The clocks have gone back to GMT in the UK and that now means that we are three hours ahead of them. This is the part of the year I find most frustrating. Trying to do business with companies and banks in the UK is a problem. In Bahrain we mainly start work at 7 or 8, and I am usually at my desk by 6am as I am a morning person. In the UK they don’t start work until 9am which means that I have been at work for six hours before I can get anyone on a call or to answer an email. Then the other side kicks in when I am having dinner at 7pm. I end up with calls and emails demanding answers interrupting my watching of Tipping Point and The Chase.
Time differences are an inconvenience when you are working for a multinational company. My previous company had an operational office in Hong Kong, headquarters in the UK and sales offices in the USA, so I would sometimes be working round the clock dealing with HK early in the morning and the States in the evening. I have clocks on my office wall set to their time zones so that I can be considerate when trying to call them. I just wish that they had done the same. You’re not at your best trying to answer a call about technical specifications at three in the morning. I guess this is just the price we pay for working in a digital world where you are ‘always on’.
Long gone are the days when you started work when you arrived in the office and finished when you left. No computers at home, no emails or mobile phones capable of sending and receiving them. Lovely stress free weekends, and when you went on holiday you were ‘out of the office’ and you could relax only worrying about whether you were actually tanning or burning. Nowadays you are expected to take your laptop with you or even if not you still have the dreaded phone and therefore you are always contactable to be asked questions or to still get the quote done. For about the last 15 years, when on holiday, I have always had to get up a couple of hours ahead of the family to get the work done and you can’t go back to your company and say that you worked for four days on your two-week break, and so you only had 10 days leave.
Mind you, I remember a holiday back in the Eighties with no phone or email, and as I was sunning myself on the beaches of Malta I gave no thought to what was going on back home, blissfully unaware that my partner had made a very bad decision which almost put our company out of business. If I had been in daily touch I would have stopped it and saved us thousands of pounds. I always call that holiday my most expensive one. So swings and roundabouts I suppose.