Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

Work has been very busy this week and the next two days aren't going to be fun. We've finally reached the point where we can send out the Nursery Education Grant forms to the nurseries with the details for next term. Normally we'd have done this by the first week of the month. The reason it's so late is because this time it's going out with the Early Years Census and other pilot information, which has tripled the paperwork involved. It's also tripled the number of people involved and you know what happens then, right?

Yeh.

Anyway, PartyGirl was finally able to finish the printing today, after a last minute scare when we heard that we might not be able to extend the Support Scheme funding to cover all 2 years olds as we thought. This would have been a disaster as we have been advising nurseries that the scheme was being extended and they've been telling the parents. If we'd had to go "Erm, sorry, we wuz lied to, as you were..." I think there would have been angry mobs with torches and pitchforks outside County Hall in short order :p

So tomorrow begins the Great Envelope Stuffing. With just the Grant stuff this used to take PartyGirl and myself the best part of a day if not longer to do. Now, however, the paperwork has ballooned to the point we've press ganged at least two other people to help. We used to put around 12 sheets of paper and one SSAE in the packs, some of which was stapled together. Now there is in excess of 30 bits and bobs! Egads. Luckily, thanks to sterling efforts by Holly, our little Finance Resources treasure, most of the paper has been collated into piles so that we're not trying to collate 30 bits of paper every time, but several loose sheets and some stapled collations. Bit easier. Still, imagine if you will, that this lot has to be sent to 480 nurseries and you'll appreciate why PartyGirl and I have NOT been looking forward to this! Oh well, keeps us off the streets.

Had a bit of a giggle this week though. TooTall had been attempting to forward an email to a finance chap at West Sussex. However, he got an email back saying it could not been forwarded as the filter had detected it could contain obscene or offensive words or phrases. This boggled us as we could see nothing untoward, unless the server just didn't like the word "sex" in "Sussex" but we felt that surely a fellow county council would have allowed for that? So I rang our IT department and got them to look into the matter and guess why it had been filtered out? Go on, I bet you can't......

....

....

the filter had found the word "cum" in "document".

Seriously.

*boggles*

As we were saying, their email trap must get stuffed with rejected mail!