A New Record?

So I've mentioned that it normally takes me about a week to make myself indispensable... And on about my third day in my current freelance placement, my boss had a quick meeting with her boss, and came out to announce that they already wanted to extend my contract to six weeks, possibly two months.

One weird thing is the number of déjà vu flashes I've been having this week... Salespeople not putting things on the system till after the magazine has gone to press, Salespeople going off down the pub while there's still stuff they need to sign off, Salespeople arguing that late copy isn't their responsibility, never has been, never should be...

Of course, all this is possibly hypocritical of me, since I said within my first couple of days that I believe Salespeople should not be salaried, but should work solely on commission, as that's the only way to encourage them to sell on time, as close to rack rate as possible, and to make their bookings official. Any Salesperson worth paying would appreciate that structure because it allows them to earn more money (commission on rack rate being higher than 'pants round ankles' rates) and getting their bookings on the system on time ensures they get paid the full amount. It's really a simple bit of logic, so it's surprising how resistant Salespeople (and, often, their managers) are to the idea.

Today - final press day on my first magazine this time round - got a bit hairy. The bulk of the magazine went to press yesterday, leaving one section - the very front and back of the mag - to be finalised by lunchtime today. The hold up was caused by one section with a lot of late sales (thankfully repeats) and one full page ad near the front, which was sent only a short time before the cut-off point.

Typically, the problem in a situation like this would be the clients being tardy with sign-off (including simply agreeing to a particular repeat ad) or the supply of copy.

Not so, today.

What went wrong today was the company's web/email system, and on two levels:

• One bit of copy fell foul of IT Security, which prevents .zip files coming in. The salesperson who received it had to ask IT to release the email... then (rather foolishly) simply forwarded it to me... resulting in the email falling foul of IT Security all over again. That took a total of about 2 hours to sort, from the time the client sent the artwork, to the time I received it. By that point, we'd solved the problem by other means: the file was copied to a memory stick, and transferred manually from one machine to another.
• Another bit of copy fell foul of a routing delay with both email (the client sent the artwork - twice - about an hour before it arrived) and internet traffic (I uploaded the file to the printers, got the 'Artwork Received' message from their file delivery system, saw the file logged in their history as having been uploaded, and yet it took about 20 minutes to finally appear within the magazine on their system).

Curiously, the company is in the process of shifting to a new 'Cloud-based' system, which sends a shiver down my spine. I'm a control freak, and I'm very aware of that... so the idea of not even having my files stored locally is repugnant to me... There's also a new email system being installed and already people are complaining about it. Hopefully the staggered installation will mean some of the bugs are ironed out before the roll-out is completed.

It's an interesting place, certainly... and the products (the magazines themselves) are pretty cool - I nabbed a back issue today, to give to my father, because it features an article about a new space telescope, the successor to Hubble. It's not exactly busy by my usual standards, but what is? The lightness of the workload actually made me quite arrogant about the final few ads - I allowed more time for them to arrive than I should have done, so the system delays turned a slightly late magazine into a very late magazine but, still, it was only an hour or so late, and it's not as if it was late into the evening.

Kind of a shame that they don't have any permanent positions going... It seems they're in the middle of some redundancy processes, and are obliged to offer any 'spare' jobs to supposedly suitable candidates but, when the roles being made redundant are along the lines of, to choose a title at random which may not even be applicable, 'Production Editor', anyone from a Production background will immediately know that the 'Production' prefix of that job titles is utterly inapplicable. An editor is an editor. They have no involvement in true Production work (in the specific sense of 'sending the magazine to print'), and their skill set doesn't fit a Production role... But, of course, the upper echelons never understand such complex semantics...

Aaaaaanyway... it's late, I'm tired... I've had a really good week (and most of the bizarre resentment I felt at the weekend about losing all my idle time to gainful employment has faded away)... Time to start thinking about getting some kip.