scaling up

My callsign has changed. It's annoying, because they've made all callsigns very similar now. My previous one was unique, and fairly easy to pick out amongst the radio traffic that almost entirely didn't affect me. 

It's understandable. This office, prior to the earthquake, was approximately 60 people. For the first couple of weeks, it was a group of about 30 international staff. Callsigns followed a simple system based on names, one easy to work out who was who. 

The office currently stands at 70 international and probably 600 or 700 local staff. We're aiming at about 1200 total. The old system began struggling as soon as there were 30 or 40 people using callsigns. The new system is far more scalable, but it means I don't can't work out a callsign if I just know someone's name. 

There must be so many things that have to change to scale an office up rapidly. Every member of the staff must get paid. Not just that, but ten percent of the staff have international contracts from other countries. A number of those, myself included, have residency in a third country. 

Managing the vehicles for that number of people is also a real challenge. We have perhaps 50 cars, and not many more drivers. The cars are in use from 6am to start picking up staff from various locations in town, to 11pm, curfew time. And despite all the planning that goes in to arranging cars the night before, there are always people who turn up and say 'oh, can I have a car for the next three hours'. And a few who turn up and say 'oh, I'm just taking a car for the next three hours'. 

Finance, logistics, human resources, in fact, the whole of the operations department (anything that doesn't count as the 'programmes department'), does not have an enviable job in my eyes. They have my utmost respect for keeping this machine ticking over. But then, this is why we bring in so many international staff. This is what they're used to doing. They've done it before, they'll do it now, and they'll do it again the next time in the next place.