Stayed awake until we went to bed last night, which was nice. And we did do the toasted sandwich thing for tea too. Dunno what we will have tonight though.

Today has been in equal parts rewarding and frustrating. I finally got all the timetable changes from the last two weeks in and off ot the printers when, Kazam!, another one turned up. Ordinarily this would just be a cause for me to shake my head wearily and say something like "just when I thought it was safe" or "here we go again" but this one took the biscuit and finally spurred me into writing a stroppy email. It was for a service that started on Monday. Now, that would be bad enough, not hearing about it until after it changed but this is one we are sponsoring. Yup, not only had the information been in the office before today, we designed it. Accompanying the registration was a letter of support for the change dated the 19th. But did they tell us then? No. And knowing how the system works it will have taken them a couple of weeks to pull the whole thing together. It is actually a replacement for a commercial service that has been cancelled. Did they tell us they were going to look to replace it? No. Did they tell us when the tenders went out? No. Or when they were returned? You guessed it.

So that was just one step too far for me. I have sent this to their stand in manager (names not changed cos they ain't innocent and don't deserve protecting!):

I've been trying to get communications from your team about what goes on for 4½ years now so would welcome your input on the matter. The main issue is on letting us know what they are doing when it comes to sponsored services. I am continually finding out about things we are paying for from the final registration rather than in advance from the people doing it. This is made worse when it comes to supporting short notice changes.

I think the final straw has just come - I have received a registration in the last ten minutes for a service that started on MONDAY accompanied by a support letter from Ian dated the 19th. Now I know I was off for two weeks, but your people must have known they were doing this before the 19th and could at least have told someone something about what was going on. It would have been nice to get the roadside publicity done before it started, whereas now it won't be until Friday of this week.

Frankly, I've had enough of being left out of the loop like this. And after all, who's going to ride a bus if we can't tell anyone it is running?

There is also this email I sent to Mike, Chris and Charles before going off up North:

Chaps,

As I seem to have been lumbered with producing a leaflet to tell the plebs all about ticket interavailability between sponsored and commercial services, can one of you provide me a definitive list of what we do, where it is valid etc etc etc.

Ta,

Again, I have heard nothing. Not even a "we're busy but will get back to you". I can see I will be getting chased for news on the leaflet soon and will have to say that people are letting me down.

Any chance you can take them off somewhere and knock some sense into them? All the re-org stuff implies we should work together more but that's only what the publicity/marketing team has been asking for since before I started here.

All help gratefully appreciated...

He agrees the situation is not a good one, so has agreed to join us at our next team meeting to see what we actually need then sort them out. Hopefully the results will prove positive. After all, we are supposed to be getting closer to each other under the re-org stuff so there are some pretty huge walls to break through.

Better news is that we think we have decided on the holiday we want to take. Prague. Will see now how much money we end up with and if there are spaces for us.

Also wnet to the library at lunchtime so have four cds to listen to soon: Underworld - Beacoup Fish AND Live - Everything, Everything, Jimi Hendrix - Axis: Bold As Love and Blink 182 - The Buddah Album. The latter will fit on the same MD as another album of theirs I've got but the live Underworld will need some clever editing to fit on an MD unless I can find somewhere selling 80 minute ones locally.

Nearly time to get out of here for the day. Yay! Getting hairs cut tonight as they should have been done last week but we were on the A1 at the time.