Aude’s off to France this weekend to visit her parents and do some shopping for the wedding, and I’ve got a weekend in London catching up with some old friends. I’ve come equipped with a sleeping bag, which is about as close as I come to ‘roughing it’. The cats have been left with extra food to fend for themselves.

It’s been a funny old week. I’ve spent much of the week interviewing candidates, some good, some bad, some downright shocking. Those who were successful are attending an all-day assessment centre today, seeing if they’ll make the final grade. The rest can be summed up by the feedback I received from one of my colleagues: “She’s a lovely person. But she’d be a hopeless consultant.” They’re 90% enthusiasm, 10% capability. Nice in a puppy, but not in a colleague.

I managed to catch some sort of stomach bug so spent most of Wednesday in bed feeling rather sorry for myself. In my Operations role, one of the highlights of my week is reviewing timesheets. Apparently whatever I caught was going around – lots of people claiming hours off sick. I read somewhere that the second and third weeks of February were statistically plagued with the highest absenteeism of the year, something to do with the short days, post-New-Year blues, and long break since a bank holiday – I wonder if that’s the case or whether everyone was genuinely sick.

My Operations role has given me some really valuable insights into how a consultancy is run. Take timekeeping – the lifeblood of any consultancy. One of the things that you learn as you work in a consultancy is that you can get by for ages doing very little work if you’re creative with your timesheet. And you can be penalised for even a moment’s idleness if you’re not careful.

It’s all a matter of interpretation. Certain codes are red flags and get examined very closely – even an hour booked to ‘Unassigned’ gets careful scrutiny. Catch up over coffee with a colleague and book the time to ‘Unassigned’ – expect to get a talking to. Have the same cup of coffee, but book it to ‘Sales / business development’ and no one says a word.

My senior guys know this. They know where to stick their time in order not to raise any eyebrows, they do their thing, and everyone more or less leaves them alone. But some of my junior guys, even with all the coaching in the world, seem not to have cottoned on to the way the game is played. And then they wonder why they’re constantly being harassed by management for how they’re spending their time.

But their naivety really surprises me sometimes. It’s mid-year review time, and one of my junior guys booked 23 hours to ‘counselling and feedback’. And expected no one to ask any questions about how he’d spent his time. Even though my managers, who have to do appraisals for 5-6 people, generally only booked about 10 hours.

A group of the management team got together last night to take a state of the nation over a few beers. And we decided between us that we’ve got quite a few puppies on our team – enthusiastic and quite sweet, but needing quite a lot of handholding and not quite paper-trained yet.

Maybe I should hire a dog trainer?