Posts filed under 'Rants'
I’m not afraid of a lot of things. Celery. Heights. That’s about it. But more than either of them I’m afraid of phones. More precisely I hate phone conversations.
Maybe it’s the inability to see the other person’s gestures and facial expressions, but I find it incredibly uncomfortable to talk to somebody on the phone. I stumble over my words, I start sweating and eventually my throat goes dry and I have to get rid of the other person as quickly as possible.
It’s not just strangers, I’m the same with my wife, my mother, anybody. I rely on email and text messaging for 90% of my contact with the outside world. Email is great. Not only can you take time to think about what it is you want to say, but you have a paper trail that is a permanent record of the conversation. You can send images, plans and embellish descriptions. I find I can be myself in written conversation and not the bumbling mess people come across if they call me.
Not everyone agrees with this. The worst culprits are the people who reply to an email with a phone call. Why do people do this?! Surely it’s much easier to answer my question or respond by just clicking reply and typing what you want to say? If I wanted a phone conversation I would have called you!! Yes, you can ask and answer lots of questions very quickly over the phone, but is it really worth the hatred I now feel towards you for ruining my day by making me speak to your disembodied voice? Surely not.
September 20th, 2006
It’s been coming for a long while, but today it finally hit me. I hate what I do for a living. I know as jobs go sitting at a computer drawing pictures sounds like an easy life, but behind the creative fa�ade I am essentially a lacky. Yes, I get to flex my creative muscles and design beautiful things that people pay for, but the journey to that finished thing is never as easy as it should be
Clients. They are the problem. As professions go, graphic design has to be one of the least respected.
People don’t go to their doctor to be cured and end up telling them they know better and that they don’t have cancer, they actually have a bit of a cold and make them prescribe some Lemsip Max.
People don’t take their car to Kwik Fit and proceed to tell the mechanic exactly what is wrong and how to fix it.
So why do my clients think they know as much or more than I do about something I spent four years studying and ten years practising? It’s a constant uphill struggle to gain any small bit of satisfaction from a project, or to have just one week where a client doesn’t get shirty about the fact that ink takes time to dry and thereby ruin your day.
Don’t get me wrong. This particular employer I am with now is great when put up against some of the other places I have worked, but the job itself is starting to affect my ability to enjoy my life and the time is coming when I need to do something about it.
My ‘other’ profession gives me the freedom to produce the kind of work I want to produce. The clients send me emails telling me how fantastic my work is. I don’t have to sit in a room filled with the ringing of phones for five days a week. Job satisfaction. And I can earn the same amount of mortgage repayment, if not more!
I am about to snap. Watch this space.
September 13th, 2006
So, tonight I spend the first night in my marital bed without my marital wife since our marital happening three months ago, as she’s off to visit her parents (and steal their tile-cutter).
From an early age I enjoyed spending time on my own, but the older I get the more I find I get a bit lost when left to my own devices. I procrastinate on a grand scale, eat badly, sink into a hole on the sofa in front of MTV2 and shirk as many of my tasks as possible. I have lots to do. Weddings to edit, albums to design, filing, tidying, DIY, but will I have acheived anything noteworthy come her return towards the end of the week? Only time will tell.
Drinks with ex-University friends tomorrow night will put a serious dent in my ability to succeed. The last one ended with me helping home a serious casualty, turning a blind eye to her projectile-vomiting from the cab window in the middle of Whitehall. Let’s hope I feel better than I did on Saturday morning after my first drinks with new work.
Mental note: don’t drink 6 pints of Guinness on an empty stomach after a beer-free period of a month or more.
August 7th, 2006
Tonight at a wedding (as a guest for once) I was faced with this comment from a very drunk guy from Berwick I’ve just met for the first time, leaning across at me with brandy swilling around his glass, eyes half-closed. I, meanwhile, was sobriety personified as designated driver and using the opportunity to bulk up the folio.
Do I look like a man that likes to party? I seriously doubt it. Even in it’s loosest sense, partying is something I’ve always steered clear of. Firstly, I don’t like dancing, and partying and dancing seem to go hand in hand. Partying in the sense that he meant (dropping some pills, snorting a line and no doubt dancing like a tit to atrocious music in a dingy shithole of a nightclub) is something I’d give my right arm, leg and ear to avoid. Don’t get me wrong, I like a drink, but in the comfort of a cosy pub, with some good conversation, and preferably a bag of crisps to pick at.
Maybe I’m old at heart, or maybe I’m just no fun, but I’m sure it’s apparent upon meeting/seeing me. I’m going to excuse this guy because he was obviously one more sip of VSOP from serious alcohol poisoning. Party on.
August 5th, 2006
It’s been 5 months since my last post. Since then I have got a new Mac, bought an expensive suit, become a married man, visited Iceland again, destroyed my Sony phone by sitting on it, got a new Motorola phone, changed my job, turned 31, changed job again, got hooked on yet another series of Big Brother, fitted a bath and made fresh steps towards The Plan.
The blog had to come off my site because I feared it may hinder my job-hunting. It contains some quite forthright opinions on such matters as posters in train stations and I couldn’t let these, or my droolings over the band Clutch, stop me escaping ‘the Carnaby Street job’. Things got so bad that I just quit the job anyway thinking I could wander into a life of freelance-plenty. I would only have to work 2 weeks of the year to earn 4 times the average UK salary. I could stagger in and out of various companies without a care in the world counting the minutes to my next holiday.
Of course what actually happened was that I ended up with no money after a week of no work and took the first crappy full-time position I was offered. This was well-paid, but involved working in a proper office, in a proper office block, with lots of people who thought dressing down for Friday was wearing a jumper over their shirt and tie. It couldn’t last. Luckily I was saved from corporate hell by Or Media, a little company in Covent Garden. Four weeks in and it feels like home.
Home on the other hand feels like some sort of external storage area for Screwfix.com. Intent on escaping from the ‘Well and our increasingly infuriating noisy neighbours, we have begun a redevelopment that we should have started three years ago when we moved here.
Sevenoaks is calling.
August 2nd, 2006
Look what I saw at London Bridge the other night:
‘Oh God, he’s off on one about those banker types again’ I hear you say. Well yes, but look closer. There has been a change for 2006. Two of them (James and Jamie) have got new photos!!!
The exact same “melt your puny peasant body with my all-powerful gaze” pose, but slight changes to their hair. As if they hadn’t wasted enough money with the first posters!!!! If anything the new shots make them look even more ridiculous. It’s the last time I mention them, I promise.
[fingers crossed]
February 3rd, 2006
Nothing brings home the depressing feeling of going back to the day job after the Christmas holidays as much as a bare, dead tree left out with the rubbish.
I guess it’s more noticeable in the very centre of London as there isn’t really anywhere to hide them. Recycling doesn’t really exist in Soho. The binmen from Westminster Council come every night and clear the streets of rubbish bags and cardboard boxes, but it all goes in the back of the same truck. So no shredding facilities on Regent Street.
Still, just under 354 days to go.
January 5th, 2006
Not sure where December disappeared to. I was doing so well, but forces of work, holidays and the build-up to Christmas worked against me, and the blog was the first thing to suffer.
But 2006 will be different. Not just because I will be writing here more regularly, but I will also be working harder toward The Plan, keeping in better touch with friends, making more of an effort at home and being all that I can be. 2005 seemed to be about making one step forward and having to take two steps back. I procrastinated and slacked off on a grand scale, and it makes me mad to think that I have wasted any time that I could have spent achieving my goals. And the only way to avoid it happening again is to attack everything full-on.
This began with cooking for myself, Jess and five friends last night. I can’t remember the last time I cooked a proper meal at home. Publicly, I blame the small kitchen we have been afflicted with, but I know that the main reason is my attitude. So I grabbed the bull by the horns and got stuck into a five course meal. There was too much carrot puree, and the beef was a bit well done, but I enjoyed it and it gave me some sense of achievement.
Thanks to Kev for the pic.
In 104 days I’ll be a married man, and by then I want to be able to stand up in front of my wife, family and friends and not feel in any way that I’m letting myself or these people down.
January 1st, 2006
I’ve become a little obsessed. With a poster. It’s a poster that seems to be everywhere. I see it at the train station. I see it on bus stops. I see it as I’m driving into the Rotherhithe tunnel. I see it in my sleep. It’s taking over my life. Here it is:
Unremarkable you may say. That’s what I thought at first. But now I have noticed it I can’t stop staring into the eyes of the three men on it. They have icy stares. Stares that say ‘I’m wearing a suit and I am an important part of your life. You will do as I say.’ And I have become obsessed with the details of the poster, which suggest the opposite is true.
These people have nothing to do with me. A London-wide advertising campaign has been created to advertise that James Ridgewell, Guy de Blonay and Jamie Allsopp have got themselves jobs at New Star. Good for them! What’s New Star? What do they do? What is a UK Special Situations Fund? I’m sure there are people in London who have to deal with these guys on a regular basis, or to whom their appointment is big news, but can they really be so important that a poster has to be placed at 100 yard intervals across the whole of London?
Now I know I’m not the greatest looking guy on earth, but who thought that these three were poster material? Guy looks like he’s in pain, Jamie has a hairstyle like something from American Psycho and James just looks plain evil. Never has the stereotypical perception of suit-wearing, finance-dealing, City-located kind been rendered so successfully, and on such a grand scale, before.
I hate them even though I’ve never met them! I hate them, and everything they do, and everything they stand for. And I hate the people that wasted endless tens of thousands of pounds putting their faces everywhere even more. It’s an unhealthy obsession. And the more I hate them the more they stare at me!
November 17th, 2005
Not having a great week, so I’m afraid it’s another ranting entry.
I think it’s a sign of the level of ignorance and stupidity becoming the norm in this country that despite endless complaining from anybody you come into contact with, people still think it’s acceptable to have their music broadcast around public transport via their shitty, little, tinny earphones. Apart from being intensely annoying to all in earshot, it should also be embarrassing to the culprits as more often than not their choice of tunes is utter garbage. I boarded the very crowded train this morning intent on shutting out the fact that I was pressed against some of the scariest folk in SE London, in very unnatural heat and with a 97.8% likelihood of delays occurring.
I soon realised this was unlikely to happen as the peace and quiet of the 07:56 from Hayes was shattered by ‘tsk tsk tsk tsk’ from someone’s mobile phone earphones. This was cue for someone else to whack up their volume, possibly but unexcusably to drown out the first guy. Then on gets another at the next stop! Obviously, no one says anything. Just a few evil looks which are met with continued ignorance. I would have mentioned it to the one nearest me (who was also playing the loudest and shittest music), but after my run-in last Friday I decided to continue trying to block them out. Which just got me more riled.
At this point I noticed the space hoggers. The people who think that reading a paper (usually Metro) gives them the God-given right to extra space in the crush, usually enough space for 2 or 3 people. Angry looks and huffing and puffing are exchanged when the space-hogger’s paper is jostled, despite the jostler having to stand on one leg and rest their head in someone’s armpit for lack of room.
I could go on. So I will. I am yet to mention (until now) the ringtones. You’d think after all the piss-taking in the media and the general vibe in society at large that annoying and silly ringtones are the domain of 12-year-olds and wankers, that people would steer clear and just have their phone ring. Or vibrate. Or anything. Oh no. Every morning some otherwise normal looking commuter on their way to work has to scrabble around desperately to retrieve their phone which has turned into a audio version of one of those ‘I’m with stupid’ t-shirts. I guess the only explanation for the proliferation of the Jamster ads on TV is that people actually think Crazy Frog is good and spend a good chunk of their disposable income on this shit. Which really worries me.
What will I whinge about tomorrow? Who knows… Have you seen the state of this year’s Carnaby Street Christmas lights?
November 10th, 2005
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