Queue. So what.

Have you noticed how wherever you go now, queues have stopped being this really sodding annoying thing you just have to do? And all you can do is stare at what other people are buying or stare at the magazines you vow never to buy because you just can’t be seen getting one? But by the time you get to the front you are so bored, you lose any sense of shame or embarrassment and end up buying one!

Last queue I was in I think I was reading my twitter updates, guy in front of me browsing music on his iPod, some others behind playing games, there goes the magic of queuing with nothing to do. Will life ever be the same?

Forethought

I keep listening to DJ Shadow and that’s not because I’m stuck in the past or anything, I just like the guy. Insight, foresight, moresight. Insight, foresight, moresight. I also got a very nice email from someone today in the wee hours of the morning so my guess is they’re on a very different time zone but nevertheless – they made a comment on my remark about people: I try to think they’re genuinely nice. The reply was ‘people are not genuinely nice because we’re not taught to be genuine’. And hm, hold on a second…

For a very long while, when life was seamingly carefree and there were no bills to pay or I just didn’t have to face some random things the world threw at me, worrying about people’s hidden agendas was the last thing on my mind. Before she died, my mum told me she never really had any ‘friends’ because one way or another, they were all stab-stab from behind or were trying to use whoever was in the way so they could climb on some sort of corporate career ladder. Which was her curse I suppose, but she always said, like Morrisey, people hate it when their friends become successful. And I always thought she was right, without even questioning it. People were not being genuine because indeed, their work made them that way. 

For a while though I went through a more critical phase, when school was teaching us to question the things we know now and re-evaluate what we’re being taught or spoonfed, depending on the case. That’s when I thought I don’t really know what people are like – so began a ‘yes’ to everyone phase, a whole deal of generosity and living your life by that idea that you “give a little love and it all comes back to you”. This Danish guy says ’share your shit’ so pardon my language (or well his), I tried the sharing thing. It did not work out very well as you’d have to become a bit selective with whom you shared your..um, stuff with. You live and you learn, saying yes to everyone eventually divided the people I knew into two camps: the camp that thought I was a subservient person who just likes to please everyone, although most of it was effortless and I never said ‘yes’ to things and projects I couldn’t embark on, only to later strain myself. And then there was the ‘we need more people like you’ camp. Later on, a third group emerged, that said ‘well all the smart people I know aren’t sharing their info and they’re usually the quiet ones that don’t keep blogs or talk at every conference.’ 

I thought, good for them, but I’m not in a position to sit in my corner and be quiet, nor am I in a position to talk about things I’ve not yet experienced or know. Adland suit, he knows. He’s already a bit jaded in his fond remembrance of times past when he was a wee suit. Northern, he also knows his stuff. Everone else. But they’re already in that position where they don’t really care whether someone disagrees with them on minor things. If I disagree, I’d better have a very good argument for why. But I haven’t seen enough. This is where the ‘yes man’ part comes in: at some point, you have to say yes to some people and push yourself a bit harder I think. 

If  forethought was the only thing that discriminated humans from other things, and measured as present pain divided by future pleasure multiplied by the interval between them, then it’s probably your most valuable ability. Forethought backed by knowledge and experience – even more so. I wish I had that experience. Or knowledge. Sometimes I’m not even sure where to start.

Coming back to the original idea. Forethought would actually help us reduce our hedonic instincts to do whatever’s good for us, but not for others. Doing it well would maximise the balance of pleasure minus pain by thinking of the time needed to ‘get there’. Wouldn’t we become more genuine, seeing the pickle we’re all in right now?

Dear Royal Mail…You Smell

nd I mean every word of it. Actual smell. I’m not one to whine about random shitty things happening in my life because I kind of expect things to go wrong at some point, but not this horribly wrong. So it might as well go down in the history of this blog at least.

Amazon order is meant to come my way, contents worth about £200. Address is wrong and package or delivery notice (depending on how big it is) will probably go to Flat 1 instead of Flat 7. Panic. Who lives at flat 1? Does anyone even live there? I knew some of the places in the building were for sale so I just left a friendly note through the door asking them to put anything through mine in case it gets there before I manage to do anything else.

Amazon says I should go to the ‘nearest post office’ and try to intercept it on the way and collect it from there without a delivery notice and I agreed that it was the sensible thing to do.

Proceeded to post office at few minutes to nine the morning Amazon said the order would be placed and not even dispatched. Shock and horror at the local post office: some obvious Indian British (let’s say) dude walks out in tracksuit bottoms, a jumper and slippers to open the post office. Goes back inside, is sat comfortably in his chair and takes the first order from someone. The place smells of alcohol and piss and I kid no one when I say that. It was as if some homeless bum had taken shelter in there for a lot of nights in a row and drowned in a sea of his own piss, then moved out because not even he could stand the odour.

I tell the employee that the place stinks. Nevermind the fact that you came to greet me as if you had just got out of bed and can’t even be arsed to wear something that resembles a Royal Mail uniform. I suspect that next you’ll be having your feet in warm water or something, because it’s comfortable working like that. Explaining the problem to the guy, he thinks I’m talking about mail redirection. Now I’ve been speaking English ever since I could say “mum” and while I know my vocabulary is lacking if I want to have a conversation for aesthetic purposes I may be at a loss but this is the post office. Getting the “I want to pick up a package because the address on the delivery notice is wrong” doesn’t need a lot of English. How he got to mail redirection is a mystery. I told him it’s a one-off thing, not all my mail. The look on his face says I pissed him off or it’s my fault he had to wake up and he tells me to go to the sorting office. I ask where the office is and he says “Northern Street”. I said there’s no post office on Northern Street. Because there is no Northern Street. He says it’s in the city. I already knew what he meant but my blood was slowly boiling so I just left, a bit in disbelief that I have to go all the way there. The Northern Quarter it was then. Oldham Street. 

Fast forwarding through two people who told me very politely that people get sent to their office because employees want to get rid of customers, asking them for advice, them telling me they only deliver to M1, M2 and M3 in Manchester (Not M16 where I live), giving me the number of the manager from my local post office and leaving with a somewhat sense of achievement. Even though, eh, not really. So they send me back from where I started but give me  the alt route of speaking to a manager. Somehow I feared the guy I saw was the incompetent manager. Fast forward again, I hear the same story – No, I bet the sorting office lied to you. B*tch please. You’re the post, not 3-year olds in nursery school. Well he said this. No, he said that. No, he lied.

Gave up on it for the day and filed a complaint to the post saying it’s not very nice and I want to know who’s telling the truth and most of all, why does the manager greet me in slippers and a tracksuit bottom at 9AM?!

 

Me (short version):

“[...] expecting package from Amazon.com [...] address wrong, as “Flat 1″ instead of “Flat 7″ [...] contacted Amazon [...] [...] go to the nearest post office [...] if neighbours ignore the note I put through their door [...] collect straight from the post office instead.

(story goes here + mention of employee in slippers)

Now I don’t know where the truth lies [...] how to get this sorted [...]suspect  employee at local branch has not understood [...] despite having explained thoroughly [...] sorting office was very helpful (*tyvm*) [...] believe them when they say it does not stay with them, but gets dispatched to the branch nearest to the post code.”

Very bland reply:

“If your item has a visible Return Address on the outside of the packaging,
we will of course return it to you straight away.  If a return address is
not visible, it will be sent to our Returns Centre for processing, which
could take several weeks to complete.  This is due to the high number of
undeliverable items they receive on a daily basis.

Once it reaches the front of the queue, your item will be opened in order
to find a return address.  If we find one, your item will then be resealed
and returned to that address.  If no address is present though, your item
will either be held pending an enquiry or destroyed.  This is very much
dependant on the nature and value of the contents.”

…Excuse me, what? Thanks for copy pasting the answer from the big book of answers but that’s not what I need. You’d think people read your complaints and not just do the ctrl+f to find keywords and then paste the answes. Well, seems they do. Nothing about the guy in slippers and office smelling of piss. Perfectly fine.

So I gave up on all this and said that if it doesn’t arrive by Monday (yesterday) I’m going there again. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, etc. 

On Sunday, neighbour puts package through my door, together with a delivery notice from Royal Mail that said the package was too big to fit and you had to collect it from a post office. So they just gave it to anyone without even asking for an ID from them? Good thing it actually reached me in the end but seriously, if you don’t have nice neighbours you’re a bit screwed.

Impermanence

I played around with a project discovered a long time ago but never had time for. Poladroid can either bring back sweet memories of the cameras or make you poke fun at something you know was a cool toy to own but had disappeared by the time you were old enough to want one. Like me. I never had one but I’m looking at a photo of my dad taken with a Polaroid and some text written underneath it. 90s geotagging as we say – “South Bend, USA” . There’s something about this photo that I can’t put my finger on; it tells a story of something that happened before I was born I think – and it’s one of the few things that survived several moves.

When you put a picture into poladroid, it takes a while to process and then you have to wait for it to ‘dry’. I think it’s great – I only grew up taking instant pictures that needed no time to dry. In fact, the pictures I took were always ready in an instant, be it prints or anything else. Almost instant transfer via USB and all that. 

Nothing I ever made, photo-wise, has any permanence, unless I printed it and put it into an album. Or uploaded it on the internet. There’s nothing to ‘have and to hold’ but even so, I realise, I show photos to people and relatives on my phone or laptop all the time. Impromptu meeting with a neighbour after the high school prom leads to a chat about what my dress looked like. Oh, but I can show you in a second, let me take out my phone. Hm. It adds some fun but it takes away the ‘come over to my place for a cup of tea and I’ll show you’.

It brings me to some thoughts I read this week. Paul Isakson writes about being stuck in the ‘now’, or as he describes it:

“… [becoming] caught up in the now that we’re losing valuable lessons from the past and forgetting the importance of having a vision to work towards in the future.”

There’s also a very truthful article in the New York Times (you need to be registered) on how we ‘grow up’ on Facebook:

“…that number [7 million 35-54 age group] is dwarfed by the nearly 25 million users under 25. That gives me pause. They can’t be doing what we’re doing, right? What do they have to look back on?

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?”

And then back to these “polaroid” photos. When you knew that there would be palpable evidence of a photo and it disappeared the second you threw it away or burnt it, unlike today, you’d have a clear conscience. No photo, no proof. It was also a downside in case you wanted to keep it – that was the only copy. In the world. No other!

Now you might press a delete button or have a complete wipe of your hard drive but once posted on the internet, the photo will most likely be there forever. Embarrassing or not. Internet archive will have recorded it or someone will have picked it up – your digital trail might be back to haunt you one day. You no longer ‘reinvent’ yourself if you ask me, you only adapt. You trade freedom of thought or audience (see people who got fired because of their updates). You trade freedom of putting whatever you want on the internet for having a job in the ‘real world’. Such is life. There is no running away from internet proof. But I never really grew up to have the luxury of getting away with people not seeing certain things.

Shortlisted

We made an ad a while ago. It was shortlisted by Reading Room’s creative director. We were very pleased. Didn’t win the big prize but feels like we have anyway. From a digital agency’s perspective I wasn’t quite expecting to win but it was a very nice surprise

Useless Knowledge

I’m feeling tired and a bit worn out – perhaps a sign that I do need a holiday to just sit and ponder, read a few books and do nothing. I found myself reading more Bertrand Russell, whom I had abandoned since ‘Sceptical Essays’ a while ago. I’ve been less of a sceptic in the past few months and tried to convince myself people are genuinely nice and don’t have a hidden agenda. I was wrong a couple of times but at least it didn’t feel so bad. Simply by no being interested enough I probably let go of it a lot easier – and by easier I mean a one hour rant. If that sounds a bit freakish, apologies, there are far worse cases than mine.

So Russell’s making my bus rides more pleasant now with ‘In Praise of Idleness and other essays’ – what I wanted to share was this quote from his ‘Useless Knowledge’ essay: It’s very unlike me to post several entries only with pictures or text and no contribution of my own or any sign of thinking but I’ll make up for that soon-ish.

“Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisaka introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word “apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word “precocious” because the apricot ripens early; and that the A as the beginning was added by mistake , owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.”

I love this feeling.

Is This Life?

The AdAge article about Coca Cola’s facebook fan page (where they say it wasn’t built by them initially and all that) has these interesting numbers:

I’m thinking Facebook will have had a drop in popularity by now with the latest update, but nevertheless. Portrait of today’s man/woman: believes in Barack Obama, shoves a pizza in the oven when home from work, eats Nutella to cure that sugar craving, watches Man United, gets overjoyed by Kinder eggs because they remind them of childhood, wastes time on Facebook and MSN and cries during Monsters Inc.

Funny what connects people.

Disrupted Their Poster

So I had a poster to do for uni. Big deal, I know.

Did it on my own because I had no time to meet up with the people I was meant to do it with. They took it very personally when I preferred the company of other work over theirs as if we’re all in The Apprentice and Alan Sugar is going to give us a huge bollocking if we ‘can’t deal with team members’. So, my way or the highway when doing work solo, the best part was having all the time in the world to read it, read it again, read it slow, read it fast and abandon it for a few days. What the others didn’t get was that you have to give it at least 24hrs to let the thoughts sediment so in a way, working on my own did help.

This IS a perfect circle

Human resources, the dreadful area that the poster had to cover, meant a case study and a lot of thought put into it. Which is not really my thing as with human resources combined with academic work you have to justify a lot of your actions and quote Armstrong somewhere in the process (only generalising, you see) to create a sound piece of work. I didn’t have any Armstrong textbook but I had everything else available and after a while no framework or model sodding took my fancy sadly. I went with my first, gut reaction and wondered if I was right.

50:50 was over, there was no audience so I had to call a friend for that one and well, dad was just there. It struck me after a day or so that his company is pretty much in the same pickle. ‘What would Don Draper do?’ didn’t save me as it wasn’t advertising related so instead wondered what dad would do in the same position. Why I put so much thought into sending a simple ‘dad I need help’ email I don’t know, not like I’m scared of him or he’ll think I’m not capable myself, but my initial thought was he wouldn’t have time. Anyway, after a couple of days he emails me his decisions and while on the phone with him he’s all ‘you know, I’m glad you sent me that because I enjoyed it’ – whereas I thought it’d be like ‘dad please help me with homework’ – ‘not now, kid’ (not that he ever said that, but I know people who do). His decisions were exactly the same as mine which enriched the relationship more than a ‘dad and daughter’ day out; I tend to think he’s pretty harsh with failure even if he’s reiterated that he’s not so bothered. What made me go through the horrors of trying to get everything perfect all the time, I don’t know but I’m trying to fix it.

So poster then, was a bit of a dilemma to me. It had to be “creative” and I hadn’t seen the others before so had no idea what I was competing against or what the standard was. So yellow paper (as you’d expect), black marker and scissors + glue to my best of knowledge. I figured they had seen about 300 posters already so it had to look interesting if not ‘wish I had done that’ creative (although it’s what I was aiming for). I’m not a design student although I wish I were sometimes so the idea was this:

And turned into this, save a few pictures and black marker on some areas like the outline, which was all a stream of text (not in its final form as they took it from me at the end and I didn’t get to take a picture of it):

The circles were meant to be cogs but I figured that was too obvious and I just went to bed instead, not worrying much about them. Presentation day followed. It went a lot better than I had hoped for, pressed by time to explain it in five minutes by myself. Five minutes didn’t do it justice but my grade now hangs on my tutor’s decision of whether it’s a 1st or 2:1 as I didn’t have time to explain all my theory to him verbally. Analysis was good and that’s all I know and plan to sleep with a clear conscience of having thought too much about crap (again). No vertical poster, no grids, no cheesy pictures, no black paper and a lot of people saying they wished they had done that. Trés bien, as the French would say.

Summing it up: four days, two of which were research, one wasting time looking at shoes, one putting it all together, 12 mugs of tea (5 green, 3 Yorkshire, 2 Earl Grey, 2 Assam), a mug of custard, two fruit salads, £6 worth of paper and pens, a £26 dress in between = poster. Life is great.

Having Fun @ SU

Today on one of the windows of the Student Union building:

English Things

There’s a very interesting set on flickr from an illustrator passionate about UK things. Looking through his list I realise I have a fair amount of “UK things” and I wonder how many the average person owns. We’re probably the easiest to persuade into buying ‘British’ or local, at least that’d be my guess.

At the time of writing  I own about 20 out of his 103 items but have consumed a lot more in the past, probably bringing the number to 50. Half sounds about right, doesn’t it?