I was rubbish at work the other day.
Really, really super busy day, really, really super busy week.
And I know that that happens cos sometimes I get shocked, and I say and do things that I wouldn't otherwise do, because I don't have time and I'm stressed.
On Tuesday I was travelling to Belfast in the afternoon, but I had 2 dentists visiting me who had agreed to come so they could see around the practice for the whole day.
I went to the gym in the morning and then turned up for work, but I didn't even have time for a shower before the guys arrived, and then I spent the morning in my gym gear working, showing people around the practice and having the meetings that I had to have.
By the time I got a chance to have a shower, it was later on, and so I went into the shower room at the practice, and it was full of people's bags.
I got a little bit mad; I decided this wasn't people's bedrooms, but it was a shower room. Ceremoniously unloaded the bags from the shower room into the office, told people that the shower room wasn't a bedroom, and then took a photograph and put it on Slack and asked people to move their bags before they got wet.
Then I went inside and had a shower, and in the hot water and the calm and the settling down I realised I was being a d**k.
I then realised that two of the bags were actually the guys who'd come to visit the practice and didn't know where else to put their bags.
And then I realised that we don't have a system for the bags, and if we don't have a system, people will just do the best they can the way they think.
For years, Hayley and I have had this thing that when something like that goes wrong, it's never the person or the people; it's the system, and if the system goes wrong, it's my fault.
I dried off after my shower, went outside, started to pick the bags up and repack them, and I deleted the message from Slack, I thought, before anyone had seen it.
But people had seen it, and then they saw it deleted.
My super PA Maria looked at me as I was unpacking the bags again and said to me, “Do you feel like a tit now?”
I said, “Yes, I do feel like a tit now because I was a tit”.
Often the stress we feel is not to do with people; it's to do with the system, and if we happen to be in charge and the system doesn't work, that's on us, not them.
Blog Post Number - 4667
Back in the day, when I got diagnosed with my thyroid disease and I was trying to go and ride the Haute Route 5-day event in the Pyrenees, Alex supported me through that when no one could see. In the lead-up, he even pushed me up a hill.
He wrote a blog after that, which I've kept, and I'll never publish because I don't have guest bloggers here - sorry.
But I remember it, and I remember it well, and so what he said at the end of that was chapeau, and that is what cyclists say to each other out of respect, and when they are impressed.
So, chapeau, Alex.