Lack of focus

After yesterday's misery (a 6 hour delay at Rodez airport whilst we waited for an engineer to fly down from Stansted on a Lear jet to repair our plane, a scrum to get on the Dublin to Belfast bus, a bus journey slowed by the refusal of the doors to open so that the driver had to use the emergency levers and reset them both physically and on the bus computer each time we stopped to let passengers off and on, an 11.15pm arrival in Belfast (serious kudos to son, Paul, who picked us up, unasked, and drove us the last leg home) and an exhausted fall into bed, today provided more of the same.  If you ever have to go into a high security facility to do a focus group, make sure of one thing.  Things may have been fully arranged between organisations, your security forms may have been submitted in good time and may have been signed off at the most senior level, but if the internal communication is so poor and the guys on the perimeter gate have not been told of your arrival, forget it.  We spent half and hour sitting in a sun beaten car inside the security compound only to be told that we did not have the correct clearance to enter.  We were instructed to leave.  After frantic phone calls we drove back and tried again.  Same result, no clearance had been communicated to the people whose job it is to keep uncleared people out.  Not their fault, they were just doing their job properly.  Somewhere deep in the steel enclosed administration block, our fully signed off forms are still sitting in someone's in-tray.  So, after psyching ourselves up to undertake the focus group (we have never done one in a prison setting before) we returned home defeated and deflated.  We have three more groups to do tomorrow and Thursday across two different sites.  I just hope that their internal communications are better.  The pic was taken in an antique shop near to today's "denied entry" focus group site.