Handovers.

I found myself spending much of the week of the 15th July writing a handover document for my colleagues, dutifully detailing the various human relationships and technical esoterica that comprise my working life. It came to about five sides of A4 (or perhaps US Letter; a recent user profile rebuild really gave my Word defaults a mauling) which is a strange thing to have literally a third of your life reduced to, mostly in bullet point form. But reduced it is and, provided my colleagues can find some US Letter paper to print it on, they’ll be able to cover any cracks that might emerge while I’m away.

Our daughter is about nine months old and now it’s my turn to do about nine weeks of full-time parenting. at whatever time of day or night that might be needed. We had something of a handover week last week (well, we were both off work) but eschewed all practicalities by going off on holiday. A roof box but no routine, if you will. The week culminated in a twelve-hour drive home, followed by two hours of being pinched, bitten, sucked and screamed at by my babbling interlocutor before she conked out somewhere around half past three. One hopes it is not portentous.

Claire returns to work tomorrow, seemingly coincidentally on the same day our son’s nursery begins its summer closure. She just popped in to the living room and found me steeling myself for the week ahead (by online ordering school uniform from Asda). She threw the baby monitor down, next to me, on the sofa. “This is the ceremonial handover”, she said, before plugging in her work iPhone and disappearing to bed.

And so here we are. Handovers done, WordPress updated to the latest version, SSL certificates installed. Let the nine weeks begin. Again.

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