Things went back to something like normal, financially, around the middle of 2009. Jenni joined the office at about that time on a work placement — in Spain a beca, a student placement arranged through the university. I was straight with her from day one: the placement probably wouldn’t turn into a job. The state of the office accounts earlier that year had left me wary, and I had no certainty about future work either, with no new round of public refurbishment grants (ayudas a la rehabilitación) in sight.
Jenni was excellent throughout. In the few months she was with us the office took on an enormous amount of work and still found time for the structural side of things, partly because from May my girlfriend, Ruth, was working half days at her own office and spent the other half in ours. That was when we moved the website across to Joomla and actually filled it with content, entered several competitions, and developed the promálaga cw project with Daniel Guerrero and Carlos Hurtado — a job that size needed seven thinking heads. We started weighing up a CRM, and we finally put gestproject to work as our management tool, a year after buying it. On balance, I think the office got a good deal better.
Jenni left in July. Natalia left in September: her studies in Russia had been recognised towards an aeronautical engineering degree, five subjects short of finishing, and she was off to Sevilla to carry on studying. That left three of us — Ruth, Antonio and me — alongside a large group of outside collaborators. There was enough work on the table for more people, but I preferred to keep the payroll tight and subcontract more. I didn’t want a repeat of what the 2006 grant round did to us.
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