The funny thing about Temping is that I'm beginning to get the impression that there are a lot of people out there, Temping in my field, without really knowing the first fucking thing about it.
I got my first inkling towards the end of last year, when I did a couple of stints with a company one of my former colleagues (specifically, my counterpart) worked for before changing his career entirely. It was reported to me that he described it at the time as "a bit much to take in", and yet I breezed through it... I ended up twiddling my thumbs and begging for more to do.
This week, I'm working at another company producing a similar kind of product, but for an entirely different market (and I learned today that the similarities could be down to the fact that half the staff at that company originated at this company!), and with a slightly heavier workload - several weeklies, supplements and specials, rather than just the one weekly (or was it two? I only dealt with one) and occasional supplements and specials. I'm tackling one all on my lonesome, and helping out my boss - Deputy Manager - with bits and bobs of hers, with the occasional screwball job coming along for extra fun.
So far, nothing unusual... Except I'm clearly far better than they were expecting - even after they interviewed me - and I'm being praised to the Salespeople on my second day there. Since my CV lists certain other of my internet-based projects, they had a quick gander at some of my art, and I was told today that their Art Department were very impressed. "Why's he working in Production?" they asked, apparently quite incredulous.
My answer (not to them - I'm not sure which one said it) was "Because it's more fun!"
I've always said I'm more of a techy than an artist/designer. I can do art, I can do design... but, really, my strengths are in ensuring it works properly.
And that seems to be what's lacking in others.
I suspect I mentioned at the time how galling it was when a former subordinate came back in as a Temp to assist on Copy Control, way back in my last job, and claimed that he'd done my boss's job. Turned out he hadn't. He always liked to talk himself up, but he'd only ever been a Senior Copy Controller. Problem is, he was also an arrogant twat, and seems to have bluffed his way into a couple of jobs since.
(As an aside, I probably should have seen the potential for this when he first joined the company - when my boss had a word with him about his attitude during his trial period, he told him "Look, I know you're going to hire me, you know you're going to hire me. Because I'm fucking good. That's all you need to know." And he was fucking good, comparatively... he just grew to believe his own hype, that he was better than everyone else.)
To be honest, I've always held it as true that Designers are ten a penny. Good Designers are gold dust. My former boss tends to add that good Designers who know how to artwork are rarer still.
So there's me... whose role it has been, for many, many years, to take apart what Designers put together, and put it back together so that it works properly. Templates are my thing. If I build a template, it's rock solid, and will work for as long as it'd used. Give me low res crap and, frequently, I can hand you back something printable.
And yet, I'm not an easy sell because I don't have a portfolio... Just a long history of getting things to press on time, and with the barest minimum of preventable errors.
Weird, innit?
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Friday, 23 March 2012
Everything Happens For A Reason
Amongst my many previously mentioned superstitions is the one where I often firmly believe, against all logic, that everything in life happens for a reason. I picked this one up - as one might a virus, I suppose - from a friend with a very Zen outlook on life. Her vibe was that souls, like every single iota of energy in this universe of ours, get recycled - the concept commonly referred to as 'reincarnation'. However, where most proponents of reincarnation would start spouting forth about being one of Cleopatra's handmaidens or Napoleon, someone of historical significance, she preferred to think we just come back in whatever form is best to learn the lessons we need to learn... and that we keep coming back until all those lessons are learned.
It is with this in mind that I feel the truth of the idea that 'everything happens for a reason'.
So, after my visit to the GP, where my workaholism was confirmed, I followed her advice and got in touch with a 'work club' run by my local council. On Tuesday, I set my alarm clock to ensure I'd wake up in time to pop over and join the club, feeling that I should, at least, show some willing and that, if nothing else, it would get me out of the flat, and interacting with new people - the main lure in those ghastly periods where I feel desperate to return to the full office environment.
I've gone on record - somewhere, not necessarily here - as saying that I find the average office environment dangerously toxic - full of untrustworthy, frequently slothful, backstabbing monsters, with an over-active sense of entitlement - but I genuinely value the opportunity to interact with them... even if it does leave me feeling polluted. Believe it or not, that sense of defilement is preferable to being left alone with my own thoughts.
And I'm not even talking about the dirty ones.
But I digress.
Whatever I may have expected from something called a 'Work Club', what I got was surprising. For one thing, it was actually fun. Part of me had dreaded the experience, even while on my way there, I was still trying to talk myself out of it... what use could it really be, as something run by the council? Surely it would just be doing the bidding of the Job Centre? Surely it would be for lesser mortals than I?
OK, I'm not really that pompous... But I didn't expect much, so the lesson in Presentation I got was both interesting and very useful. Eye-opening, even. And meeting such a varied bunch of people was a true pleasure. I will all-too-easily slip into reclusive ways, and lose my confidence in interacting with people - particularly if I don't feel that I 'fit in' anyway, so jumping into that environment was beneficial, even before having to do any of the exercises.
The weirdest thing, though, was that I bumped into a former colleague on the way home afterward... And the timing of it was so very delicate.
After the Club, I popped into a local (large) branch of Tesco, browsed a couple of sections only, and selected two products to buy, vacillating over a couple of others. My decisions made, I went to one of the self-service check-outs. Since I had a backpack with me, I didn't need a bag, so I put each item onto the checkout bed after scanning the barcode, paid with cash (two £10 notes, fed into the machine), picked up my change (the £5 note had to be pointed out to me - I knew it came out somewhere different to the coins, but didn't immediately see where), then struggled to stuff my purchases into my backpack. Then I shouldered the bag, and left by the same route I'd entered. I bumped into my former colleague at the corner of the outside of the car park.
If anything in that sequence of events had been any different - if I'd not bothered going into Tesco, if I'd been quicker to make my selections, or not browsed all of those sections, or browsed other sections - I would not have met up with him...
...And so we would not have exchanged employment updates and telephone numbers...
...And so I wouldn't know that his employers might be needing someone like me...
And then, today, I went back to the Club for a lesson in CV- and Application Letter-writing, application form protocols, and suchlike. Some of it doesn't quite fit my industry, and what employers would tend to require from a CV, but it did prompt me to re-evaluate my current CV... again...
Now, I'm not saying that meeting up with this guy and reworking my CV is going to suddenly get me a job (though the workshop tutor believed I was likely to find work soon), but it just goes to show how a string of events can lead to something... or nothing...
It's almost like something out of a Dirk Gently story, at least according to the TV series (see what I did there?). After the third and final episode, I'm not quite sure what to make of it... other than that it really should never have been made. My assessment of Stephen Mangan's Alan Patridge impression will stand, though Darren Boyd's portrayal of Richard Macduff improved somewhat for the last episode. The biggest problem seems to be that the writer(s) cannot decide if Dirk is truly a genius detective, or just a self-absorbed and very fortunate charlatan. The only episode that really impressed me in any way was the second, and so much of that was far too obvious and clichéd. OK, fine, in both of the (completed) novels, the 'mystery' is played out fully in the narrative, so the book is about the investigative process, rather than a means of actually unravelling the mystery for the reader, but I'm now reading The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul a second (third?) time, just to reassure myself that Dirk isn't the selfish, inept tosspot shown in the TV series.
Being Human, too, continues to confound me. This last weekend's episode seemed to be a hastily rewritten scenario that would have originally featured Mitchell and George, but ended up being Hal and Tom thanks to the departures of Aiden Turner and Russell Tovey. Some aspects of it were brilliant... but the overarching theme of the arrival of the Old Ones, and the plans that have been set in motion around that, lack the sparkle of the earlier series. Then again, after reading The Delicate Dependency, I'm finding it even harder to believe the concept of a hostile world takeover by vampires...
It is with this in mind that I feel the truth of the idea that 'everything happens for a reason'.
So, after my visit to the GP, where my workaholism was confirmed, I followed her advice and got in touch with a 'work club' run by my local council. On Tuesday, I set my alarm clock to ensure I'd wake up in time to pop over and join the club, feeling that I should, at least, show some willing and that, if nothing else, it would get me out of the flat, and interacting with new people - the main lure in those ghastly periods where I feel desperate to return to the full office environment.
I've gone on record - somewhere, not necessarily here - as saying that I find the average office environment dangerously toxic - full of untrustworthy, frequently slothful, backstabbing monsters, with an over-active sense of entitlement - but I genuinely value the opportunity to interact with them... even if it does leave me feeling polluted. Believe it or not, that sense of defilement is preferable to being left alone with my own thoughts.
And I'm not even talking about the dirty ones.
But I digress.
Whatever I may have expected from something called a 'Work Club', what I got was surprising. For one thing, it was actually fun. Part of me had dreaded the experience, even while on my way there, I was still trying to talk myself out of it... what use could it really be, as something run by the council? Surely it would just be doing the bidding of the Job Centre? Surely it would be for lesser mortals than I?
OK, I'm not really that pompous... But I didn't expect much, so the lesson in Presentation I got was both interesting and very useful. Eye-opening, even. And meeting such a varied bunch of people was a true pleasure. I will all-too-easily slip into reclusive ways, and lose my confidence in interacting with people - particularly if I don't feel that I 'fit in' anyway, so jumping into that environment was beneficial, even before having to do any of the exercises.
The weirdest thing, though, was that I bumped into a former colleague on the way home afterward... And the timing of it was so very delicate.
After the Club, I popped into a local (large) branch of Tesco, browsed a couple of sections only, and selected two products to buy, vacillating over a couple of others. My decisions made, I went to one of the self-service check-outs. Since I had a backpack with me, I didn't need a bag, so I put each item onto the checkout bed after scanning the barcode, paid with cash (two £10 notes, fed into the machine), picked up my change (the £5 note had to be pointed out to me - I knew it came out somewhere different to the coins, but didn't immediately see where), then struggled to stuff my purchases into my backpack. Then I shouldered the bag, and left by the same route I'd entered. I bumped into my former colleague at the corner of the outside of the car park.
If anything in that sequence of events had been any different - if I'd not bothered going into Tesco, if I'd been quicker to make my selections, or not browsed all of those sections, or browsed other sections - I would not have met up with him...
...And so we would not have exchanged employment updates and telephone numbers...
...And so I wouldn't know that his employers might be needing someone like me...
And then, today, I went back to the Club for a lesson in CV- and Application Letter-writing, application form protocols, and suchlike. Some of it doesn't quite fit my industry, and what employers would tend to require from a CV, but it did prompt me to re-evaluate my current CV... again...
Now, I'm not saying that meeting up with this guy and reworking my CV is going to suddenly get me a job (though the workshop tutor believed I was likely to find work soon), but it just goes to show how a string of events can lead to something... or nothing...
It's almost like something out of a Dirk Gently story, at least according to the TV series (see what I did there?). After the third and final episode, I'm not quite sure what to make of it... other than that it really should never have been made. My assessment of Stephen Mangan's Alan Patridge impression will stand, though Darren Boyd's portrayal of Richard Macduff improved somewhat for the last episode. The biggest problem seems to be that the writer(s) cannot decide if Dirk is truly a genius detective, or just a self-absorbed and very fortunate charlatan. The only episode that really impressed me in any way was the second, and so much of that was far too obvious and clichéd. OK, fine, in both of the (completed) novels, the 'mystery' is played out fully in the narrative, so the book is about the investigative process, rather than a means of actually unravelling the mystery for the reader, but I'm now reading The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul a second (third?) time, just to reassure myself that Dirk isn't the selfish, inept tosspot shown in the TV series.
Being Human, too, continues to confound me. This last weekend's episode seemed to be a hastily rewritten scenario that would have originally featured Mitchell and George, but ended up being Hal and Tom thanks to the departures of Aiden Turner and Russell Tovey. Some aspects of it were brilliant... but the overarching theme of the arrival of the Old Ones, and the plans that have been set in motion around that, lack the sparkle of the earlier series. Then again, after reading The Delicate Dependency, I'm finding it even harder to believe the concept of a hostile world takeover by vampires...
Thursday, 15 March 2012
I'm Not Suffering From Depression...
...I'm just an Unemployed, Workaholic, Creative Personality.
Depression is a tricky thing to adequately diagnose, because it comes with a shopping list of symptoms, any of which could point to other causes. I barely slept on Tuesday night due to anxiety about a job interview I was attending on Wednesday (for a temping job - I'm not kidding, I was interviewed for a week-long temporary work placement). My feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness and apathy are because I'm used to an active, high-stress environment, and I'm currently free to do everything at my own pace (which, almost inevitably, is glacial). Thoughts of self-harm are bad, yes... but I'm still capable of putting it into perspective, and seeing the potential repercussions (that is, how it will affect everyone else). Are my mood swings, bouts of indolence and bursts of frenetic activity a sign of some kind of Bipolar Disorder, or is that simply a typical feature of an artistic personality?
But then, is that not splitting hairs?
Simply Googling doesn't offer much help or comfort, despite - and in some cases because of - the vast array of questionnaires available. Out of my strange blend of curiosity and pig-headedness, I filled out a selection of such forms last night. Several pointed to Depression (capital D), one suggested an 'Extremely High' possibility of Bipolar Disorder (curiously only a 'High-Moderate' rating for Cyclothymia, a 'mild form of Bipolar Disorder'). These tests are "for entertainment/education purposes only and do not represent a professional diagnosis". At best, they exist only to give you an indication of whether you should speak to a GP.
The question of Bipolar Disorder versus Artistic Personality muddies the water still further. In many ways, it comes across as a question of "Poh-Tay-Toh, Poh-Tah-Toh". And, on the one hand, BD can be treated chemically... but that tends to just even out the peaks and troughs. On the other hand, if my mind works the way it does because of my creative nature, it surely becomes of question of "would I be willing to sacrifice the peaks to mitigate the troughs?" The possible side-effects of any medication are the basis of my resistance toward any diagnosis of Depression.
My GP presented a very compelling case for my UWCP, and I have to say that just having had the conversation with her has made me feel somewhat better. I was particularly amused by her comment that she was glad to speak to me on this subject because it's very rare that she sees men who think they may be Depressed. I responded that "I am not encumbered with that level of stupid pride."
I left with lots of advice - some, like "try to keep active, try to ensure you do something you can be proud of every day", I'm already very aware of, and have tried to action... but apathy always gets in the way. I can wake up in the morning, make a detailed plan of action, and then completely ignore it. Suddenly it's night time again, and I haven't accomplished anything. Some of the advice - bizarrely - was on the jobhunting front. So I can now honestly say that I've had more useful jobhunting advice from my GP than from a representative of the government's Job Centres.
...And that surely says something about the Job Centres.
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