The One About Work

Regular readers of this blog may have picked up on the fact that I haven't had an awful lot of paying work since the middle of last year, when a maternity cover placement came to an end. In total, I think I had maybe three or four individual days from one company. With my finances looking pretty perilous (defined as "I've got halfway through my once-healthy savings") and Christmas just around the corner, things were beginning to look desperate in December.

Then, out of the blue, I got an email from someone asking if I would be available for a few weeks of temping work in January.

Now, just to clarify, I get similar-sounding emails every so often but, with most, it's quite clear that they're scam emails that aren't even properly targeted to someone in the UK. This one was different... So I looked up the company and the person who sent the email, and it all looked fairly legitimate. Rather than risk dealing with it only via email, I decided to telephone them.

The person who contacted me was the head of a production department in a small publisher of a suite of arts magazines. With the departure of one of their staff, they were in need of some cover while they went about recruiting a replacement. Because the situation sounded odd, albeit still pretty legitimate, I asked how they'd come to hear of me. They said that they'd had my CV on file for a couple of years but, when pushed for details, couldn't say where they'd got it from.

That's where it started to sound less legitimate. Over the three years I'd been temping by that point, only one of the three main agencies who have me on their books has every found me any work. The other two either never get back to me about anything (even if I'm saying I'd like them to put me forward for a vacancy they're advertising) and the other seems to take a scattershot approach (to put it politely... it's more like 'throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks'). I figured that if this company got my CV anywhere, it was from the most useful agency.

So here's where I got a bit sneaky... for better or worse. Theoretically, I could have contacted that agency - or all three of them - and queried the name of the company who'd contacted me, to see if they remembered sending out my CV... Instead, I just told them everything I'd been told, as implausible as it seemed.

To cut a long story short, I ended up working at this company for five weeks. During this time, I did interview for the permanent position myself but, despite being told that I was the strongest candidate they'd seen and despite all the good work I'd been doing there, they ended up choosing someone else.

I was already beginning to form an unflattering opinion of the head of department, simply because of the way literally everyone else in the company spoke about them in their absence... but also because of the way they tended to behave when they were around. There were a couple of occasions where I picked up on fairly important procedural things they missed, and it soon began to feel as if they were becoming deliberately picky about some aspects of my work. After that, things just started to get weird. When the head of department informed me that I hadn't got the permanent job, they did so in a long, rambling voicemail message (they phoned just after 6pm, while I was travelling underground) which was, for the most part, a list of things that were not the reason I hadn't been selected. In fact, to this day, I'm baffled. Still, the first anyone else there heard about it was almost a week later, when the head of department circulated an email simply saying that I was "leaving". This left many folks there with the impression that I must have decided not to take the job, because they all felt I was the logical choice. I was quick to dispel that impression.

All through this, the head of department didn't seem to want to talk about it... Even after I agreed to hang around until the new guy started because working there was a lot of fun, and I wasn't holding any grudges. Plus, hey, I kinda needed the money by that point.

However, after I'd been there for about three weeks, the head of department suddenly announced (in another email) that they couldn't afford to continue paying me at the rate we'd agreed before Christmas. This left me feeling that the head of department was trying to get rid of me quickly, to avoid some kind of embarrassing scene. After thinking about it overnight, I offered them three options, all of which involved paying me the agreed rate, with flexibility on how long I stayed.

Overall, I felt that the head of department didn't want me around, and expected them to finish me at the end of that week... So I was somewhat surprised to be told they wanted me to stay a little longer, so I'd be leaving only about a week before the new person started.

During this time, the head of department tried - twice - to organise drinks 'in my honour'. The first attempt, rather inadvisably, involved sending me a short email, at a very busy point in the schedule, inviting me out for a drink early the next week. It came across like an invitation to a one-to-one chat over a drink, which wasn't very appealing. I left the email unanswered because, either way, it wasn't as important as the work. When the day came, and I was asked (yes, in another email, despite the head of department being sat nearby) if I was "still" free to come for a drink after work, I replied that I had too much housework to get through that week - which was not untrue, I'd let far too many chores pile up! The head of department made a funny noise upon reading my reply and, as people started to leave, there were a few snide comments about badly-organised surprise parties. The second attempt was a bit more public but, with an important event occurring and several people off sick on my last day, virtually no-one was in the office. The head of department was working from home that day, so I took the opportunity to skip out on the drinks, though the team I'd been working with bought me a small gift as a thank-you.

When I left, I said (loudly and deliberately) that I trusted that the right decision had been made for the department and the company... but no-one there agreed with that assessment. They all knew the head of department too well. On the upside, they work with an excellent online/electronic booking and tracking system which was relatively simple to learn and fairly powerful, covering everything from booking to flatplanning... it's always nice to have new experiences on your CV.

After I departed, I let my main agency know how it went - because this agency actually takes an interest in what I get up to - and dropped in the name of the company.

Turns out the head of department had been fibbing.

They hadn't had my CV for "a couple of years", they'd had it for a matter of months: they'd contacted my main agency early in 2013 looking for holiday cover, but had supposedly changed their mind. They'd basically cheated my main agency out of their 'finders fee'.

Of course, the funny thing about this is that, had they gone via the agency, they probably would have got a lower day rate out of me. I tend to be pretty flexible and, with a small company, I would have agreed to reduce my usual rate for the kind of work they needed covered... so, in saving themselves the burden of paying an agency fee, they ended up paying me more.

Following that placement, the agency got me a short placement assisting in a busy publishing office for about a week, only a short distance from my home. Also, somewhat amusingly, it was a company I'd been in contact with a year or so previously, having bumped into a former colleague in the vicinity of their offices. They could only afford a lower rate, but the reduced travel time would more than make up for that - even at that time of year, I'd be getting home before dark. It was basically three days one week, two days the next, picking up the slack while one of their managers worked from home during the run up to a couple of press days.

This company turned out to be one of the weirdest I've ever encountered, and that's including the one whose 'Production' department only ever ferried materials between external repro companies and internal Editorial teams. This company dealt with virtually everything on paper. Bookings, flatplans, job sheets... it was like I'd been transported back in time by about ten years. On the upside, they were looking into a more contemporary method, and awaiting a demonstration of an online/electronic system which might improve things.

Their head of sales was quite keen, but feared the usual 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' problems associated with asking Salespeople to do anything according to established rules (or, for that matter, attempting to establish new rules for them). The Production team didn't know the name of the system, but the head of sales mentioned it on one conversation, and it turned out to be the very same system as I'd been using in my previous temping placement. I waxed lyrically about it, but the abiding impression I got was that the company had been talking about bringing in the system for ages, and they'd yet to even arrange a demonstration.

Their senior designer was a bit of a character, to put it politely... Easily one of the angriest people I've ever encountered in recent years, very cynical, and most disparaging of (people in) the geographical area he worked in (particularly versus Japan, where he'd recently taken a holiday). Most conversations with him involved half-joking implications of physical violence if his expectations were not met... And he really didn't trust my experience or opinions about the artwork we dealt with on a daily basis. It didn't help that my boss didn't really listen to what I was telling her most of the time, and so failed to communicate it adequately, let alone support my suggestions. I wondered, privately, if she really had the skills for the job, and many comments made by her partner in the department didn't improve my confidence.

The problem with all the paperwork is that some of it went missing and some of it got duplicated, leading to all kinds of confusion, including one situation where someone put through a job sheet based on the wrong version of some artwork (the earliest version) after I'd passed the latest (corrected) version. I had to explain about four times that I'd already dealt with the artwork, and that the correct version was available to the Design team, in the correct folder, rather than being left in the 'incoming artwork' folder.

After all the frustrations and distrust in the previous temping placement, this new job felt like an absolute nightmare of outdated systems coupled with resentment and utter distrust between departments. Sales would continue selling up to and during press days - using the same, slow, confusing paper-based systems - reminding me terribly of my last permanent job (and, amusingly, while the former colleague who first told me about this company had long since moved on, there was another former colleague - up to all his old tricks - working there), and then expect to dictate changes to the design team right up until the last minute. Changes, I should add, to artwork which had the relevant client's approval. I heard that the senior designer felt so powerless that he'd asked for his name to be removed from the magazine. The main culprit was the second-in-command in sales, who spent most of his time out of the office, and yet would get uppity if he didn't get final sign-off on the magazine before it went to press. Not the healthiest situation, but no-one seemed to know whose job it was to slap him down. Were it not for the wonky organisation of the company, where 'Design' and 'Production' were wholly separate entities, and 'Production' was nothing more than a pair of copy controllers with fancy job titles, I'd have said it was the Production Manager's job... certainly, it had been mine in my last permanent job, and I had revelled in the task.

So, in spite of the convenience of the job in terms of its location, I was very glad to finish there without any extensions.

After that job, two things happened. My usual agency contacted me about a job in a very prestigious weekly publication based uptown, and the slightly dodgy arty company contacted me to offer me another vacancy - not the offer of another interview, a straight-out job offer.

The former involves responsibility for one edition of the weekly, including late nights every press day, travelling to the printers to sign it off for press, quality reporting up the company's heirarchy and all kinds of financial tracking and reporting that's outside my existing experience. The latter was pretty much what I had been doing back at the beginning of the year, minus any kind of 'management' aspect, because the other new recruit is tackling that. The former was offering less than I'd been earning in my last permanent postion, for greater responsibility (it's pretty much a global brand, and they pride themselves on having never missed an issue in the long history of the publication). The latter was offering even less... but, whereas the former job was basically all about managing and maintaining the status quo, the latter was a semi-creative role in a small company with enormous potential. They're only just moving into areas that other companies I've worked for have been dealing with for years and (surprisingly, given how disorganised they could be in some areas) doing remarkably well.

So it came down to a choice between a tough role in a prestigious company with decent pay, and an exciting role in a smaller company with sort-of acceptable pay... and being one to cheer for the underdog, I ended up accepting the latter.

I'd actually come out of the interview with the bigger company feeling quite excited about the possibilities and the cachet of the role... but it had quickly dawned on me that the job would have a massive - and probably very detrimental - impact on the rest of my life. My line of work tends to attract workaholics and perfectionists. I've experienced the conflicting obsessions of making a product perfect and meeting the deadline, and working with late changes, cock-ups and assorted disasters... and it turned me into a very angry, very unhappy person. A person I have no wish to become again.

Meanwhile, my experience with the smaller company had been fun, with caveats. The work was excellent, the team were great people, the deadlines weren't heinous... the only real problem was that the head of department seemed to habitually miscommunicate (to put it politely), had a tendency toward drama (not just in the sense of being part of an AmDram group in her spare time) and possibly wasn't the most trustworthy individual. Knowing that going in, the only real wildcard is the new guy.

One friend believes I'm being suckered, that they're taking advantage of my willingness to do work I enjoy for less than ideal pay. I'd agree with the latter part of that idea, but I don't see any malicious intent behind it and, until I find myself doing everything they've told me I won't be doing, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Plus, a train ride of an hour each way gives me ample time for reading... The books I've been reading since Christmas - the first three of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - were going a lot quicker while I was working than they have since...