One amusing thing that happened in Kingston market was being approached by two young ladies, one of whom piped up "Do you ever question the purpose of life?"
I replied "Every working day."
The one who hadn't spoken laughed (quite rightly observing that I was being 'teh funneh'), and I politely excused myself, having noticed their badges (do all street evangelists wear badges these days?!). As I wandered on, the one who spoke asked something like "wouldn't you like to find some answers?", to which I happily replied "I tend to find my own".
Not the best approach on a sales pitch, and I walked on considering better opening lines... She seemed to just launch into an attempt at deep and meaningful which is more than likely to raise the heckles of anyone she approached (lucky it was me, eh?)... and then not recognising or ignoring a light-hearted/humourous response really killed it. Not that I managed to come up with a better opening line, but it did get me wondering how often that kind of pitch works, what kind of pitch works most often (I'm sure there must be one, even though the audience is ever-changin'), etc.
Before excusing myself, I was half tempted to enter into the spirit of things, as it were, and see how they reacted to my take on things (believing in God, but not 'Religion'), but the one who spoke just seemed to be taking it all so seriously...
Oh well.
In other news, I'm considering my kitchen finished now. There's still a bit of shoddy paintwork, but the more I try to fix it, the more it turns into a millstone, rather than a milestone. Better to be reasonably happy (as I am) and move on to other things, than obsess over something that's not quite perfect.
As it was...
As it is now...
I think we can all agree there's a bit of a difference.
Last week, my boss was taking some time off work. Normally, this would be a source of some panic for me. Add in that the expected structure of the week got rather messed up the week before, so my one deadline on Wednesday turned into one on Tuesday and one on Friday, and you can imagine that I wasn't looking forward to the week. Then factor in my newly-adopted responsibility for web ads...
It was sometime on Monday that people started chasing me for progress on their web ads. Must have been toward the end of the day, because I said I'd be looking into it first thing the next morning. Lo and behold, the very person who was shouting loudest for news was the one who should have been getting us copy with which to make the ads.
By the end of the week, I was only about halfway through the month's ads, but wasn't helped by the fact that some folks still seemed to be selling March. This will have to stop. Also, the Copy Controller who's chasing web stuff for me was on press by Friday, so had precious little time to work on anything but her magazine. Thankfully now it's her only magazine (I think...), so we can begin to set up a structure whereby web copy controlling doesn't interfere with the magazine stuff.
My first deadline of the week went surprisingly smoothly, despite the magazine being cut by 8 pages on press day due to poor sales. Not a lack of sales, I should say - they'd filled the magazine bar a couple of spaces. The problem was, to do that, they'd undersold everything. Panic selling never works... Less so now we're feeling the economic strain. They were so far off their target that, at about 2.30pm, word went round that 8 pages were coming out. One of them was blank... Two of them were an in-house ad for subscriptions... five of them were editorial.
Thankfully, everything was so well-organised within Production and Editorial that, once I'd reorganised the flatplan, the most painful thing to do was reorganise the files I'd already uploaded to the Printers. Their software permits page cuts at any stage, but by simply cutting off required number from the end. Dropping eight pages meant that the last eight pages were moved to the clipboard, but the preceding pages all had to be manually moved back 8 to get the last few back in. The process was slightly less painful than uploading them again from scratch, but certainly less time-consuming.
Once that was out of the way, pretty much all that remained was to put the front section together. These days, I deliberately leave them till last anyway, because the Salespeople are inclined to want to move them around all the time. The whole thing was done and dusted by about 5.35. Two days after it was supposed to go to press, but at least it wasn't a late night.
Not so for Friday's magazine, which dragged on till after 7 thanks to some extremely dumb late selling. One of my designers was getting rather uppity about it all but, to be honest, the work he did on the last ad of the day was excellent.
In between, there was meant to be a 'lunch thing' between one of my designers and one of her editors, because of some strife that's been brewing for quite a while. Editor claims my designer is slow and surly. My designer counters that editor is rude and cannot make up her mind (she's already started saving multiple copies of her work, due to editor's habit of saying "Let's go back to the first version... I liked that better.")
In the end, that was postponed to this coming week, because my designer was concerned it would descend into shouting and recrimination - she's genuinely quite upset by the complaints made against her by this troublesome editor - even though I offered to go along.
We shall see how it all pans out now that it will be my boss going along...
I have to say, despite the trouble and the late night on Friday (better than some, but finishing earlier would have been better... and would have been easily possible were it not for one troublesome new client), I actually rather enjoyed the week. Sure, it was stressful, and I didn't have my boss to rely on to deal with some of the political bollocks... but I reckon I tackled it reasonably well... And giving the Salespeople a hard time was fun...
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