The View from London: a personal battle with Eyjafjallajokull
I am pleased to bring you the personal story from one of the member of my core team and the Eyjafjallajokull volcano ash cloud. Andy Clewes works in our Guildford site, and has already authored a post for this blog on The Price of "Green".
He had quite the harrowing time rescuing his stranded wife form the ash cloud that shut down air travel in Europe for so many days and shares his story below. He is not the only core team member that ran into problems with the cloud, as one of our colleagues ended up being away form the office for weeks when her flight back from vacation couldn't get back to London. Thankfully, she was able to operate for the most part seamlessly from the beach and able to remain productive, highlighting the great functionally provided by technology tools like those provided by Avaya.
My Personal Imapct
By Andy Clewes, Avaya
Last week, I had the time of my life rescuing my wife
As you all know in Europe the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in Iceland and the resulting ash cloud over Europe grounded 100% of flights for quite a few days.
This impact of this was to strand 1000's of people who were in countries other than their own due to either traveling for business or those that chose this period to have a holiday break (my wife and friend being in this category).
For those at home we were inundated via the media on the current status of the volcano, the impact to the flight companies and those people trying to either get home or trying to find somewhere to stay while waiting for a flight home. But all this had a strange impact of those at home... clear blue skies (no contrails), no aircraft noise and clear roads round the airports!
Anyway, my wife had numerous flights cancelled and with no definite date for her return I took it upon myself to go and collect her. She was staying in Southern Spain and after checking the Sat Nav which indicted a 2936 mile (4698 kilometres) round trip realised this was not going to be a trip round the block! But not wanting to have my wife stranded I set off. UK - ferry - France - Spain. 4 tanks of diesel and 27 hours late I'm in Spain. Overnight and then back again on a reverse trip this time 25 hours. A trip I can say that is not for the light hearted and I will seriously consider doing anything like this in the future!
So why this blog... I'm not trying to "impress" everyone with my actions.
This situation has highlighted how much we, Avaya, rely upon a transport infrastructure, not only for our own personal travel requirements but for our business needs. We've had all sorts of Avaya personnel in different countries who've had to either make circuitous land routes taking days instead of hours to get home or hammering the AMEX card in booking new places to stay and we've had new site installs or even worse business critical situations within our customer base being delayed because the relevant hardware or personnel is "stuck" in another country due to all flights being grounded.
As much as we all look at ways to improve and reduce our Carbon Footprint whether that be personal or corporate we have to be careful that we don't "shout from the rooftops" too loud about the impact of our actions. We need to be intelligent and thoughtful about what we can be do and how, so that the business needs of Avaya AND our customers are well served.
As a Global communications company, Avaya has a responsibility to do all it can to improve its global carbon footprint but it has to be respectful to its Employees and Customers and more importantly provide an efficient and workable platform for its current and future business needs.
Posted 29 Apr 2010 at 11:23 PM