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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