Thursday 7 February 2008

Mrs Clarke's office, how may I help?

I appear to have developed a new role in life as the personal secretary of Mrs Clarke. Today I took a returned call after Mrs Clarke left a message on some company's answerphone, and dealt with her delivery company. This has been going on for two weeks, Mrs Clarke gets a LOT of phone calls and deliveries. She also saves or has a mortgage with Northern Rock.

Trouble is, I have no freakin' CLUE who Mrs Clarke is.

I am assuming she's a dimwit of the highest order due to her not only getting her own number wrong (forgivable, especially if BT are involved) but you'd think after TWO WEEKS she'd have a) clicked that no-one ever returns her calls and b) that SOMEONE in her personal circle would have mentioned it to her.

Its getting mildly irritating. Especially as I work from home and get her blinkin phone calls all day long.

But other than that life is.... tentatively OK. After a couple of bitch-from-hell PMT days this week I appear to be back to what passes as normality in my quirky little world. Work is happening. Its mainly counting beads and listing them so deadly dull, but it is getting done and I'm staying motivated by keeping up my research on magazine submissions. I figure, if I JUST manage to get everything outstanding listed then all I'll have to do work-wise is restocks and packing so I'll be able to spend a lot more time working on designed-for-publication jewellery, and will have the time to keep it all organised and efficient - there'd be nothing worse than having no clue what had been submitted to where and what was free to be submitted etc. Well there are plenty of worse things, but within the confines of my current ambitions its pretty bad!

I did have on my list for February 'hunt down submission guidelines for all relevant magazines' however the lovely Cyndi from jewelleryandbeading.com blogged the entire list this morning, missing off only Bead Magazine which is a UK publication and therefore understandable (I also already have their submission guidelines bookmarked).

So I'm getting quite excited. I'm looking forward to the day I can come on here and say 'one of my necklaces is going to be in xxx magazine!' with happy bounciness and major overexcitement. I don't of course, consider that I'll spend a lifetime being perpetually turned down. I'm too confident/arrogant for that and honestly, what's the point of submitting if you expect to fail? Plus I know I'm good at design (it surprises me that some people can't do it, it's the easiest thing in the world) and if I'm actually trying my writing is OK as well (for years I wanted to be a journalist - I seriously kicked ass in GCSE and A Level English with 90%+ overall scores... then went and did a degree in mainy IT. How bizarre... all I can say is that I was 18, had just discovered the very new Internet (as far as public use went) and I was TOTALLY overwhelmed and enthused by the possibilities this geeky little toy offered the world. Turns out I was right ;-). Saying that for years before that I wanted to be a vet. And Geoff still wants to be an astronaut...

So thats how I'm staying motivated amidst millions of uncounted beads. Maybe not millions. But I'd say certainly in excess of a couple of hundred thousand.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah Steph! I do know about Bead Magazine, but I've got a separate review of it coming in the future, hopefully after I've gotten to see a copy. Then I'll add it to the original list. Email me with your impressions of it if you can :-)

cyndi@b5media.com