Unexpectedly...

While I've been told many a time that the new manager on one of my magazines has always been very good on her other one, I never really believed it until today.

She's a bit of a personality and, when she arrives for her other magazine's press days, she tended to do so loudly... and behave like a twit for the rest of the time she spends at our office.

Having now worked with her on a press day - technically the day after her press day (poor sales, blah blah) - I found her totally different. Perhaps it's the other one that causes the noise... even though it's the manager who starts it all off... Weird.

Press day was just like every other month, but the nitpicking started at 9am rather than 2pm, so we were finished by about 1-1.30pm, once the manager arrived to clamp down on the pointless fiddling and requests for unnecessary changes.

One of the salespeople decided to pick a fight with my boss... Always a mistake, but she compounded her error by then refusing to accompany her into a quiet office to 'discuss things', forcing my boss to deal with it out in public.

The thing with my boss is that she won't pull rank. Even though I'm more senior than this Salesperson, let alone her, she would never launch into "I'm a Senior Manager... You Must Do As I Say"-type ranting. She could, quite easily, but she won't.

So after batting back and forth a few times, she made a point of speaking to the Sales Manager in question once she'd arrived, to ensure this constant attitude problem and lack of regard for the huge favour we were doing them is dealt with by the proper channels.

Bizarrely, it turns out that the previous manager basically thinks she has a screw loose... Shame he didn't warn the incoming manager.

By the time she arrived at the office, I'd already fired off an email complaining about the nitpicking rather than signing-off of ads. To her credit, she dealt with it straight away (and yet quite subtly). Once everything was done, she assured me that next month will be better.

Yes, I know they always say that, but I got the impression she's at least going to try... and quite possibly come closer to succeeding than some.

It'd help if they actually sold to deadline...

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On Complexity

In the evenings of yesterday and today, I spent a good amount of time transforming my Binaltech models back into car mode so I can store them in their boxed pending the move to my flat.

It struck me that, bar a few obscure and challenging points (which wouldn't have been clarified by the instructions anyway), they were not massively complicated... Certainly not as they first appeared five or so years ago, when I picked up the first one. I suppose Smokescreen is a bad example, because his model in particular is very similar to its Generation 1 forebear, but they're actually quite simple to transform.

Sure, some joints are frighteningly stiff and others are annoyingly loose, but they're fun, rather than stressful... these days.

So now, all the Binaltech Autobots are boxed up, and I just have to do the Decepticons and the couple of customs I managed to finish.

I made a start also on the Movie figures...

...which reminds me... the new movie figures are looking pretty bloody amazing. The new Deluxe Bumblebee looks good enough to pick up, even though I ended up getting both iterations of the 2007 movie version and Cliffjumper. The Voyager size Bumblebee looks awesome... Though I'll probably discard the Sam Witwicky 'action figure'.

...But I digress. I eventually stopped transforming movie figures back into vehicle mode - again, for easy storage/transportation, because their weapons tend to stow in vehicle mode - when my mother pointed out that it was bed time. Oops. I still find they are of a more than adequate level of complexity... but I'm looking forward to the new ones.

Speaking of complexity, I have to wonder about the folks I work with sometimes... Let's start with the tendency for certain designers to set their ads in Illustrator (which only the Designers have) rather than Quark (which the Copy Controllers have too), meaning the most pathetically simple changes have to go back in the trays to be picked up by a designer when they become available.

What's the point?

Then there's the Salespeople. The system says "When you make a late sale, email a confirmation to your Production Manager and Copy Controller so it can (a) be placed on the flatplan and (b) generally get dealt with."

So why, one might wonder, would two experienced Salespeople, who've been doing this for months, suddenly 'forget' when they get a new manager who - bizarrely - also seems not only to have 'forgotten' this point of procedure, but has adopted the mistaken belief that the Production Manager on her other magazine doesn't ask for emailed confirmations?

They claim to be busy... but, considering how many late sales they're making this month (which, quelle surprise, mean we're setting lots of late ads), they're not helping themselves.

Gone are the days of closing the magazine a day early, it would seem.

Just about everything has been running late since we got back from Christmas, and I had hoped this magazine would buck the trend and get us back on track. No such luck. I'm getting very behind in all the upcoming magazines... which means my designers aren't getting their flatplans on time...

Worse still, the Salespeople don't understand and/or don't care that their late running impacts not on the next magazine in the cycle, but their own next month's issue. When they should be selling next month, they're still mopping up this month.

It's really rather a simple concept: The knock-on effect just keeps on knockin'

I was faintly amused to find that the... exuberant... manager of one of my counterpart's magazines was quite subdued (both in terms of manner/volume and dress sense) when she came in to sign off stuff for my magazine today.

I'd like to think she's heard that I do not approve of her noise and larking about...

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All too human

OK, forget what I've said about the BBC and genre television.

Or not... You see, Being Human - shown in pilot form last year, and now with a full series running on BBC3 - doesn't quite conform to the usual genres.

It's a comedy-drama revolving around three friends living in a flat in Bristol... It just so happens that one is a ghost, one is a vampire and the other is a werewolf.

Hilarious hi-jinks do not ensue.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it, except that I enjoyed the pilot immensely, and the almost entirely re-cast series opener hasn't dampened my enthusiasm for the concept one little bit. The dynamics are still there (vampire and werewolf trying to lead normal lives while both the normal and the supernatural world provide their challenges) and many of the story strands from the pilot have been kept. It is rather jarring that the only actor who remains from the pilot is the geeky-looking fellow who plays the werewolf (excellent casting, to be honest, as he's the last sort of person you'd suspect of being a werewolf!), so the nascent vampire plot to rise up and take over is being enacted by a completely different set of villains (except perhaps the evil 'sidekick' character... that may be the same actor) and, to be perfectly frank, the girl they got to play the recently turned, somewhat-chaotic-but-clearly-bad-girl is far less attractive - and thereby far less effective - than the one from the pilot.

Still, it shows some promise.

Better than Demons? Well, the writing is definitely far superior. It was filled with some very true-to-life moments of humour, embarrassment and pain... The writers of Demons are aiming in that general direction, but not getting there as often or as effectively. But Demons, by its very nature, is action-driven rather than character-driven, whereas Being Human falls into the latter category.

Oddly, though, it's sparse special effects are better - the werewolf transformation (seen in a few short stages rather than as a whole) is the stuff of the silver screen. Only the resultant werewolf is a disappointment. One wonders if the creature's creator has ever seen a wolf.

All of this waffle does a reasonably good job of putting off the inevitable admission that I didn't go back to the flat today. Again.

In fact, I barely got out of bed today. I spent the morning researching Resident Evil - I'd done quite well, it seems, and only really messed up on a couple of points, neither of which were critical.

After the barest, most minimal lunch I could bring myself to make (read: a sandwich), I went back to bed and dozed on and off till about 4pm, when I surfed the usual websites till dinnertime.

I'd probably be more upset about my lax attitude to finishing my kitchen if it wasn't at its worst on Sundays.

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Didn't Suck...

Having been utterly hopeless about getting to the flat to finish painting the kitchen all week, I managed to get it all pretty much done - bar the very tricky bits - today. One wall essentially got a whole second coat of paint, another had substantial touch-ups that amounted to a second coat, and there's only a few bits around the window and the cupboards that still need finishing.

I even opened the tin of darker paint, and did all I needed to with that.

Some tidy-up work is still required... and I may try to coax my mother into giving me a few tips for the final little touches tomorrow, though I think I just need to unmount the doors on a couple of the cupboards.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that, when I removed much of the masking tape, the undercoat had seeped under it more than the final coat of paint, so I have several little strips of white still to cover.

Some of the rest of my day was taken up by watching (in fact, falling asleep through) some anime - one of the later Lupin III movies called The Secret of Twilight Gemini. I still can't quite figure out why, out of the three Lupin III movies I have, two feature transvestites as villains. Or should that be 'why only two...'? The later two are very different in terms of style and content.

Once I'd had a doze, I decided to bring out the Saturn and have a slightly more serious go at Resident Evil than I've ever had before. I think I bought it originally because my old mate Paul had the PlayStation version, and it was a 'big game' at the time. I don't recall enjoying it a great deal, but then zombie games and movies tend to flip me straight into Panic Mode for some reason. Not so much with the movies these days, as they tend to be very watered down and generic (particularly the Resident Evil movies, which barely rate as zombie movies anyway), but it's certainly not just the voice acting that's scary in the RE games, and even the likes of Saturn-only Johnny-come-lately aqua-zombie-survival-horror Deep Fear.

I got much further than ever before (playing as Jill, I was eventually done in by crows in the gallery), and found it to be quite a satisfying gaming experience. The only problem was my own tendency to try to solve every problem with gunfire. I seem to recall (now the adrenaline has worn off) that the player is supposed to run away from the crows, not attempt to shoot them. The genre is called 'Survival Horror' for a reason.

The controls took some getting used to... I may have to try an alternate layout, as I tend to use A as confirm and B as cancel, so it's good that the controls can be changed.

Returning to my parents' house as darkness fell, I managed to amuse myself catching up with Friday's email and TransFormers news (of particular interest is a new, larger-format, almost Alternator-styled Bumblebee for the new movie. He comes with a Sam action figure which can sit inside him in car mode, or on his shoulder, or even on his gun arm. Why is anyone's guess.

This evening's Demons is one I'd been looking forward to since I first heard about the series, but had started to think they were going to avoid - the last of the Van Helsings versus a couple of vampires!

Overall, I have to say it was probably the best story so far (though that ain't saying a great deal - while I like the series so far on balance, the stories have been rather flat). Tonight's had some depth, didn't go overboard on the lame special effects, and used its characters quite effectively. I suspect the premise hadn't been pared down too heavily, and it would have been far more substantial had it been a mere 30 minutes longer. Some of the history could have been explored more coherently, and the villains could have had a bit more character to play with.

That said, I'd have enjoyed it on some level just because the female vampire dressed sexily and had the best makeup job I've ever seen on a vampire, let alone a vampire in a TV series. The only letdowns were the rarity with which any fangs were seen (yawn), and the fact that what little biting occurred was implied.

Oh, and the dialogue wasn't great. Vampires aren't always utterly charming, it seems... The main one in this episode attempted to chat up a waitress at a bowling alley thusly:

Waitress: "What do you want?"
Vampire Bloke: "You...[reads her nametag] Gina"
W: [laughs nervously] "I'm not for sale"
VB: "I wasn't intending to pay..."

Cut to vampire and entourage leaving the back way, wiping his gob and tossing aside Gina's nametag. Um. Yeah.

Still, the story played out fairly well, and it's implied that the sexy vampire sidekick got away (supposedly only a vampire can kill a vampire, so the stake in her gut - evidently Galvin couldn't find her heart - would only "slow her down") so perhaps she'll return. Doubt it though.

Next week's appears to involve a dragon.

Whatever next?

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Further Insanity at Work, and Some Bad News

Today was, ostensibly, a deadline day. Due to the lack of sales made (clients being overly cautious? Salespeople being rubbish? Who knows?), the deadline was pushed back on Friday to Tuesday, and things were arranged so that we completed two out of three cover sections on Friday, with the last completed this morning, then one of the three sections (not including editions) of the magazine was to be completed by end of play today.

Doesn't sounds difficult, does it? Two thirds of one part on time, followed by the final third of that, and one third (technically one fifth) of the main job on deadline day, with the remainder to be mopped up a day late.

But when you spend most of the morning trying to work around a Salesman who, having royally fucked up a sale and misled his client, continues to mislead his client, tries to fob off responsibility for the situation he's created (and continues to exacerbate) and keeps sending emails to the client CC'ing everyone on the planet, you can see where things might go adrift.

So, come 4.30/5pm, I'm still waiting on signoffs for 2 estate agents, artwork for another, and sales to cover a further two pages in the one and only section we have anywhere near complete.

Oh, and neither of the Commercial Managers involved (one leaving at the end of the month, the other moving in from another office) had considered who would be signing off that one section, so the editor had to do it with the CM's approval.

And this would be the CM who's leaving... and so wouldn't actually be taking responsibility for any problems, however much she said she would.

And, after all this, there are still far too many spaces on the flatplans for comfort, I'll be losing a day's production on my next magazine (deadline of Friday), and tomorrow is going to be just as bad as today.

At least the features are looking good. Ish.

Earlier this evening, I had a phone call from my boss to say that there was a problem with one of the cover sections - not the one that was only sent today, the problem one has been with the Printers since Friday, but hadn't been worked on until I got the print order over today. The print order was delayed because the member of staff who does the numbers for me needs constant reminders, despite having a copy of the schedule and so a good idea of when the numbers are needed so we can produce the print orders.

Having looked at the problem - bleed missing on the outer edge of the inside covers - I concluded that it was better to let the covers run as they are, than risk causing more slippage by asking them to hold it over till tomorrow so I can resupply. Chances are, we'll be OK... if we're not, it's all down to late sales taking up too much time.

Shortly after that phone call, I had a call from my sister. She'd had another scan today, which found a heart defect in her little-finger-sized baby. This is the kind of thing, she was told, that will be fine as long as the baby is in the womb, but the baby will need surgery within hours (perhaps minutes) of birth.

A bit of a blow all round... but then, this is why you don't announce a pregnancy so early.

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Lazy Day

So much for my plan to return to the flat and finish off the kitchen.

I could barely bring myself to get out of bed, let alone leave the house. All the more annoying because I'd packed my bag ready last night.

Most of today was wasted either on the internet or sleeping, so I've done basically nothing of any merit today.

Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get to pop over to the flat and paint during the week... but, chances are, we're looking at next weekend now.

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A Day of Excitement and Surprises

Well... Surprises, at least.

Not least the arrival of an evangelist at the flats this morning, just as I was getting started on painting the kitchen. It went something like this...

Me (picking up entryphone): Hello?
Evangelist: Ah, hello [pause] You don't know me [bad start... I mean, how can he be sure, eh?], but I'm visiting your neighbours [very bad start - a lie: if he's trying my buzzer, then he's tried all the others and no-one's let him in yet] to talk about Peace on Earth and what the Bible says about how we can bring this about... Would you like to talk about Peace on Earth?" [after such a bad introduction, I can only assume that was a rhetorical question]
Me (hanging up): Thank you.

I mean... that's a terrible sales pitch. I work with terrible salespeople, but I'm sure they could have come up with better.

It doesn't help that my sister has been (and possibly is again) a ley preacher, and I've helped her write many sermons. Her 'thing' was that the Kingdom of Heaven is here, now... and it's up to us to make it happen. I much prefer that to some ill-judged wittering about Peace on Earth by an evangelist who introduces himself badly and lies straight off the bat.

Next up, as I was painting, I heard someone downstairs introducing himself as somebody-or-other from the Labour Party, asking if Neighbour Below knew about the upcoming European Election, and if they wanted to talk about it. I don't believe he got anywhere because, moments later, he appeared on my doorstep.

At first, I wanted to just ignore him and get on with the painting... but he made himself so conspicuous at the window, that wasn't really an option. Well, it was, but it would have been very rude. When I opened the door (and almost got blinded by the morning sunshine), he asked if he could speak to the previous occupant. I informed him that she no longer lived there and, rather than trying to interest me with his patter, he simply gave up and left.

It will henceforth be known as The Morning of the Piss-Poor Salespeople.

Painting progressed quite well. By lunchtime, I'd actually done pretty much all the painting in the lighter blue - three walls, bar the detailed stuff around the cabinets. This took me maybe a couple of hours. Since I started quite late, that meant to lunchtime so, having changed into something less sweaty, I headed out for food.

While out, I had a call from my old mate Paul, who had asked during the week if it would be convenient to pop round to the flat with a belated Christmas Present. He was calling to confirm that all was still OK, and I said that I was out at lunch, so I'd probably meet him at the station.

As it turned out, due to missing a train, he was rather later arriving than the half hour he predicted. Still, it wasn't desperately cold at that point, and it did give me the opportunity to remember to pick up the Saturday edition of The Guardian for its jobs section.

Once back at the flat, I briefly showed him the kitchen before he passed on his present. His original plan was to get me something for the kitchen but, since I'd mentioned that the kitchen was pretty much fully stocked thanks to Ikea, he went a different route and got me a towel set. Coincidentally, it looks much like the set I got myself - possibly even the same colour - making it perfect. I stashed them in the bedroom wardrobe (revealing to him another set of my father's tools) and we retired to the lounge and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting.

Around the time it started to get dark, he made moves to leave, so I figured I might as well join him. I packed my bag, made sure everything was locked up and that the boiler was set correctly, then we headed out.

On a different note, I'm beginning to rather like Demons. It's still nothing special, but the title sequence and theme song hit the right note (which always makes me more inclined to try to like something) and it sometimes seems as if they're really trying to break the mold they've chosen for themselves to become something bigger, better or, at least, different.

Tonight's episode was not really outstanding in any way (unless you could the camera's peculiar recurring focus on Villain du Jour's tail), except for a couple of flashes of brilliance. In particular, while Ruby was looking through The Stacks for a book on bombs or explosives, and she stopped under 'B' to say:

"Bingo!.. Bingo?"

This line was very clever, in that it set up the expectation that she'd found a volume on Bombs, only to twist it round so that she'd happened upon a book in The Stacks (the most complete library of Demonology, etc) on Bingo. I'm surprised no-one's used that gag before... but then, it is peculiarly British.

Other than that, it was pretty formulaic... and the trailer for next week's pretty much promised not to deviate from the clichés.

That said, it did depict a female vampire wearing a veil and glossy red lipstick. As long as she has the fangs to back up the suggestion that she's a vampire and not just a Goff, I'm all for that. For too long, we have suffered vampiresses who wear 'barely there' makeup. Give me a female vampire with bold makeup any day.

No, really. Any day's good for me.

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And Yet Not Without Its Dramas

Forgot to add to the last post that one of the Salespeople was found in tears in the ladies toilets today. Apparently she wants to leave the job as she hates it and finds it 'immoral' (it's a Sales job, Sherlock) but every time she tries to resign, they talk her out of it.

Right.

In other news, I came up with a joke today. When my boss complained about an ad being full of non-sequiturs, the following just popped into my head:

Q: What's the most useless phrase for a Gardener?
A: A non-sequitur

...More of a pun than a joke, I guess... And it wasn't even a gardening ad.

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Getting somewhere?

The changes in my mood sometimes surprise me.

Around New Year, I was pretty despondent about my flat - particularly the painting of the kitchen - and spent far too long lamenting my lack of progress toward moving in. In the last few days, I've managed to buy the paint I need to do all the walls and, with the rollers, etc already at the flat, I feel ready to tackle... even to finish the painting this weekend.

It may not help that I have a friend visiting on Saturday, delivering a belated Christmas gift. It may serve as a distraction (particularly if I feel the need to bring out the Saturn by way of entertainment) or it may serve to ensure I complete the job on Saturday. That remains to be seen.

But overall, apart from some rather angry outbursts at work over the last few days, I've been feeling much better about everything.

There was one situation where I was trying to work on the flatplan for my brainblending 3-edition magazine (split over two sets of entries in the database, so it's never clear where any bookings are meant to go) and our Junior Designer trotted over to ask me about an ad she'd picked up to set. Now, when I'm flatplanning, it's never a good time to ask me anything... but this question was pretty dumb.

OK, she's a Junior, and can't be expected to know everything yet, but she hadn't even thought her question through before posing it.

The client supplied a complete ad last month, but this month needed us to set it. This ad wasn't per their normal template, so Junior Designer wondered what to do. I suggested (possibly a little bit too sternly) she ask the Copy Controller if there was a new template available to follow... My mistake there was that the Copy Controller is (relatively) new as well, and so didn't offer the most sensible answer.

The job ended up getting set in Illustrator (which they all know they're not supposed to do and, in any case, this ad flagged up missing fonts which went unattended by the Junior because she couldn't see anything wrong) using last month's PDF as the basis.

Needless to say, I reset that sucker in Quark and fixed the fonts, so now we have a template we can use in future, if necessary.

Then, yesterday (one of my press days), I had a terse email exchange with one of the Salespeople regarding amendments to a supplied ad that I didn't want to do - because we shouldn't be amending supplied ads, it wasn't necessarily going to work if we did, and because it was almost bloody 6pm when the client noticed they'd made the mistake. By rights, no-one should have been there to take the call/read the email.

I eventually agreed the change with the Commercial Manager (who understands at least some of the potential problems), but the Salesperson who 'requested' the change could have handled it better. When told we couldn't do it, she simply emailed back asking "Why?", copying in the CM. Always guaranteed to rile me.

Still... Today went quite well, but Monday's magazine is in a bit of a state...

Oh, and I still want to look for a new job. That hasn't miraculously changed.

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Demonic

And so ITV decided to try its luck with a mini-series modelled on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It's called Demons and, to be honest, it's not terrible. Sure, it's got an eyecandy (male) lead, a besotted hanger-on, and an older man watching over them. Sure, the first episode had a guest star as the villain of the piece. It's not a complete rip-off, though.

Demons is very proud to be set in London... It namedrops several location, and offers some nice tourist shots, but it paints a far more contemporary picture of the city than most fiction designed for the export market (and I have no doubt that they want to sell it in the States).

Strangely, though, one of the main characters in an American played by an English actor... a neat counterpoint to Tony Head's Giles from Buffy, or a gratuitous 'way in' for potential American viewers. Not too sure yet.

It plays about the the Dracula myth in that some of its characters are referred to as being of the family Van Helsing, and even goes so far as to feature another character from an "illustrious family", Mina Harker. Considering her age, I don't think she's Johnathan Harker's wife.

Bizarrely, she's introduced as a blind pianist but, as followers of the genre will know, 'Blind' just means her eyes don't work... she sees by other means, and sees far clearer than the rest of us (pointing out that the besotted-hanger on wants to be more than just a friend, when I had erroneously assumed she was the girlfriend already).

The villain of the piece (with a typically ridiculous Brit-monster name) was played by Mackenzie Crook, styling himself so closely after a character played by one of his Pirates of the Caribbean co-stars, that I half expected him to introduce himself as Captain Jack Sparrow.

Some of the dialogue was pretty good, but a lot of the time I got the impression the writers were trying to go somewhere but not quite managing. Mina's frosty reception for the 'not-girlfriend', followed by her assertion that she didn't dislike her, she just didn't know her being a prime example. It was also quite jarring that, when the main character asked about vampires and werewolves, his mentor claimed "we don't name them, we just rate them and smite them". If everything is going to be referred to as an "entity from the half life" it's going to get a bit repetitive.

Overall, though, there was little technically wrong with it (apart from apparently killing off the first episode's guest star and main player), it simply lacked the polish and style of its model. Better than other efforts (particularly anything attempted by the BBC), but still lacking something in the writing and direction. The special effects were more than competent, except that where Buffy always gave the impression that its dissolving vampires had mass, the monsters in Demons seem to burn up as if they were made from paper.

In other news, I stayed over at the flat on Friday night, cooked myself some dinner (well, heated a pie in the oven and microwaved some veg), had a good night's sleep, and managed to finish painting the base coat in the kitchen on Saturday. With a smaller roller, the remaining work took me about an hour and a half at most, so perhaps I should have started with that in the first place, rather than trying to cover more ground at once with the larger roller.

After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon larking about on my Sega Saturn - neglected for far too long because the TV is almost constantly occupied at my parents' house, or because I'm more usually surfing the net while I'm there. Since I now have the old family TV, I took full advantage of its Cathode Ray Tube to play some lightgun games (House of the Dead - it seems impossible that its 1998 setting was the future when it came out), Virtua Cop 1 and 2) before settling down to play Shining the Holy Ark, and discovering that I'd missed most of an entire map when I last played it years ago. I've made quite a bit of progress, it seems.

There's a fair bit of other writing I'd like to get done - tiny additions or changes to stuff I have in progress for the most part - but not much inclination to do it... So, while I'm on a slightly more even keel that I was on Friday, I'm still not as focussed as I'd like.

We shall see. Maybe I'll surprise myself.

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Epic Fail

I've been sitting here at the computer for about five hours now. I got out of bed deliberately late because, while I need to get over to the flat and at least try to finish painting the undercoat, I'm really not looking forward to it.

All I have to do is finish off the door-side wall, paint around the window and boiler, then paint behind the fridge. That's all that's left for the base coat. The actual painting will have to wait for some other time because I don't have the paint yet.

And, you know what? I'm dreading it.

Considering the time and effort I've already put in to a job that should have taken me only a couple of hours, I'm terrified that I'm going to cock it up somehow.

...But then, put it in perspective: I'm taking way too long over painting the kitchen...

Versus: I completed the purchase of the flat in July 2008. It's now January 2009 and I'm still not living there.

I'm terrified of moving there because I'll be on my own, having spent almost 35 years in the comfort of a family home. I'll have to cook for myself, do my own laundry, keep track of my spending.

I'm also more than a little concerned about the outlook at work. Sure, we're making more money than two years ago, but not as much as forecast last year because of this looming threat of recession... And I have a nasty feeling that some more magazines are going to fold... When this happens, it's likely that more staff will be shed. The top dogs will say "You don't need that many people in Production if you're doing fewer magazines", and they've already tried to do away with one of the Production Managers.

If they try it again, and the move can't be blocked, the choice will be between me (with a mortgage to pay, and about 15 years experience), and my counterpart (with a mortgage and a family, but less experience and a shaky track record in both Managing and back-ending magazines).

That's not a choice I'd like to make, in this economic climate...

So, my New Year's Resolution #1 will be to look for a new job. REALLY look. And 'new job' meaning 'different job'.

I may have decided on something similar last year...

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