The joys of flexible working

Anyone working for Brighton & Hove City Council (not just us delightful tourism peeps) get to work flexible hours. For the most part we do the normal Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 hours, apart from the lovely folks at the VIC as they have to do weekends as well. But it is always nice to know we have the option of changing our hours, for example if you are going away for the weekend and want to leave early on the Friday, then as long as you have enough hours saved up then that's fine. Equally if you need to be at home to let in a little man to look at your flat, as I did this morning, then that is ok too.

As I had enough time stored I could have easily spent the morning reading or watching trashy telly, however I thought as I had had to get up and dressed early I might as well make the most of it and get some work done. Which could have been tricky but actually although a lot of stuff is saved on our hard drives there is also a lot we can do from home, so I forwarded a few e-mails I had not had time to read at work on to my home address and I was able to put together an itinerary as of course all the information about what to do I could get from our website then I e-mailed it back for me to format at work, although really I could have done that from home as well as any of the images that I use are also available from our online image library - brightononview

And for a change it was nice to work at home and be able to have the radio on and listen to Ken Bruce's Popmaster partly to challenge my pop trivia but also to see what would go wrong - today they managed to loose the caller in the middle of the quiz! I also felt I got more done in a relatively short space of time than I might have at the office as I was able to focus completely on what I was doing without the usual distractions. There was also the added bonus of my walk to work being quicker than usual as there were no parents walking their children to work. Don't get me wrong it is admirable that they are walking instead of herding their offspring around in 4x4s, however I do not see why they cannot rein their little darlings in a bit rather than splaying all over the pavement and leaving me no room to get round them, grr (waves fist randomly in the air)

That said I would not want to work from home all the time, partly because I would run the risk of becoming a hermit, especially in winter but mainly because I would miss the office antics be it Sarah's angry rants, seeing just how many bargains Nicky manages to buy at lunch or the latest double entendres from Linda and Richard :)


Charlotte