8 things…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, …err, sorry, back in September, we kicked off a little competition to win an iPod, linked in with our first big advertising campaign in t’Big Smoke. For those of you that haven’t yet become completely bored with the ‘London Calling’ blog entry that’s been lingering on here for weeks, you can refresh your memory here.

More…

Here at Plusnet Towers we’ve been incredibly busy lately, getting ready to kick off a massive advertising campaign in London. For those of you who live in London, you might have seen the first part of our campaign already – we’ve been sponsoring the ITV London Weekday weather since the end of July. If you haven’t, you can watch the clips here

As of Monday we’ve had posters across London Underground, on London buses and in several London newspapers.

As I’m sure you’re aware, Plusnet has grown in part due to customers recommending our service to their friends. We wanted to get this across in our campaign, which is why we’ve gone for ‘8 out of 10 Plusnet customers would recommend us’ across all formats. More…

Good afternoon readers, I hope you’ve all had a good Easter!

More…

Good evening and welcome to EOD!

I’m back at the grindstone after a rather relaxing week off.  It’s amazing how quickly you can forget about early mornings when you have a week off work.

Before getting into the meat of the update, happy St Patrick’s day to all our Irish readers! – hope you’re all having a good day.

Over to Comms and here we have Mand…

Howdy,

It’s been a pretty quiet day for me today, as I’ve been working from home, keeping my germs to myself.

James is still on holiday, so I assume he’s been playing video games and/or drinking beer.

Bob and Chris have been helping out with some email issues following the rather large piece of migration work we did on the MAAF platform over the last couple of weeks.

Matt has been in the forums and ‘writing an email’, very cryptic.

I have been working on problems, a plan for an upcoming project, and a few conference calls.

That’s it from us today, more Comm-ic fun for you here

Have a good one,

Mand

Short and sweet today, so Mark’s Web Team musings finish things off nicely…

It’s Mark here, Cead míle fáilte* from the Web Development team! We’re hoping you’re having a great St Patrick’s Day, with lots of dancing, drinking and err… potatoes?

Once again our canteen failed to serve up complimentary pints of Guinness, but we’re not bitter – the Thai Curry was pretty nice. So what in the world of Plusnet web development has been going on today?

Well I’ve been doing email work, prodding some problems with a stick. At lunchtime, I spent about twenty minutes wishing I had Irish roots, my Welsh ones are far less fashionable…

Nick “More email work, problems and work on Partner today for me…in a nutshell (a tiny one, like a hazelnut)”

Dan “Still working on some internal tools.” Thanks Dan, sounds gripping.

Andy “Partner training material, and a small tweak to the Madasafish website that you tested for me Mark”

So I did Andy!

Jonathan “Chewing the cud and general musings, plus some secret things”.

James and Phil are both sealed in a protective cocoon, whilst they complete work on an exciting development that remains hush-hush for the moment, but is going to be available to customers soon. Occasionally I see Phil beating on the walls of the cocoon. I had better get the QA team to drill some air holes.

Sam has been working on visuals for a Partner related project, he’s also borrowed my iPod cable, so I think he’ll be listening to some music too.

Team leader Jonny is in self-imposed exile, apparently it’s too hot in the Development team office. He’s conducting appraisal interviews somewhere within the labyrinth of Plusnet towers.

Kelly “I’ve had to work from home today to look after my poorly girlfriend, but that means I’ve been able to get on with some presentation writing.”

* Cead míle fáilte – translates to ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’. How generous are we?

That’s all folks – see you soon.

It’s the second Friday 13th of the year, although sadly no Jason film out this month. Mind you still haven’t seen the latest one yet (and no comments spoiling whodunnit! please).

Anyhow, let’s start off with a sweep of who’s posted today, first is Neil from Networks:

We’ve rounded of what can only be described as a very full week up in Networks. It’s all a bit of a blur but last weekend’s migration of some BrightView vISP’s was a blinging success! Most of the Dev posse have been cleaning up some resulting problems which were inevitable to an extent and putting other random fixes in place. We now look forward to migrating the rest of the vISP’s including Mad As A Fish over tonight, and fingers crossed for another smooth one. Over in Ops we’ve had a huge amount of tickets to plough through due to some mail related problems that we’ve sorted out now. This was almost a one mad effort from Mr Dan P with myself throwing in every spare minute that I could find to back him up.. More DR move work for us including making sure all the guys in South Africa are now using the new Citrix platform to connect to our Network. They’d better be now because I’m disabling the old one on Monday….. We’ve kept all general problems under control too which is a great achievement given the amount we had coming in. More madness next week no doubt!

Neil

Next is Mand from the Comms Team:

It’s Friday. We like Fridays, as the end of Friday is Beer’O'Clock.

Anyhow, there’s only me and PJ left as I write this, so I’m gonna have to wing it somewhat.

Bob’s day was mostly taken up with sending an email to Madasafish customers regarding the email work we’re doing at the moment. It was good though to see the almost unparalleled look of joy on his face when he got his laptop back today (it’s been away being fixed for a few weeks now, and he’s been rather irritated with it’s laptop on a far too frequent basis).

James spent the day going on about his ridiculously long weekend, and working on his plan for world domination (you’ll hear more about that next week).

Matt has been working on our newsletter, some task work, and support for our CSC colleagues. Along with winning an iPOD shuffle with some very very cringeworthy jokes (for charideeeee).

CParr has been holding a JaffaCake vs Chocolate Hobnob debate, and cursing anyone who dares to choose JaffaCake, he really has a problem with them for some strange reason. This is CParr so best not to ask in my experience.

I’ve been catching up from my couple of days off (I like 2 day weeks ), preparing some internal communications and working on problems.

In other news, we raised £107 today by allowing people to pay to wear a hat to work, though PJ’s hat insulted all common decency as it was a Blades hat (it pains me just to write that ), and the aforementioned joke competition. This will be headed to Comic Relief, as it is of course Red Nose Day.

As an extra special weekend treat, we have not one but two comics for you today:

Enjoy!

And last today, but certainly not least we have Jen from HR:

A bit of a run down of this week, from HR:

Amanda was on holiday Monday and toddled off to watch The Killers in concert. Meanwhile, back at base camp Barbs, Gem and I were up to all sorts of lovely stuff. This week we’ve been focusing on recruitment, including interviewing for roles, plus admin for changes and new starters. Linked into this we’ve also been supporting with resourcing plans. Employee Opinion Survey sessions are next week, so we’ve been setting these up and sending out info to facilitate department plans. Barbs went off on a Excel training course yesterday and we reviewed the holiday policy and sent out updates. We’ve also continued to receive performance reviews and MDLP 360 degree reviews. Of course, today, it being Comic Relief we’ve donned silly hats and felt very conspicuous, but it’s all been for a good cause. None of us managed to get in on the joke competition though, but the post man came from Royal Mail about 15 mins ago and this was his contribution:
‘A young man is getting fed up of going to weddings and being prodded by all the old women in his family, “It’ll be you next”. After a family funeral, they suddenly stop doing it. Might have had something to do with him prodding them and saying, “It’ll be you next”. Anyway, I’ll pop another quid in for that, if only to apologise.

That’s it for another week!

And that’s it for today, but we’ll leave you with the winning joke from Matt T:

Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Because it was dead.
Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree?
It was stapled to the first monkey.
Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree?
It thought it was a game.

Tomorrow is the 15th, halfway through January already… Crikey!
On with the EOD: More…

Ok, I had mixed success with my 2008 predictions, but I’m always up for a challenge and so am once again going out on a limb and putting my reputation on the line.  “What reputation?” I hear you ask.  Well, I’ll let you decide on that!  Anyway, here goes: More…

Ah, the British winter is here. We haven’t had any snow in sunny Sheffield yet, well not that I’ve seen, but I hear that other places have. And to think just a week ago I was sat on a beach in the sun just outside Barcelona. Bit of a shock to the system.

More…

The rumour mills and tech sites are really starting to go Mac-crazy on the run-up to the inevitable, any day now, news that Steve Jobs has got some exciting new Macbooks to share with us all – most likely on 14th October. Or who knows? it could be sooner. After all, rumours tell us that this gear is already shipping. More…