. The call drifts into the next with the same people talking about almost the same thing. A couple of hours of work and calls and it will be time for the short walk back and then we can start all over again tomorrow.