Monday, August 27, 2007

The best laid plans.

As many of my regular readers will know I have 3 fantastic kids. Every Sunday in winter my husband and I try and get them up the mountain for a ski day. So part of my Saturday jobs is to remind the kids to get all their Ski gear laid out for the next morning.
As a Professional organiser I find that giving people responsibilty to handle their own organising issue. So by getting my kids to be responsible for getting their clothes ready is one of these steps.
Imagine my surprise and laughter when we arrived in the car park at Mt Hutt, with only the boys (as Grace was busy winning a Computer Competition at Canterbury University), had left their Ski Pants at home. How did they manage this, you may ask. Well it seems that the previous week they had decided to keep them in their room, not with the ski gear that all stays together week by week.
As we wake early 6.30am to go skiing the kids travel in the car in their under ski wear leggings, so they boys jumped out of the car in their leggings, and declared. "Where are our Ski pants MUM.....they are not in the bag? To which I helpfully replied, "they will be wherever you left them, and given I reminded you to get your gear ready last night, I do not think it is my problem!!!!" harsh I know, but please how many times can a person be reminded and systems be put in place before people catch on.
Suffice to say they will not do it again.
We managed to hire 2 pairs of pants and they happily skied of for a session with there Sunday ski instructor "Teeny".
However on the organising issue. We went to the desk and paid for our pant hire and were pointed in the direction of the clothes hire area. we stood there with 4 others for 15 minutes. Eventually I just grabbed 2 pairs of pants off the rack, threw the docket on the desk and we went skiing. At the end of the day we returned them to the still unmanned rental desk, and went home. It was incredibly frustrating, as these mountains charge big bucks for their ski passes and hire etc, then to be wasting so much time because they do not have enough staff to get the CUSTOMERS kitted up is really frustrating. if we had not helped ourselves, we have no idea how long we would have waited, as any staff member who happened by in the time we waited were not interested in stopping to serve people. I just hope the other 4 people in the queue eventually managed to hit the slopes on what turned out to be a glorious day up the mountain.
And boy's, don't forget your pants next week.

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