Working For A Plumber In Lockdown
Like a lot of people in the UK, since Monday the 30th of March, I have been working from home due to the Covid-19 lockdown rules, I feel very lucky that plumbers are classed as key workers so that we can continue to work and help people.
FJM has a great reputation for being a hardworking and honest plumbers so we have had a steady stream of work coming in to keep us all busy. We have made a lot changes to the way we work in order to keep our staff and our customers safe, you may have seen Fred’s blog post last week about the changes the engineers have made but one change was me working from home instead of in the office.
I bet you are wondering how I can work from home when I work for a plumber, well, everything that I need to do my job is online or on my work laptop so all I need is a Wi-Fi connection, my work mobile phone, my headset and I am set to go.
We use Gas Engineer Software so that all 3 of us can stay up to date as to what is in the diary and what everyone is doing. It is a fantastic bit of software which can be used on a computer or as a phone app. I mainly use it on my laptop but the engineers (Fred and Pete) use the app.
The phone calls still get answered as if I was in the office because they have been diverted to my work mobile so that I never miss a call from any of our customers.
My office is now the corner of my living room, I sit in my big comfy armchair next to the patio doors, I have my laptop on my little fold out table, I pinched one of my husband’s big speakers to hold my folders to my left and the little coffee table to have everything else on it to my right.
Most of the paperwork I need to do can be done electronically and saved in our secure cloud storage, so I don’t need to keep hard copies of any paperwork and everyone has access to what they need.
My dog Sunny seems to think that me working from home means that I am here to open the patio doors for him whenever he wants to go out in the garden haha.
It does feel very strange being at home and working for the last 5 weeks but we have become such a tight nit team, working together from a distance and doing what we each do best that I call us the Dream Team.
I don’t know how much longer we are going to be in this situation, but I have a good feeling that FJM will keep going no matter what.
