Back to the Future

Well, a little rest has done me a world of good. For the best part of the last few weeks (joys of several re-rostered rest days and a bit of leave thrown in) I have been resolutely not thinking anything job.

However, the time is nigh where I shall be launching myself back in the deep end.

When I say deep end, I don't mean jobs- calls, or interacting with the public. That shall have to wait. I am going to have to wade through a pile of emails sufficiently high enough to remind me of the mountains I was climbing only a few short days ago.

I have a sinking feeling that I might a simple, but possibly fatal error before I ran out the station leaping for joy at the commencement of leave.

Cue drum roll and sounds of impeding doom riders, please.

I did not set my out-of-office email autoreply to "on".

I shall therefore expect one or more of the following.

- Emails urgently warning me for court.
- Emails urgently dewarning me for court when someone actually bothered to check the duties to see if I'm in. The Witness Liason Office or whatever their title is these days have an annoying habit of warning absolutely everybody for a court case, and then checking the roster. They even check on what date you've booked your leave to see if you didn't pull a crafty one. I got warned for court on the first day of my honeymoon. I had great pleasure in telling the somewhat snotty bloke where he could stick his warning as I had booked that leave about a year in advance.
- Emails warning a PC that he has certain work on some job outstanding cc'd to me (because the PC is on leave.)
- Utterly useless tripe sent to the entire division about how the lift in HQ is having scheduled maintenance.
- Emails advising me that a PC still hasn't completed certain work on some outstanding job (because he's still on leave).
- A good work email celebrating the fact that someones latest politically thumbs-up scheme has gone down terribly well. Too many examples to mention.

These emails shall be dealt with in the usual manner:
Delete without reading (50%).
Read briefly and delete. (40%)
Read, consider actioning, then delete. (7%)
Read and actually do something positive, like reply. (3%).

This will probably take most of the shift. The greatest sense of achievement of returning to work will likely be sourced from getting the email inbox back down to zero.

On a more serious note. Am I the only one who gets just a tang of worry about going back to work after time off? Not about nonsense on email I might add. But I do worry that in time off I'll have forgotten something. I haven't had to think about police stuff for a fortnight or so, and part of me says "Do you still know what you're doing?" (I ignore the voice which says you never know what you're doing.....)

Still, I ignore that voice too. I always seem to get back into things just as quickly as occasion demands, which is usually 10 minutes or so after parade. Except night duty, when things have usually gone wrong about half an hour before parade.

Anyway. I still have a couple of days before the joys of going back to shiftwork. Could go and top up my tan. Ha! If you include rust / weatherbeatenness as a tanning type that is.