This morning I was having a leisurely start to the day (I was in the bath, actually) when the phone rang. “Where are you?” I was supposed to be in Basildon, delivering an Excel Intermediate course. I had accepted the booking last month, but somehow failed to enter it into my diary, and I had completely forgotten about it. This is a trainer’s worst nightmare – even worse than the one where you’re completely naked and trying to deliver a course but haven’t been told what it is! I have let down my agency, the client and the delegates. Absolutely horrible.
The agent has spoken to the end client, and they agreed that it would be better to cancel the course, rather than have me arrive totally flustered and two hours late. Presumably they will reschedule, but I somehow doubt that I’ll be offered the replacement.
All I can do is apologise profusely and put steps in place to ensure that this never happens again.
I have added a column to my work list, headed “In Diary”. This is set to TRUE for existing entries, (they have now all been entered). When I enter a new row this column comes up empty, so I have used Conditional Formatting to give the row a bright yellow background until I change the status – after entering the work in my diary. Highly conspicuous! I could have done this straight away too, but first wanted to check that the extra column didn’t interfere with my code for generating invoices automatically (it didn’t).I have decided not to automate exporting the diary entry just yet at least. It looks to be straightforward enough, but I often need to add further information to the diary that I do not include in the work list, so it would only do half the job and I would have to edit the entry anyway.
The training organisation has been back to me and, while they’re obviously not happy that this happened, and I’ve given them a nightmare of a job to sort it out, they do accept that it’s a one-off blip. They have assured me that they will be using me again – although I will be working at a very reduced rate if they reschedule this particular course!
I have now added cells to my work spreadsheet, reminding me to synchronise bookings with my diary. I log the date I last did a diary check, and it will come up in red if I leave it more than a week. In due course, I may see if I can write a macro to export the data to a diary format, but that will be a major undertaking – so a quick solution now is better than nothing.