Happy Days At Puddlecote Inc

I was planning to write about today's amateur and laughable CJEU judgement on article 20 of the TPD (and ASH's gleeful jubilation at the banning of many vaping products) but something pinged in my inbox at 5pm which changed things somewhat.

You may remember last month I mentioned a large contract Puddlecote Inc was waiting on ...

The tender we submitted is in the region of £650k pa for a contractual seven years and would entail significant staff recruitment to cover, as well as vehicles to source in a hurry. It's not something you approach lightly so in advance of this we have undertaken a major business reorganisation. This involved taking on three key professional managerial staff for our office (one more will be necessary if our bid is accepted), renegotiating around 40 staff contracts, and commissioning building work to extend the premises to cope with the added workspace that will be required should we be successful. It has been a process which has been many months in the planning, has been quite costly (and continues to be), unfortunately involved unavoidable redundancies, but gained me three free coffee cups and a load of post-it pads from a grateful Reed Employment.

Well, we've just found out that - pending a few routine contract approval procedures - we have been awarded it!

As I said at the time, this means that there is now a lot of work to be done and my time is going to be squeezed.

Of course, if we do win it then the contingency plans for that go into effect and all hell will break loose! At which point you won't see hide nor hare of me during certain periods I expect.

By crikey, my options for sneaking away to the cricket on weekdays this summer look likely to be diminished too.

A Whatsapp group with my office staff has been buzzing away this evening with a combination of excitement at the award, and trepidation as to the extra efforts which will be required to implement the contract successfully. We're arranging a lunch tomorrow for all of them to say thanks for their efforts so far in gaining the new business and also to brief about the plans we have to put in place straightaway for such a large undertaking.

The overall feeling is that these are happy (if undoubtedly stressful) days to come, and I have to say that it's at times like this I'm proud of the team we have assembled at Puddlecote Inc HQ.

There is one of my key personnel who isn't on Whatsapp, though, so I had to text him instead. He's our Fleet Maintenance Manager (FMM), a down-to-earth guy who will be tasked with helping to source the large number of extra vehicles required and keeping them maintained and regulation-compliant along with the 70 odd he already handles.

It was a short conversation:

DP: We won the new contract.
FMM: Fuck! 

I think a new bonus scheme might be in order.