Yet another frustrating day!

I should have known that today was going to be difficult when I became embroiled in traffic on my way to my Citizen's Advice session. I left home at the normal time of 8am but when I still wasn't anywhere near the town at 8.30am I knew there were problems on the road.

It turned out to be roadworks on the Kettering Road and I eventually got to the car park at 8.57am! I hurtled down The Drapery and almost ran into the Guildhall to find a new girl, Aimee, already setting up. Of course, my lateness gave her a bit of an advantage so she was in control, something I found quite difficult to cope with seeing as I had been on my own in the office for the last two weeks!

Aimee normally works on a Friday and said that it's very quiet - she saw only seven clients last week whereas we had over forty turning up. I let her get on with it at first and went out with the data sheets to find the clients who had turned up to see us. However, it all got a bit chaotic mid-morning and I could see that Aimee was finding it difficult to input the sheets and make appointments for the advisers. With Frank, he sits in front of the main computer while I go and collect the data sheets and input them so it works very well. He will book appointments and sort out food bank vouchers if need be. With Aimee, we didn't quite gel together very well and she had some odd ways of doing things that worried me a bit!

I escaped at lunchtime and went off to the post office to send the letter to the CEO of B&Q. I sent it "signed for" so there should be no excuse for it not to get to him. If we don't have any luck with this route then it really will be time for us to get some legal advice.

After lunch things really did go from bad to worse and we had a seating area full of people waiting at one point. The advisers were tearing their hair out and I just knew that we would still be in the office past 3pm. In the end we had to turn people away and give them leaflets so I felt a bit bad. It was bliss to finally get out and head home at 3.45pm.

The BT engineer had been and had fixed the internet problem, which was great news. He made three trips to the main box on the estate so we won't be charged the £130 call out fee, thank goodness! Mike had stayed at college so we went off to collect him at 5pm and hit the rush hour traffic...grrr!