Tuesday 26th July, Day 3
After the disappointment of Monday evening (my poor trusty steed couldn’t keep up with the pace of the challenge!), I dropped the bike off at the garage and headed to the nearest tube station with a sense of trepidation. Fun doesn’t tend to feature on ‘The Greg’s’ daily agenda, and standing in a packed carriage in an all-in-one red leather race suit certainly isn’t going to change my mind very quickly.
Nevertheless, on my way to the first visit I put on a brave face (which really is no different from my normal face) and dug deep into my bag of banter. Just because ‘The Greg’ doesn’t have his chariot, our generous authors should not be made to suffer!
My first visit, to Kirsty Langley at Motability Operations, was brightened by the witty security guard who offered me an electric scooter to continue my journey. Needless to say, the offer was rapidly dismissed with a quick flash of my Oyster card. My day was then brightened further by Kirsty’s hilarious contribution of a jargoned conversation between ‘Neil’ and ‘Bob’. Fear not Kirsty, the “results cake” is in the oven!
A short bus ride took me to Bishopsgate to visit Adam Pledger at Lloyds, where I bumped into a good friend and previous INVOLVER – Sam Lizars – a delightful coincidence! After spending some time chatting with Adam about how they’ve effectively used their Leaders as a face-to-face comms channel there at Lloyds, ‘The Greg’ and The Tube were once again reunited.
I headed West towards Latimer Road where I met with Pamela Dease from TalkTalk, who added a hilarious case study about a rather unexpected icebreaker that her MD used!
From there ‘The Greg’ headed back across town to catch a train from Euston up to Milton Keynes. After being swiftly ejected from the train operators cab, as we pulled away from the station I couldn’t help but appreciate the raw power generated by this machine, although it felt strange not to be straddling the thing. ‘The Greg’ was demoted to ‘self-loading freight’ in the rear.
In MK, I first called in at Homebase to visit Ruth Martin, who’s case study takes the employee suggestion box to a whole other level!
Then onto Christina Clark at Virgin Active, where my red and white outfit fitted in perfectly with their branding. Christina felt that her example about Virgin’s anti-Corporate day was such a winner, that she was determined to keep the iPad for herself. This left ‘The Greg’ with no other option but to use both my jedi mind tricks and raw power to wrestle it from her “Active” grasp.
Inspired by the activeness of the Virgin brand, ‘The Greg’ felt compelled to consider a mode of transport often referred to as ‘The Foot’. As the confidence in my stride began to grow, so did my weariness, so Mission Control has arranged a replacement bike for the following day and I have now returned back to London to refuel, recharge my batteries and lube my drive chain.
This is ‘The Greg’….