Office of Wonder

One of the many problems with modern living is that many, myself included, must face a working life that takes place solely behind a desk in front of a PC monitor. A place which becomes our home from home. The spot where we spend more time than anywhere else each week, except for maybe our own beds.

But fortunately I am spared much of this modern drudgery, for my work place is unique. The Point at Paddington Basin is a building like no other, as described below in the architects very special design brief.

TFP were commissioned to design the fit-out and the brief focused on sharing of information. The core concept for this is a volcano. The lower ground floor is the 'magma chamber' of ideas, and the atrium the vertical focus of communication and activity, with ideas fountaining out into the wider world. This energy manifests itself on the outside by a ripple of colour up the centre of the entrance façade, culminating in a coloured glass sculpture on the top.

Some days I have so many ideas, I feel quite like throwing myself down the vertical focus of communication and activity

Good News

Due to some reorganisation of my department, that's all four of us, my work responsibilities are no longer certain defined tasks, I now am responsible for certains departments, all the ones that aren't clothing!!!

No more trying to pretend I know anything about fashion, no more struggling to come up with different outfit names for different shirt and tie combinations and no more giggling at outfit names I'm would never be allowed to call the plus size outfits (jumper-lumper, All-round style, etc).

Bad News

Non-clothing departments include beauty and cosmetics, and flowers. Anyone know what SPF 15 means?

News Story of the Day: Rabbit Killer!

Mistakes

Oh the horror. This week I was given an error list. There were over two hundred products on the M&S site with errors in their selling copy. Each with my name written next to it…

My jaw dropped, I was just about to prevent myself from peeing my pants as I logged the item numbers in to discover what mistakes I had made.

What I soon discovered, to my total relief, was that my name was attached to each because it was my responsibility to correct the mistakes in the item copy, not that I had made them all.

Then on further examination I discovered that many of these mistakes were words the spell-check didn’t understand like Steadycam or HD. Then there were lots of trademarked names that should to begin with a capital letter and lots of names that aren’t trademarked and shouldn’t.

After I went through all these, what remained were the genuine mistakes… not all of which were made by me.

Yes, out of the literally hundreds of items I’ve written selling copy for I’ve made a total of 6 mistakes or at least, 6 mistakes that were detected.

Either way, I can live with that.

I definitely didn't have anything to do with this...

Oh Crap

Because we had a lot of work to do at the beginning of the year, the woman I'm employed to work for (not my boss) is trying to justify the employment of extra staff for the copywriting team. To that end, we (me and the other copywriter) have to fill out a little form each day which states how many different bits of copy we've written.

This will end in one of two ways:

1: They will realise how excruciatingly long it takes to write copy and bring on new people.

2: They'll realise how much work I'm actually doing and administer a severe bollocking.

I wonder which it'll be?*

But whatever happens there are worse things out there. When I was making up product names earlier this year, I never dropped a clanger like this...

*2

Achoo

I’ve been sick for about three weeks now, and am finally virtually back to normal. I haven’t taken any sick days because, as part of my intricate contract (I work for Marks & Spencers, but I actually work for someone else), I only get statutory sick pay. So if I phone in sick and I automatically lose £90!

What I should’ve done is buy Vicks Cold Protection. It’s proven to prevent people from catching a cold. 77% of people tested said they didn’t catch a cold.

A whole 77%, that’s what? Three quarters of people almost. So if you buy said formula, you’ve still got a 1 in 4 chance of actually becoming ill.

And of course, that’s the only stable statistic in this equation. Just because you haven’t developed the symptoms of a cold doesn’t mean that it’s protected you from catching one. You might just have been fortunate and not been exposed, not everybody catches every virus or cold that does the rounds do they?

If only I’d taken Vick’s special brand of Mickey Mouse placebo, then maybe, just maybe, I might have slightly reduced my chances of becoming ill.

Slightly.

I bet it’s not cheap stuff either.