Phone calls and frustration feature heavily in boss Mick McCarthy’s days during the January transfer window as he seeks to add to his squad.
The Blues manager is currently searching the loan market for central midfielders, while another centre-half is a priority with Tommy Smith set to join the Colorado Rapids.
McCarthy, who is hopeful of adding someone to his squad ahead of Saturday’s trip to Bolton, outlined how he has been spending his time recently.
"My mate came to see me from Barnsley and we just got back to the house about a quarter to seven after I’d left the training ground and I put the phone down,” the Town boss recalled. "And he said, ‘Don’t you ever get sick of that bloody thing?’
"And I said, ‘No, it’s my job’. But I’d pretty much been on it all afternoon, getting nowhere, achieving nothing, but nevertheless still making calls or accepting calls.
"That’s just about what it is and we’re not doing tons of business, but we’re still trying to get players in.
"It’s frustrating as much as anything and I think it is for everybody else because there are lots of clubs who want to loan players out but need to get somebody else in first.
"Certainly Premier League clubs who think their players should be getting experience playing, and us, of course.
"So, to let them out they have to get somebody else in and that’s just a waiting game. And then you think you’ve got it nailed and something falls through and it’s as far away as it ever was.
"And you’ve probably got something else spinning and you’re thinking, ‘Maybe I ought to do that’. It’s frustration as much as anything.”
He says it's agents and managers he spends most time talking to: "You’ve got to speak to the agents in the end because that’s the game now, you’ve got to deal with the agent, the player’s agent, it’s his representative. Let’s take the agent word out because it always seems like a derogatory term when people say ‘agent’.
"One of them said to me the other day, ‘I suppose you don’t like agents’ when we were talking about big fees. I said there’s nothing wrong with them, I think everybody’s entitled to earn a living but it just depends on what level.
"I’ve no problem with their representatives, I speak to them because I have to ring others up to find out whether we can do a deal with them. And I speak to the managers. I speak to anybody I need to speak to to get a deal done.”