Honestly is good.  I like honesty.  I have decided that it should come with a caveat though:  Gentle honesty is better than hurtful honesty.

This observation is the result of two people being a little too honest with me last week.  The first informed me that ‘oooh, you can really see your bald spots can’t you?’  True maybe, but there are possibly gentler ways to remind me of something I am painfully aware of.  The second was when I was told unless Bradley could come out of retirement when we met up, they would rather not see me as ‘I don’t like how you look with such short hair’.  Interestingly, this particular person has never seen me with a shaved head.

So promptly, all the loveliness and support that people had given me went out the window and I went into hiding.  I’d not actually been into the office since Monday the week before (the Pog mobile had a succession of critical illnesses that meant a few days of intensive care at the garage, and resulted in me being stuck in Bumpkinsville) so it all rather got out of hand.  This Wednesday though, I had a big meeting that I run and I had to go into the office.  Coached through a few panic attacks by some incredibly patient friends, I got my act together, left Bradley in the bathroom and went in.

I’ve mentioned before that we have amazing photography around our office.  On one floor, the lifts are covered with a huge image of Bradley Wiggins (the real one, not the one currently languishing in my bathroom).  To demonstrate my newly resolved braveness I took one of those awful I’ve-taken-a-picture-of-myself photos with my phone.  I opened it on my laptop and posted it on Facebook as I thought it would make people giggle.

Anyway, back to the meeting.  It has around 3000 invitees from all over the world, realistically, around 700 join.  Still quite a lot though…  Big manager and his management team gathered in his office and I took a really deep breath as I walked in with my slightly baldy, fluffy hair.  I got some looks but…actually they rapidly paled into insignificance as the meeting went very, very wrong.  I wont go through the utter chaos that followed, I’ll just skip to the giggle:

We use a ‘thingy’ called WebEx on these calls so that people can follow the presentation that is going on.  I create the presentation but in the meeting someone else moves the slides while I field questions that come in.  Around 10 minutes into the call the WebEx session terminated.  (For once it wasn’t my fault!)   On top of the other things that had already gone wrong, total panic ensued in the room.  After a few minutes I worked out that I could set up a new meeting myself, send the details to all 3000 people and pick up where we left off….kind of.  I would need to run the presentation to do this though.

Unfortunately, with this WebEx thingy, you can share an application (so in this case people would see the slides) or you can share your desktop (so everyone can see anything you are looking at).  This is unfortunate as by this stage I was a shaky mess, trying to look in control.  I shared my desktop rather than the presentation.  And guess what was open on my desktop at the time……?

You guessed it:

Yup, that’s me and the other Bradley. I’m really hoping most people wouldn’t have seen it before I corrected the view.  If they did though, I guess it was probably more entertaining that the slightly more standard slides.  On the upside being in the office and seeing people suddenly became less of a big deal.  Staying there and successfully finishing the meeting was more important.  And that is what I did.

Hooray, hooray, hooray that it is Friday though!  :o)