And then not

Of course, there is one other constant.

If a beneficial change is suggested, events will unfold that make that change impossible.

To whit, there is a hiring freeze throughout the company. Anyone who leaves either Production or Editorial will not be replaced. This particularly includes redundancies. Sales will be unaffected.

So, for the time being, we're stuck with one senior designer who does bugger all, another who's only in two days a week, and a senior copy controller who's becoming problematic because he doesn't have the word 'manager' in his job title.

Meanwhile, my boss jets off to Egypt for a two-week Nile Cruise today.

I have a magazine that's going out on Wednesday that, on balance, isn't looking too bad... the problem is that today's magazine has caused problems for it by running late. Some of the same salespeople work on it so, while concentrating on making sales for that magazine, they've neglected sales for Wednesday's.

This wouldn't be so bad if the salespeople in question weren't unreliable at best. It got to the point today that I asked the MD to intervene... but, as far as I can tell, he did not. When I spoke to the South office manager, he said he'd have all the updates I need tomorrow morning. This, after spending most of the last week trying to get it sorted ahead of time because this is precisely what happened last month.

Now, granted, it's not ideal that the same salespeople deal with two deadlines in one week... but, frankly, Production do that all the time. One of the copy controllers had three press days last week due to illness or holiday.

In other news, the current flat purchase is still progressing reasonably well. I have a letter from the mortgage lender offering me the mortgage I need, I now have the information the insurance company want regarding the building's roof - in the process of being redone, asphalt and felt - and a homebuyer's survey that highlights a few things that need further attention/quoting.

In other, other news, when I arrived home today I was greeted by my super-duper limited edition Chevrolet Aveo TransFormer - originally made available to anyone who took the Aveo for a test drive in the States, it turned up on the Chevrolet Europe webshop at a dirt-cheap price. It's taken three and a half weeks to get here (a very laid-back Customer Support person in Sweden told me last week that they'd been so inundated with orders they'd got behind, and hadn't responded to my two emailed enquiries because they get so many emails, they couldn't possibly respond to them all, but he reassured my that I would get my toy... with a slightly condescending emphasis on the word 'toy'... It's a model, darn it!) but it's here and it looks rather cool. Transformation is a mixture of yer-average contemporary TransFormer complexity with touches of Movie stylings (particularly in the way the front wheels fold into the torso), with a head modelled loosely on the Autobot logo. It's perhaps not as poseable as one might hope, but it's pretty good.

And it's a limited edition.

And it's mine.