The Daily Grind

OK so I'm not a huge fan of the format I've been going with. Which was basically writing what I did each day so I thought I'd do something a little more generic. I'll still do some day by day ones when I do something particularly note worthy but on the whole I'll do more like this.

So I thought a good place to start would be a typical sort of work day. I'll try a not make it too long and boring for you.

I'll skip all the boring pre-work routine but I will mention the nice walk I take every morning to get to work. Assisi itself is set on the hill and my accommodation is about a 1 km walk above the office so every morning I get to walk down with a great view of the valley below looking out over Umbria and on towards Tuscany.

Every morning starts with a couple of meetings, the first at 7.30 for the management team and the second at 7.45 for everyone working, just to run through the details of the delegations that are coming through on the day and any updates from the previous day.

In between these meetings I have to run down to the restaurant and tell them how many students are coming on the day so they can make picnic lunches. No-one in the kitchen speaks English so this can often be an interesting exercise but it usually works out.

From then until about 9 am its a fairly relaxed morning. I have to enter all purchases into our budget to make sure we aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on anything and then its just checking emails and catching up on the news of the world. Then at about 9 am I'm called to the presentation room to run the morning shop, where the students can pre-order their photos and purchase t-shirts. This is the busiest time of day as I have to process about 30 - 60 students in 15 to 20 minutes.

The Shop!

The Presentation Room

 After restocking the shelves and packing up the presentation room I'm back in the office by about 10 am and from then on I'm call this whole time to do a variety of random jobs, from putting toilet paper in the port-a-loos to running ice packs to the crew if someone hurts themselves. But there is nothing major that I have to do until about 1 pm when I collect the memory cards from the cameras at the tower and drive down in Santa Maria, about 10 minutes away, to get the pictures printed.

Where I get the Photos printed,
with my car in the foreground.

Tower the students abseil off.
(100 feet high)

Once I get back to the office with photos I have to put them into folders, as they get a team and individual photo. Once that's all done its just waiting around for the call to come down to the presentation room for the afternoon shop, in case any of the students decide they want to purchase the photo and also to announce who gets their photo for free.

After that the students head off and continue on their trip. I have to count all the sales and make a record of how we did on that particular day then the crew comes together for an end of day debrief outside the presentation room and then back to the office to update the sales spread sheet.

And that's my day done. Of course there is whole bunch of other stuff I do during the day, such as answering phone calls, sending emails, impromptu meetings/discussions with other management on different things that arise each day but on the whole, what is above is the general flow of my day.

Hope that makes it a little easier to understand what I'm actually doing over here, on the other side of the world!