Having worked in the Publishing industry (in one form or another) for close to twenty years now, I can confidently assert that a large proportion of those involved exemplify a wide variety of lunacies. Divas of one kind or another are extremely common - everything from those who bang on and on about how they "come from [big name publisher]" (but get very cagy about which titles they worked on there) to those with a sideline in AmDram or similar, and perform the full range of human emotion on every press day. Dependency on everything from caffeine to alcohol to cocaine is pretty much rife. 'Editors' have a wide range of ability with the English language, from flowery excess to functional illiteracy. People in various areas of the work fully expect 'deadlines' to be as fluid as their average lunch, safe in their ignorance of the unavoidable fact that print itself - be it Litho or Digital - is a mechanical process which cannot be hurried to make up the time lost by dicking around on press day because they didn't bother checking any of the layouts over the preceding days or weeks.
But, in many ways, the insanity of those directly involved in publishing is nothing compared to some of the clients of Publishers. Where I work at the moment, we occasionally take on the task of publishing items for our advertisers, sponsorship partners, etc. One such recent example is a certain listing.
Things went a bit off the rails quite early on in this job when, at the behest of the MD, my boss met with the client. It was meant to be a simple introduction and conversation about the job - which was essentially 'acting as Print Brokers' - but ended up with my boss agreeing that our sales team would handle the advertising, and she would redesign the product for them, bringing its look and feel into the 21st Century. The MD was not pleased, and we're now basically losing money on the project.
So, Insanity #1: My boss presumes creative control over everything that comes our way, frequently upsetting the client. On this occasion, the client had a perfectly serviceable-looking product, but my boss dislike the 'marble effect' background image on each page, or the fonts, or the formatting... so, without asking anyone, set about redesigning the entire thing. The end result does look cleaner, I'll admit, and more consistent its alignment of text... but why reinvent the wheel when it only needed tidying up?
She's also decided recently that she wants to see every advertisement we design for our clients. This is all because, after more than five years, she finally noticed that the background on a particular client's ad was rather dark, making the text (very slightly, and really only for her) hard to read.
Thing is, this wasn't an ad we'd designed anyway, and the fact that the client had been reusing the same artwork for at least five years tends to suggest that it was working for them. Nevertheless, without consulting the client, she instructed changes on that ad and, since that day, my counterpart and I have to run a first draft past her whenever we create artwork for a client, before we send it to the client. Head of Sales thinks that would have been a fine idea with our predecessors, who created every ad to the same - very basic - template... but feels it's a waste of time with a couple of guys who have repeatedly proven themselves capable of creating excellent ads for our clients, not least because we have a relationship with the clients that our boss does not.
There's also the time involved. On the most recent occasion I sent her a client ad, it took four and a half hours to get any response out of her, and it was only that quick because I prompted her. If she's not in the office, we can't prompt her as easily... and, since we most often have to set ads for clients right at the last minute, because they've been unable to supply anything ready-made, that's another huge waste of time we can ill-afford to lose.
But I digress. Going back to the big client job, we have Insanity #2: My boss presumes her way is the only way. After meeting with the client whose job we're taking on, my boss set up a schedule for the work we had agreed to do and distributed it via email to the relevant people in the office and to the client. The client immediately notified her that they intended to keep their original schedule and plan of action, within our prescribed schedule. By this I mean that they had set a deadline date for compiling their listings, at which point they would be passed to their designer, who would lay them out in the correct format for the print job, send out proofs, and get it all signed off before passing it on to us. I read that as "we will be setting this part of the job, you're only dealing with the advertising", so I queried it with my boss, since it's her schedule they seemed to be ignoring. She agreed that it was nuts for them to do all the work for themselves, but only because she'd redesigned their templates, and not given the client access to them...
This leads us neatly to Insanity #3: The client is laying it all out for themselves, they're only doing that to see how much of their allocated space they're actually taking up... and then passing it on to us to lay out all over again in our own template. Utter waste of time.
But the craziness doesn't end there...
Insanity #4: After falling to pieces on her press day - doling out her work between me any my counterpart, before doing some clothes shopping on eBay, only to burst out crying later on when arguing with her Editors - boss announced she would take a day off the following week "to recover from the stress". Nothing necessarily unusual, except that it was a day that she wouldn't be in the office anyway... and, in general, we can't tell whether she's working or not when she's not in the office, because we virtually never hear anything from her between the regular "Good Morning" email sometime between 8.30am and 9.30am, and the mad flurry of emails that generally starts at about 2.30pm. However, when I spoke to her that morning, she mentioned that she would shortly be driving to "an event", and it turned out she was spending at least that day at Boodles... There's no way that was a spur of the moment thing, so the idea of 'taking time off due to stress' was just a smokescreen for 'bunking off work to ponce it up at a posh tennis event'. She's previously taken time off sick, then denied it was sick leave, so I wonder what will happen about this.
Then we have the joys of 'Housekeeping' and Insanity #5: Things keep going missing when the boss 'streamlines' our library of files, and it's never her fault. Actually, I could remove the bit about 'streamlining' and it'd be equally true, as she's accused my counterpart of deleting files he hadn't been anywhere near, but when she's been clearing our duplicate files in particular, it often transpires later than she's removed all copies of some files. Sometimes the 'correct' version is still available, but it's been renamed, and she's forgotten doing it. For example, one of the designers recently emailed her asking after a couple of brand logos, and she emailed my counterpart and I asking if we knew where they might be. Then she emailed my counterpart, telling him that he'd made the logos, so he should know where they are. When he pointed out that, actually, he hadn't she asked me... my response included the word 'streamlining', which was enough to remind her that she had recently been moving things and renaming things and deleting things. Rather then point the designer in the right direction, though, she insisted that he email her the document he was working on so she could relink them herself... despite the fact that he'd likely have to relink them again because she works on a Mac, we all work on PCs and, because they don't connect to the network in the same way, paths to linked files don't work the same way.
Since having a meeting with my counterpart, as a follow up to his appraisal (because things that didn't come up in the meeting were included in the notes, and much of it was bullshit) she's toned things down a bit, and even joked at her own expense when things go a little adrift... Her attitude seems to have softened somewhat, and she has made verbal reference to some of her less impressive character traits... but there's still a lot of time wasted due to poor self-management, let alone her management of the department.
This month is fairly quiet, though, so it's a good time to try to get ahead... Next month features a couple of nightmarish weeks where, due to terrible scheduling (all the regular magazines plus two guides, a supplement, and some client projects), we have at a couple of instances of two and even three publications going to press on the same day.
It's going to be almost like the good old days of my last job...
Thursday 9 July 2015
Monday 6 July 2015
Big Days
I've known my girlfriend for a little over three years now, we've been dating for about two and living together for just over one... And her folks had been asking about meeting my folks for quite a while. We finally got it all organised a couple of months ago, and it actually happened the weekend before last.
The build-up had been quite stressful for me, for no real reason... I mean, my folks tend to be fairly laconic, while my girlfriend's folks are extremely talkative. Both fathers have a tendency toward being stubborn and opinionated. Both also have military backgrounds, in traditionally rival outfits (my father spent some time in the TA, her father was in the RAF) so I imagined all kinds of potential sparks-flying situations. I also had a nagging little voice in the back of my head wondering why they should all meet up, but I tried to put that down to my preference for the life of a hermit.
Perhaps it is an important step in a relationship... and I'm sure it'd be weird if a couple's parents' first meeting occurred, for example, at the couple's wedding... but why now? And why did it keep coming up just about every time my girlfriend spoke to her parents..? Couldn't we, y'know, leave it a little bit longer?
Still, it happened... My parents took a weekend trip to Lincoln (though my girlfriend's parents had offered to put them up, that seemed to me to be taking it all a little bit too far), and a table was booked at a restaurant we'd visited over the Christmas/New Year break (that little voice in the back of my head kept telling me that was a terrible idea, since the restaurant is out in the sticks, and needed everyone to be driven over... it felt that, for the safety of all involved, it would have been better to get together in a place we could walk away from, if necessary). The precise timings were only pinned down on the day, via text messaging, but we met up with my folks at their hotel, in town, and they got into my girlfriend's parents' car while she and I rode along with her sister.
Dinner was actually perfectly friendly and, while there were a couple of RAF jokes at the expense of paratroopers, my father actually saw the logic of the argument (possibly not even seeing it as a joke) rather than being upset by the sentiments expressed.
Histories were exchanged between both sets of parents, but my folks tended to simply answer questions, offering little in the way of elaboration. The didn't give the impression that they felt interrogated, just the usual sense that they don't really 'do' chat... Even so, it went quite well... as far as I can tell. Now I think about it, I don't think I've spoken to my folks about it since we got back... Hum.
The strangest part of the evening was when my girlfriend's mother, peering intently at my parents and at me, wondered aloud who I most resembled, and my girlfriend and her sister simultaneously named different parents. My girlfriend thinks I look more like my mother (I have her nose, certainly... and her teeth... but I've actually been mistaken for my father (at a distance) on occasions when I've word a beard), while her sister had apparently said that my father and I move the same way. That's actually something I've noticed myself, on occasion - the way we walk is scarily similar, and some of our facial expressions and quirks are basically identical.
My folks, unsurprisingly, did not engage in a similar examination of my girlfriend and her parents... but I have to say I normally struggle to see any resemblance in her to either of them. When she got her hair cut most recently, there was a moment when I thought she almost looked like her mother... but, for the most part, all they seem to share is an approximate shape and a certain chubbiness of their cheeks when they smile.
So I guess that's another milestone passed...
There was another momentous occasion this last weekend, after my girlfriend snagged a couple of tickets to a live revival of one of her favourite TV shows, 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' (she proudly says that she's seen every episode of the US version, and quite a lot of the UK version). To celebrate, we had planned to go into town a little bit early, visit Forbidden Planet (where we first met after corresponding for about a year... but also just a really cool shop for geeks like us), grab some dinner in Pizza Express (to make use of a voucher she received) and the pop along to the Adelphi Theatre for the show.
Just for the sake of spontaneity, there was a late-ish addition to the day's scheduled activities, in that a new Sherlock Holmes movie - titled simply 'Mr. Holmes', but based on the novel 'A Slight Trick of the Mind', by Mitch Cullin - has been released recently, but was already being phased out of the big cinema chains to make way for Terminator Genisys. We ended up booking seats at the Picturehouse cinema near Piccadilly Circus - a completely beautiful venue, as it turns out, with very nice seats.
The film was brilliant and, while it had some quite affecting moments, it didn't quite manage the emotional impact of a Mitchell & Webb sketch with the same basic idea (seek it out on YouTube - it's the 'Old Holmes' one, not the other one about two bickering actors - and I defy you to keep a dry eye to the end). Still, Ian McKellen played the part brilliantly, the three storylines intertwined quite pleasingly and, if Laura Linney's variable accent was the only problem with the movie, it didn't cast too dark a shadow over the proceedings. I may have to look up the book, as I'd liked to have had more insight into Holmes impressions of the devastation of Hiroshima, since that was touched on only briefly in the movie. I also quite liked the conceit of casting Nicholas Rowe as the cinematic version of Sherlock Holmes in a movie about Holmes' twilight years, considering one of his biggest roles was as the titular character in the 1985 movie 'Young Sherlock Holmes'.
Forbidden Planet yet again received some of my hard-earned money, though I was slightly weirded out when a foreign tourist urged me to look up an old TransFormers TV series (Cybertron, aka Galaxy Force) when I grabbed the last Generations/Thrilling 30 Sky Byte on the shelves. I'm never quite sure what to say in these circumstances because, as a fan of TransFormers for 30 years, I'm well aware of Cybertron - and have even seen a few episodes - but it didn't seem polite to say so... I also picked up the talking plushie K-9 I'd intended to get my girlfriend as a birthday/Christmas present, but failed to find at the appropriate time... I'm sure they weren't in the shop last time I was there, and they never seemed to be in stock on the website... but it was nice to finally find one. We also found a Sherlock Holmes-based card game, and brought it home with us... though we've yet to give it a try. Could be fun... but possibly not as much as the game of Cards Against Humanity we played at my sister's house earlier in the year...
Since we finished our dinner slightly earlier than necessary to get to the Adelphi in time for the show, we popped in on Orbital Comics as well. Only a brief visit, but long enough for me to put another dent in my wallet, picking up a twelve-year-old TransFormers convention exclusive set.
Whose Line..? was a hell of a lot of fun. We've seen live improvisation comedy before, but this was almost structured as a game show, with Josie Lawrence, Brad Sherwood and - two of my girlfriend's favourites - Greg Proops and Colin Mochrie on the 'panel'. While Clive Anderson was meant to be hosting, a sign in the entrance hall announced that he was 'unavailable' that evening, and was being replaced by one of the creators of the show, Dan Patterson (later in the evening, a note written by a member of the audience was revealed to say "I wish Clive were here"). Highlights of the evening were Lawrence belting out a song about an industrial sander in the style of Celine Dion, Sherwood serending a member of the audience in the style of a Rock Anthem, and the enthusiastic fangirling my girlfriend exhibited throughout. It was also cool that the two musicians from the US show were 'special guests' at this live event. The only disappointing aspects of the show, for me, where those where members of the audience had to take an active role, because the folks who were chosen to go on stage really didn't seem to get into the spirit of things... Either that, or they were trying to be funny themselves, and just making a mess of it.
It was quite a long day, all told, and our tentatively planned visit to a Zen garden in Acton (there's a juxtaposition!) on Sunday was put off because we were both exhausted, and the weather was a bit rubbish until the early evening.
The build-up had been quite stressful for me, for no real reason... I mean, my folks tend to be fairly laconic, while my girlfriend's folks are extremely talkative. Both fathers have a tendency toward being stubborn and opinionated. Both also have military backgrounds, in traditionally rival outfits (my father spent some time in the TA, her father was in the RAF) so I imagined all kinds of potential sparks-flying situations. I also had a nagging little voice in the back of my head wondering why they should all meet up, but I tried to put that down to my preference for the life of a hermit.
Perhaps it is an important step in a relationship... and I'm sure it'd be weird if a couple's parents' first meeting occurred, for example, at the couple's wedding... but why now? And why did it keep coming up just about every time my girlfriend spoke to her parents..? Couldn't we, y'know, leave it a little bit longer?
Still, it happened... My parents took a weekend trip to Lincoln (though my girlfriend's parents had offered to put them up, that seemed to me to be taking it all a little bit too far), and a table was booked at a restaurant we'd visited over the Christmas/New Year break (that little voice in the back of my head kept telling me that was a terrible idea, since the restaurant is out in the sticks, and needed everyone to be driven over... it felt that, for the safety of all involved, it would have been better to get together in a place we could walk away from, if necessary). The precise timings were only pinned down on the day, via text messaging, but we met up with my folks at their hotel, in town, and they got into my girlfriend's parents' car while she and I rode along with her sister.
Dinner was actually perfectly friendly and, while there were a couple of RAF jokes at the expense of paratroopers, my father actually saw the logic of the argument (possibly not even seeing it as a joke) rather than being upset by the sentiments expressed.
Histories were exchanged between both sets of parents, but my folks tended to simply answer questions, offering little in the way of elaboration. The didn't give the impression that they felt interrogated, just the usual sense that they don't really 'do' chat... Even so, it went quite well... as far as I can tell. Now I think about it, I don't think I've spoken to my folks about it since we got back... Hum.
The strangest part of the evening was when my girlfriend's mother, peering intently at my parents and at me, wondered aloud who I most resembled, and my girlfriend and her sister simultaneously named different parents. My girlfriend thinks I look more like my mother (I have her nose, certainly... and her teeth... but I've actually been mistaken for my father (at a distance) on occasions when I've word a beard), while her sister had apparently said that my father and I move the same way. That's actually something I've noticed myself, on occasion - the way we walk is scarily similar, and some of our facial expressions and quirks are basically identical.
My folks, unsurprisingly, did not engage in a similar examination of my girlfriend and her parents... but I have to say I normally struggle to see any resemblance in her to either of them. When she got her hair cut most recently, there was a moment when I thought she almost looked like her mother... but, for the most part, all they seem to share is an approximate shape and a certain chubbiness of their cheeks when they smile.
So I guess that's another milestone passed...
There was another momentous occasion this last weekend, after my girlfriend snagged a couple of tickets to a live revival of one of her favourite TV shows, 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' (she proudly says that she's seen every episode of the US version, and quite a lot of the UK version). To celebrate, we had planned to go into town a little bit early, visit Forbidden Planet (where we first met after corresponding for about a year... but also just a really cool shop for geeks like us), grab some dinner in Pizza Express (to make use of a voucher she received) and the pop along to the Adelphi Theatre for the show.
Just for the sake of spontaneity, there was a late-ish addition to the day's scheduled activities, in that a new Sherlock Holmes movie - titled simply 'Mr. Holmes', but based on the novel 'A Slight Trick of the Mind', by Mitch Cullin - has been released recently, but was already being phased out of the big cinema chains to make way for Terminator Genisys. We ended up booking seats at the Picturehouse cinema near Piccadilly Circus - a completely beautiful venue, as it turns out, with very nice seats.
The film was brilliant and, while it had some quite affecting moments, it didn't quite manage the emotional impact of a Mitchell & Webb sketch with the same basic idea (seek it out on YouTube - it's the 'Old Holmes' one, not the other one about two bickering actors - and I defy you to keep a dry eye to the end). Still, Ian McKellen played the part brilliantly, the three storylines intertwined quite pleasingly and, if Laura Linney's variable accent was the only problem with the movie, it didn't cast too dark a shadow over the proceedings. I may have to look up the book, as I'd liked to have had more insight into Holmes impressions of the devastation of Hiroshima, since that was touched on only briefly in the movie. I also quite liked the conceit of casting Nicholas Rowe as the cinematic version of Sherlock Holmes in a movie about Holmes' twilight years, considering one of his biggest roles was as the titular character in the 1985 movie 'Young Sherlock Holmes'.
Forbidden Planet yet again received some of my hard-earned money, though I was slightly weirded out when a foreign tourist urged me to look up an old TransFormers TV series (Cybertron, aka Galaxy Force) when I grabbed the last Generations/Thrilling 30 Sky Byte on the shelves. I'm never quite sure what to say in these circumstances because, as a fan of TransFormers for 30 years, I'm well aware of Cybertron - and have even seen a few episodes - but it didn't seem polite to say so... I also picked up the talking plushie K-9 I'd intended to get my girlfriend as a birthday/Christmas present, but failed to find at the appropriate time... I'm sure they weren't in the shop last time I was there, and they never seemed to be in stock on the website... but it was nice to finally find one. We also found a Sherlock Holmes-based card game, and brought it home with us... though we've yet to give it a try. Could be fun... but possibly not as much as the game of Cards Against Humanity we played at my sister's house earlier in the year...
Since we finished our dinner slightly earlier than necessary to get to the Adelphi in time for the show, we popped in on Orbital Comics as well. Only a brief visit, but long enough for me to put another dent in my wallet, picking up a twelve-year-old TransFormers convention exclusive set.
Whose Line..? was a hell of a lot of fun. We've seen live improvisation comedy before, but this was almost structured as a game show, with Josie Lawrence, Brad Sherwood and - two of my girlfriend's favourites - Greg Proops and Colin Mochrie on the 'panel'. While Clive Anderson was meant to be hosting, a sign in the entrance hall announced that he was 'unavailable' that evening, and was being replaced by one of the creators of the show, Dan Patterson (later in the evening, a note written by a member of the audience was revealed to say "I wish Clive were here"). Highlights of the evening were Lawrence belting out a song about an industrial sander in the style of Celine Dion, Sherwood serending a member of the audience in the style of a Rock Anthem, and the enthusiastic fangirling my girlfriend exhibited throughout. It was also cool that the two musicians from the US show were 'special guests' at this live event. The only disappointing aspects of the show, for me, where those where members of the audience had to take an active role, because the folks who were chosen to go on stage really didn't seem to get into the spirit of things... Either that, or they were trying to be funny themselves, and just making a mess of it.
It was quite a long day, all told, and our tentatively planned visit to a Zen garden in Acton (there's a juxtaposition!) on Sunday was put off because we were both exhausted, and the weather was a bit rubbish until the early evening.
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