New Camera! Test Run! Exclamations!

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Test run from the photos I took with my new Camera. That’s camera with a capital ‘C’.

Very exciting.

It’s an expensive birthday present to myself.

I finally figured out how to use manual mode.

High-End Lifestyle

Printed on the first page of a beautifully bound, hard-back A5 booklet type thing.

It looked expensive.

Lets hope those High-End Lifestyle people don't spell too good.

A New Client At Work

Arthur

The building is very dog friendly. It’s one of the nicest things about the place

Dogs come in with their humans nearly everyday.

Sometimes they stroll into the office, asking for a doggie website or an angry cats app.

They are very demanding clients.

“Arthur, you cannot pay for an app in dog biscuits!”

“No, not even if you look at us with those eyes!”

Another Day

Yet another day at work,

where I find myself once again

wearing my top

not just inside out,

but backwards as well.

Which just goes to show

my morning state of mind.

Early morning door-slamming (that’s me) and yelling (that’s both) with the ex this morning.

Ah, domestic bliss.

Other good news is my boss managed to brow-beat his phone company into giving him insurance and apologizing for not offering it sooner (Hah!).

And it only took 6 or 7 phone calls and various quiet threats. He is customer service’s worst nightmare and my role-model.

I’m So Fired

Uh oh. Job center!

I dropped A2′s (that’s one of my bosses) new iPad 2 on the ground while testing an app on it, and cracked the screen in a corner.

A1 (the older brother, and big boss) was shockingly gleeful about it. (Apparently A2 is as clumsy as me, and has been so since he was young).

I was horrified and terrified at the same time. Large numbers of what this could cost floated in front of my eyes.

I started to furiously twirl my hair in anxiety.

They were both nice about it and didn’t shout, (A2 swore under his breath and vented his rage at his phone company instead, since they didn’t provide him with insurance) so I feel dreadful, and guilt ridden.

Praise be to the internet. It saved my conscience from gnawing at itself.

I managed to find a place that will replace the screen and back case for a pretty reasonable amount (less than the cost of a new iPad 2, and less than the time I burnt the kitchen exhaust and had to fork out £350 to replace it so I am actually relieved.)

If A2 can’t get his phone company to fork up I’ll send it off. They cab fix it in under 48 hours and post it back.

Yay. (Imagine that ‘yay’ said in the doleful accents of one attending a funeral)

I’d better not buy myself anything for a little while. I was contemplating getting an iPhone but knowing my wretched talent for dropping things, thats just another route to Brokenville via Doh! town

The week before I accidentally forwarded an email to a big client with some details my boss didn’t want a client to have. (Which they now have thanks to me. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.)

The week before that I got chewed out by the client for a site going on live without search engines being blocked. (FUCK!!)

Then the client belatedly realised that the content on the servers was accessible if you knew the exact link (Stress on the word ‘exact’), and flipped out because

“Hackers could potentially steal it and post all the content online!!”

(It’s been on there for a year and no one stole anything, so slight over-reaction but whatever, it was my mistake.)

So it’s been a fairly error ridden 3 weeks. I wonder if I’ll get fired.

I’ve been pretty good until now, but these seem like enormous, weighty crimes. (Even though A1 is not remotely concerned with the iPad droppage)

And then there was this other big mistake when I was in the office, and I was thinking about something on a project and I just turned my computer off, left the office and went home. I didn’t turn the lights off, and I left the door wide open.

I guess I forgot I was the only one in the office.

I have these absent minded turns now and then. (It was one of those that got my kitchen burned. Dangerous they are.)

The security guard scolded me the next morning. He had to come in and turn the lights off and shut the door (couldn’t lock it)

He’s my friend now. We had a nice chat at lunch. He’ll be visiting Delhi over Christmas. He visits Bombay often he tells me. He likes Juhu.

This photo below cheers me up.

The Munt sent it to me.

Don't you love the seed tears? And don't miss the pubic hair. Nice craft work I must say.

Happy Halloween!!

Work Update: High-Tech

Airstreams crossing on Upper St. at twilight

One of the bosses saw me ripping a song from YouTube the other day.

He had no idea you could even do that or that there were sites that did that for you.

It blew his mind.

I found this highly entertaining.

A2 is trying to sort out his iTunes manually, deleting song by song.

He has some 60 GB of music that he is painstakingly going through one by one.

Then he writes the names of the songs down on a piece of paper so he can later go back and delete them.

It’s insane system combining high-tech and low-tech.

I told him writing on paper was,

“like seriously, so over man.”

Just as I walk through the flat.

Work Update: The Intern

Summer Sky, Near the Tesco in Soho Square.

I’m trying to cultivate more patience with the new intern. I rarely have patience with interns.

I don’t know why, considering I was an intern only a little while ago and a fairly duff one at that I’m sure.

During the first few months of my first job, my boss yelled at me a lot for getting things wrong. He even made me cry once (I cread privately of course. You can’t be bawling in an office. So not done.)

My job entailed setting up an email newsletter that got sent to 25,000 people. I knew NOTHING about html, newsletters, coding or designing for web before I started working there. At one point he was essentially re-doing everything I had spent an age on. He was a little controlling but still, that’s never a good sign.

I had months of email related paranoia – I’d be checking my email constantly worrying that an irate email would suddenly pop up scolding me for some hideous gaff I’d made. Mornings and late night were especially nerve-racking.

In the beginning sometimes my code would be dodgy, links would be wrong, I’d schedule something to go live at the wrong time and then I’d get furious emails at all sorts of hours along the lines of

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???? FIX IT! FIX IT NOW!!!”

So this new intern is a recently graduated B.A. art student who’s very inexperienced and therefore needs a lot of hand holding. This means a lot of corrections, multiple notes back and forth, double checking everything and general frustration all around.

I can now sympathize with my first boss yelling at me. I must have been a really, really annoying intern. I’m glad they didn’t sack me, because I eventually shaped up (thank god!).

I do feel guilty that I’m so intolerant of someone who I was exactly like a little while ago.

Additionally I have a tendency to rush instructions and/or explanations, which means generally they come out entirely garbled.

So even though it’s my fault for being unclear, I then I feel quite irritated by the utterly blank expression on the interns face.

Can’t the intern just pretend to understand what I’m saying???

Some facial expression of some kind??

Is that so unreasonable?

Number 2.

My Hiding Hole

There are 3 loos on the top floor of where I work.

I like to sit in there for a while as a kind of time out, also to prevent myself from going outside and smoking.

Sometimes I sit there so long that the light which is movement sensitive, turns itself off.

I have to wave my arms rapidly to turn it back on again or sit in the dark.

However the tiny pleasure of sitting in the loo is being ruined by a couple of things.

1. Lack of ventilation. Those loos really stink man. Especially in the morning when some unknown man/woman has a poo.

2. Someone broke the seat in the middle loo leaving only 2 usable toilets which means there is a que. The que kills my desire to sit in the loo instead of standing outside and smoking too much.

3.  Daily usage of these 3 loos and made me realise that some men are incapable of peeing like normal hygienic humans. Sometimes the loos are completely unusable because some filthy fuck has pissed all over the toilet seat and probably down his pants.

What is it with men and toilets bowls? Are they incapable of aiming? It’s a huge ceramic bowl, they have a movable flesh-hose and a pair of hands. How hard can it possibly be to hit the target accurately??

Men and women should never have to pee in the same place. I’m thinking of writing a strongly worded complaint about the unhealthy amount of urine around the first floor loo seats.

Yuck.

Work Update

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I’ve accidentally on purpose stopped paying for the hosting package for my website. (Streamline.net)

They’ve sent me 2 emails. One suspending my account, the other telling me my website will shortly be booted off.

Pffft like whateveas. You don’t scare me you fucking crooks.

I had a big fight with them 2 years ago when I found out they had doubled my yearly cost while at the same time inviting new customers to join with some seriously dirt cheap 2 year rate. I was furious.

So I called them up and yelled about how they didn’t give a shit about their existing customers and asked them if they were just going to screw me over.

They said yes.

It was too much trouble to move, and I couldn’t cancel payment.

But NOW I will. Assholes.

My website is flash anyway. I like it but flash is a pain to manually update. It hasn’t been updated in about a year now.

I prefer my wordpress blog, although it’s far from ideal. Sigh. What to do? I need a good free, content manageable website template. So far Behance has probably been the best.

Went to a client meeting and even though it was pretty warm I couldn’t take off my coat because my sweater had a hole smack bang in the middle over my right breast. That kind of thing never leaves a good impression.

I’ve been getting various emails at work spelling my name wrong. Not from people emailing the first time but from people who I’ve emailed back and forth repeatedly

The app developer called Jorma, who is pissing me off no end, with his shoddy coding and inattention to detail keeps sending me emails titled: ‘Jamine’ or ‘Janie’ or ‘Janice’ or ‘Jamie’

Instead of telling any of these people to spell my name right, I rather passive-aggressively started responding to their emails with their names spelt wrong, trying as far as possible to make it look accidental but simultaneously using the letters they got wrong in my name to misspell their name.

You get me?

So in response to L. Harry’s email calling me ‘Jamie’, I began his email with:

“Dear L. Hami…”

While an email to the app developer Jorma (who called me ‘Janice’) was:

“Dear Jorna,

Thank you for your shoddy email, your worthless code and your frankly rotten work ethic.

Please fucking spell my name right you cunt.

Kind Regards,
Janine”

I only wish I could be so forthright. The only part of the correspondence above that is true is the opening and closer.

I don’t know if it worked or if they noticed but I enjoyed making a subtle point (well in my own brain anyway.)

This developer has been inconsistent, communicated poorly, skiving constantly and refused to work from the London office. He has also missed every single deadline set.

The boss had to tell him to pull it together man, stop crying (he actually cried) and just finish this project.

Uphill work.

Sweet

My boss came back after lunch from a client meeting and gave me a sweet that this Cali drug lord client gave him.

It’s part of his new trial product range of items made with weed.

I have low expectations about the performance of these kinds of products.

I once bought a bag of ‘natural’ grass from Camdem and it was just a bag of junk. It didn’t work and tasted terrible.

So I ate the sweet on the way home in the tube.

Nice, kind of gingery, mentholic. (If there is such a word as ‘mentholic’. Spellchecker doesn’t believe there is)

I got off the bus and promptly texted by boss to say officially that although it was tasty, I found that the sweets were not ‘medical’ in the slightest.

As soon as I sent the text I realised I was pretty darn mellow.

I love my boss.