What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 15 August 2016

Welcome to another week and it’s fair to report that all was not well at Cloud 9 Towers this time a couple of weeks ago. After a few issues with our services and various wrangles with BT, they decided to cancel our Broadband Service, rather than one of the telephone lines we had installed for a specific client event last year.

So our official Cinderella (Carol – we call her that as she is normally office bound whilst we are all out and about at events) bravely manned the phones whilst the rest of the team were dispatched home to work.

Whilst modern technology, phones and Apps make working without a full online service okay, there are just somethings you cannot do in the office without being able to access the internet and emails that require attachments.

So as it’s a Monday and not the best day of the week to pick up the phone and use it as an excuse for any kind of new business generation (as we can’t follow anything up!) it was a case of trying to find an effective way to use our time. Not that easy when every two minutes BT are calling you back to try and plug or unplug something in, which involves scrambling about under desks and unravelling lots of wires.

So writing a blog or two was one way to use the time, as was finally reading the piles of Trade Mags dotted around the office which remain unread and in most cases unwrapped.

A good old fashioned clear out was also in order – do we really need that old Q Hotels mini brochure featuring just 21 properties which is now hopelessly out of date, as well as a copy of Square Meal from 2014? It’s very easy to adopt a hoarder’s mentality sometimes in this industry, when the fact is that most of us use information online these days anyway.

Also, information, contacts and venues change so often that we sometimes wonder why a small fortune is spent on promotional literature and elaborate brochures. We know it’s a topic we have touched on before, but the waste generated by brochures, and promotional items sometimes astounds us.

Memory sticks are another wasted investment for most venues – sorry if you are a venue and you are particularly proud of the information on the memory sticks you give out. We – along with lots of other agents (and we know this because we have checked) simply delete the data on the memory sticks and use them for our own events or information swapping internally.

After our mammoth tidy up, an even bigger filing operation took place. How on earth any office truly manages to be paperless is beyond us, but we do genuinely try and save the odd tree by not printing unless we need to. Venue contacts and client information though remain important enough to print off, if only to carefully study the small print.

So we had a technology fail, but it still shows you can be reasonably productive, increase your industry knowledge and have a clear out now and again. So maybe in a few months we will adopt another technology free day!

Have a great week….