Weekly Recap

For the second time this week, I'm recounting an event that happened much earlier in the week but was never written about at the time. As I'm not ready to intrude on my 'Flashback' concept with such short-term topic revisiting, this can perhaps best be viewed as the 'previously in my life' summary at the beginning of an episode of a long-running series.

This Tuesday I was out of the office for a meeting in the morning - what is actually a rare occurrance. I thought on this somewhat and realised that the most recent time that I had to visit somewhere for work was almost a year previously, while still working at my former job.

The difference was stark. Then I was dispatched to Norwich as a token sop to a fussy but senior business manager whose branch was bedevilled by IT issues, which while I was there seemed to mainly be the sort that occur between the keyboard and the chair. The manager was ill on the day I visited to make my appearance even more pointless, and I spent the majority of my time doing normal work and wondering why I had been sent 100 miles away for this.

However, my visit on Tuesday was to the home of Jaguar Land Rover, which was a slightly more impressive proposition. Their offices are what is technically known as the arse end of nowhere, reinforcing their luxury British brand concept by basing themselves in the Oxfordshire countryside. This was a pain to get to, but more amusing was their on-site security.

First you must park, and check in at the visitor point. From there you are given visitor badges, sent by bus to the main site (whichever building you are headed to), and then you must go through the same check in process at the building you returned to. This seemed to be entirely pointless, as the little of the building we saw between the reception and the meeting room was mainly just office floors where people were doing dull tasks on computers. Perhaps there was something highly secretive going on there unbeknown to me.

The meeting was dull and the majority of the day was taken up with travel to and from the site, but overall it's something worth recounting because it sounds far more impressive than the reality!