Upwards and Onwards

One week into the new year and we did today what management in the U.K do best, we had a management meeting! There are plenty of things better than working and one of them is talking about working, this time though there was a purpose.

Bob leaves next January after about a hundred years in the profession and the time has finally arrived when we had to decide what to do with his portfolio of clients. Basically they've been divided between Laura and myself, this has been accepted by all with one notable exception, somebody who got the hump because he wasn't invited to the meeting and so therefore threw a sickie - pathetic.

Anyway it's exciting and a bit scary at the same time, a bit like finding your sister-in-law attractive. I've suddenly acquired a load of clients I have never met which is exciting, but there's always the worry that they will bugger off at the sight of a new face, and not just because it's mine! Still it's a new challenge and only the next twelve months, when I still have Bob's experience and knowledge to fall back on if needed, will show whether or not it will end in tears.

It was on my insistence that we started the handover now, I hate the thought of natural ability and knowledge being wasted and has this horrible vision of us arriving for work on 1st February 2011 and offering up a collective, "Shit, he's gone, what do we do now?" Just as there is a reluctance to take people on at the beginning of their working lives there is also a reluctance to harvest the knowledge of those who are approaching the twilight years of their working lives and I think it is something we are beginning, as a country, to address. If people want to work beyond the statutory retirement age and they can still do a decent job let's employ them.