Spooky

Work was, frankly, a bit crap today. In theory, it should have been a simple case of tidying up the remaining ads on a magazine that was virtually finished yesterday.

In theory.

In actual fact, the magazine wasn't finished till after 5.30 because of numerous instances of copy going missing, late-sold clients not being chased by their reps, and far too many piddling little changes to the overcomplicated sales features.

I was sat around doing more or less nothing for a good chunk of the day, which had the usual effect of driving me stir-crazy. I even tried getting up to date on my magazine backups, only to find one of our idiotic Temps has regularly been saving ASCII-encoded EPS files, despite having been provided notes on how to save them properly. I'd swear he was doing it deliberately. The upshot is that a magazine that might take up three quarters of a DVD in an average month now requires 2 DVDs, or a huge amount of time spent resaving the ASCII-encoded images as something vaguely sensible.

We did have a visit from the JobCentre Plus today, for those of us being made redundant in December... it was reasonably informative, if rather poorly presented by a woman who initially seemed put out that there were fewer folks in the presentation than she had been expecting (largely down to absences due to illness or skiving), and who came 'prepared' with hand written 'notes' from which she basically read her entire presentation. The Job Centre, we were told, has improved immeasureably since any of us were last in there... Except that the 'improvements' sounded more like costcutting. Gone are the job boards (from which I gingerly plucked my very first job, at the tender age of 19), replaced by internet-enabled consoles with job listings (very much a case of po-tay-to, high-tech-po-tah-to, if you ask me). Gone are the queues, allegedly... but all because you are required to call to book an appointment, rather than just turning up. And if you do just turn up, you're directed to a phone, through which you can... call to book an appointment.

I came out of the presentation wondering why anyone would bother with the JobCentre Plus. If you have the whole of the interwebs available to you, why jump through their hoops?

After work, I popped uptown with a friend to sample the delights of the Ghost Bus Tour (go on, say it quickly). Initially worried that it would commence very late due to terrible uptown traffic, we found the experience interesting and engaging... if a little unsophisticated. It was probably better than the similar, on-foot tour I did in Edinburgh many years ago, but largely because of the clever setting (aboard a London Necrobus), the performance of the conductor and the Ring-influenced look of the Health & Safety inspector, who caused merry hell at crucial points of the journey. The mock seance at the end might not be to everyone's taste, but it was a fun experience from start to finish.