Gavin Ford lists what he would like for Christmas this year. Luckily for his children, it involves the assembly of lots of flat packed games
10 December 2004
Here we go again. The festive season is now upon us and office Christmas parties are well under way. In my neighbourhood, more and more people seem to be decorating the outside of their property with bigger, more extravagant Christmas lights each year. I haven’t yet been tempted to do this. Not because I’m a Scrooge, but because I think too many lights look tacky. Saying that, my children, Sophie and Tom, love to look at the lights and my wife and I enjoy taking them out to see them. A couple of streets away a few residents organise a lights display and wooden cut-outs of children’s television characters stand in front gardens. The event raises money for the local children’s hospital and the organisers do a fantastic job.
At work, my teams are spread across five locations and so it is really difficult to get everyone together for a single Christmas bash. Unfortunately, it’s not made any easier by the fact that we are a service department and cannot just ‘shut up shop’ like other departments do each year.
Each site team, therefore, has its own party, be it a lunch time or evening event, and if necessary, we will arrange for support cover to be brought in from another site. I work in an office with 27 other people and this year we’re again going out for a Christmas lunch, which will be great fun. The phones will be diverted to a colleague at another site and for one weekday afternoon only, none of the central team will be available.
Our students break up for the Christmas and New Year vacation period on 10 December this year. They’re really lucky as they get four weeks’ holiday (who said students are worse off these days?). I can’t grumble though because although I’ll be working up to around lunchtime on Christmas Eve, the university shuts for the entire Christmas and New Year period. Members of staff receive this holiday without it affecting their normal annual leave entitlement.
Our in-house security team does operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week over the festive period, but each member of the team receives a generous rate of pay for doing so, which certainly softens the blow.
From the second week of December onwards, the university’s catering teams will be providing a traditional Christmas dinner for anyone who is brave enough to want one. It is the one time of the year when food is served with a smile and extra care is taken to get it all on the plate. The look on the faces of the guinea pigs....I mean student and staff diners, as they eat certainly provides the Christmas entertainment for the facilities team. Will I be having one of these culinary delights this year? No chance.
Our family will be coming to us again this Christmas. Sophie and Tom (and I) like to be with the toys they receive and as we all get on really well with each other, the arrangement works fine.
My Christmas morning will no doubt be the same as it has been for the past few years. At around 5.30am I’ll be woken up from my peaceful slumber; from 7am I’ll be twisting off those annoying bits of plastic wire that secure toys to their box; at 9am I’ll be unscrewing battery compartments and filling them up with the job lot of batteries I remembered to purchase before Christmas; at 10am I’ll be trying to piece together the parts of flat packed games and at 11am I’ll start to glue bits of plastic that have snapped off in the excitement. Then I’ll do the same for the kids’ toys!
While I enjoy every day of the Christmas period, I probably enjoy Boxing Day the most. The build up to the big day is over, things are less hectic than the day before and I can finally start to unwind. Every year on Boxing Day, the King George steeplechase is run at Kempton Park racecourse. I’ll be having my usual flutter on the race and for those of you who are interested, my fancy for this year’s race is Seebald. You never know, with current odds at 14/1 I might even recover some of the cost of Christmas.
So, my message to Santa is a simple one this year. I’d like a fun and healthy Christmas, with lots of family around, plenty of children’s toys to enjoy and the winner of the King George. That’s not too much to ask surely?And for all of you facilities managers out there, I wish you the same.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Gavin Ford is facilities manager at the University of Brighton
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