What do you do then...?

I've just completed my second week as a Marketing Officer.

Well, I say second week. I was off 2 days the first week, one day this week and left early to go for some training today. So I've just completed my first six and a half days of actual marketing. I believe that 6.5 out of 10 is actually quite a high attendance rate for a Marketing person. Well done me. I'm a credit to my profession.

There have been a couple of minor challenges so far:

Day 1: Arrived refreshed after two weeks in the strange void between Client Services and Marketing, during which I spent a large part of my life cruising up and down the M6. If that makes me sound like some kind of huggy-bear/superpimp type character, then I'll cope with that as a concept. *long pause* I'm still coping. Anyway - my desk was missing something when I arrived. After a bit of pondering, a touch of wondering and a fair amount of puzzling, I realised that the bloody great big mac that had been there before I went away had vanished. No computer. Tricky.

Anyway, the poor thing was panting it's last in the company of my friend and IT colleague the lovely Jompet. He'd tried all sorts of things to revive it (some of which I'm sure are illegal and/or physically impossible) but it was deeply traumatised, possibly at the realisation that an imbecile was about to become its user.

I then had to steal a colleague's PC. She's on holiday for a month, but it took several days to un-stick the gonks, frills and another stuff from around the screen. To my family - I love you and will miss you when I'm gone. I know I will be killed when she gets back.

By the end of Day 1, I knew how to:

a) look for a mac
b) steal a PC

Day 2: Some stuff happened. Some of it involved doing things to a web whilst grazing the interworld. Or something. Not really sure. learning on Day 2:

a) There's an Inter Net.
b) I think I'm slightly scared now

Day 3: A colleague based in another office needed something doing RIGHT NOW. In fact, if I didn't do it RIGHT NOW, the imminent collapse of a big lot of money and possibly the whole office's careers would occur. Slight problem, in that the only version of software I can do the "thing" in is on the mac. It perks up slightly allowing me use it for a bit, before breathing it's last. Bearing in mind that I don't know how to use a mac you can see my dilemma. Oh, and I haven't the faintest idea how to use the software either. Things I learnt today:

a) I don't know how to use a mac
b) I don't know how to use a Soft Ware
c) Jeeesus, now I'm really scared

Handily, at this point my huge week had ended. Woo! Marketing! Yeah! I can do that! 4 day weekend - woopwoop!

All too quickly, time was up. I won't bore you with all the details of this week. Here are the highlights:

It involved slightly less fear
A chunk of websiteyness (which having actually had training on it today, highlighted the fact that my previous dablings were lucky not to have brought the whole WWW to it's virtual knees and that I now have a lot of fixing to do)
A bit of finding out about training (HOW much for a 2 day course?!)
Some frankly quite brilliant (if I do say so myself) arranging for someone else to do the things I can't
A Krypton factor style intelligence test where I attempted to erect a 6 foot display, er, thing, in a room 6 foot high, without instructions, using only my cunning - Display 1, Jenwis 0.
Photographing some nice people giving us a cheque - an actual cheque mind, not one of those comically big ones you can actually see in a photo
Some meetings about marketingy-type things
I'm still pretty good at making tea and coffee
Marketing should apparently be called La La Land

And there you go. 2 weeks in and I'm none the wiser. Hope nobody noticed I was bluffing it...

This post is for my friends & colleagues, with whom I shared an entertaining 5 minutes today reminiscing about the good old days (actually about 2 months ago) when we worked together and used to have way too much fun. Probably why we got split up....

Playing tonight on the Hamilbutton cheap stereo (playing through my expensive amp and speakers which are about all that's left of my decent hi-fi after the CD skipped all the time and the cassette deck chewed up it's last C90) is Eddie Vinson's "Cleanhead Blues".

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

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