New office? New challenges! The new FWL Office opened officially yesterday (Tuesday 4 October) at 5 St Mary’s Courtyard, Church Street, Calne. Due to swift expansion in staff and case load, a new premises was needed. Finding the right place was easy and thankfully, fairly painless although we do have to wait for Wiltshire Council to approve the ‘change of use’ from retail to office space. With so many retail properties lying empty in the town, we sincerely hope that our landlord’s application will be processed promptly!
Service has continued as normal throughout the move although, on occasion, our 48-hour response rate to correspondence has stretched to 72. Most of the work we have arranged has run smoothly and our decorators, electricians and visual display designers (and fitters) have been amazing. We are super pleased with the end result and have welcomed many lovely visitors to the office already. However, we have had to master the art of significant network ‘work-arounds’ in order to move in this week. Telephones and broadband? Erm, no. Mobile phones and Mifi? Works a treat….
All the network cabling has been installed and is ready for the ‘big switch on‘ (a bit like Blackpool illuminations) but, as per usual (so it would seem), BT Openreach are holding up events. Tomorrow (Thursday), we are scheduled for a visit but are reliably informed that the broadband and telephone lines will not be working for many weeks yet. How is it possible for something so simple to take so long? There is already a telephone line in the building and indeed, it has a dial tone when a telephone is connected to it. In fact, calls can be made…. so what’s the problem?
It’s a jolly good job that we are ingenious at FWL, otherwise we would still be sat in our old offices. Problem Solvers United. That’s us. So, BT …. you might be able to set us a challenge, but you can’t stop us from achieving our goals. [It would be great if you didn’t feel the need to set us a challenge …. just saying!]