Breaking up is hard to do
Today, I told my boss I have decided to leave the company. I’ll most likely hand in my notice next week. It was a perfectly pleasant conversation. I said that my personal projects are beginning to be more demanding and full time work is no longer a viable option for me, unless I’m willing to spend yet another summer working 7 day weeks, which is not an experience I’d care to repeat after last time. I was sort of smirking to myself in my head remembering the recent Stuntdubl post about breaking up with bad clients. I didn’t mention the fact that this decision was a process that came about after my growing dissatisfaction of the direction the company has been going (i.e. from independently owned startup to corporate-owned “standard” company) drove me to go and interview at an agency and that it was only then, when I was offered the options of several interviews for jobs that were much better than mine that I decided I didn’t really want a full time job at all right now.
I was shocked to discover how much I was affected by the whole thing. I thought I would feel a lot more relieved but really I feel quite sad and not a little bit scared, as I have nothing lined up so far and am not going to be looking for a bit (and I am not very good with money). The way I reacted really reminded me of some break ups I’ve had when I knew things weren’t working and decided to get out before we started hating each other. I know it’s the right decision: I’ve been bored and depressed as of late and have been feeling grossly undervalued; I really need to go.
I’ve not even considered changing my mind, but it’s been a longish relationship and I don’t hate anyone enough there for this to be easy. That is the problem with amicable breakups.
Blogging, death threats and victim mentality
Before I go any further, I’d like to make it clear that up until today, I had no idea who Kathy Sierra was. I only found out she existed because a piece about her blog death threat thing made the Digg front page. The title made me think that she must have written some really provocative controversial stuff that pissed a lot of people off and made them want to kill her so I thought “hey, good on her”, but then I actually went and read the article and had a look at her blog and hey, I couldn’t see any controversial stuff at all. I also gather it wasn’t anything she’d written in particular that had made people pick on her. So to recap the story as I see it:
Woman has blog. Woman gets some offensive comments on blog from what seem to be a bunch of pimply 15 year olds trying to be “street” and “el33t”. Woman totally freaks out and in a fit of drama queen hysterics cancels public appearances and “suspends her blog in protest”. Other sad bloggers follow and one of them (who I’ve never heard of either, but then again, I only read very specific blogs and don’t really care about the “blogosphere” as a whole) has this to say about the matter (as quoted on the BBC website):
Robert Scoble, author of popular technology blog Scobleizer, condemned the campaign against her.
“It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in my stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man,” he said
The revolution will not SUCK
So I kept seeing the ads on the tube about the “information revolution” and was wondering what the whole thing was about. Being somewhat of a nerd (in hindsight) I thought maybe someone had it in for Telehouse or something. Then I saw one of the ads on a website and decided to click and see what the whole thing was about…
My god, how sucky is that? I mean, I know Matt Cutts already pointed out the problems with this campaign from a search point of view, but from an advertising point of you, it sucks even more.
You’d think this massive corporation was suddenly overrun by communists or something. First they ditched the posh butler (obvious symbol of the opression of free will) and now this.
Can you smell the reek of tries-too-hard? I can smell it from here! There’s nothing people hate more than the stench of tries-too-hard. In a month that gave us the lamest PR campaign in the history of mankind the Ask.com campaign may be dwarfed into insignificance (like the product it promotes), but we can’t just let it die without honouring its gross ineptness, can we? Oh, I think not.
Are scummy sales people chauvinistic as well as slimy?
Over the past 2 years, I’ve had the misfortune of having to deal with lots of sales people. I can count on one hand (and a bit) the amount of sales people I’ve dealt with I would consider to be pleasant, well-adjusted individuals. The majority of people who ring up to speak to me are pretty lizard-like. I really hate it when people use scummy sales techniques of pretending they know me to get our CRM team to pass me the call.
Some of them are also pertty rude to the person who takes the call and then all smiles when they get through to me. I’ve asked our CRM team to let me know if someone’s been particularly curt with them on the phone, because I am generally mistrustful of fake and greedy people who put down those they think are unimportant so they can make a quick buck. As far as I’m concerned, a company that employs such people to promote itself is not likely to be a dependable, ethical company and I would need a pretty good reason to deal with a company I don’t feel I can trust. Sadly, lots of companies use nice salespeople but are still pretty unethical, but hey, if you’re lucky enough to get an eyeful of nature’s warning signs (think black and yellow spiders), you may as well take a step back if you can.
The beatings will continue until company morale improves
The corporate world is a fickle mistress. One minute you’re living the high-life and the next you get knocked on the head with the iron fist.
When I first moved from doing customer service/moderating to my current role, my greatest worry was that I didn’t have enough to do. I’d been working as a moderator for a while and got used to having a set of tasks to complete as part of my daily routine. The job structure was very easy to understand: you start the day with a (large) number of posts, pictures, etc. to go through and your job for the day is done when there are no longer any of those left. Seeing as I was working on a big, popular site, that hardly ever happened within a work day.
When I changed over to doing marketing/SEO, I had very few quantifiable set tasks. When I finished those, I had to make up my own work. I spent some time doing research and learning no skills (it took a while to get my heard around the fact that this was acceptable business behaviour), some time working on my own stuff and a lot of time worrying about not having enough work (which I thought may mean I’d end up losing the job). Those were the days when link-buying was still pretty much the done thing, so I ended up spending whole days buying links from directories, because I felt that I had to fill my time somehow to justify my employment. It wasn’t until my first pay review, when I complained to my boss I was fed up of doing glorified data entry for a living, that I realised I didn’t have to do any of that. My boss explained to me that my new role cannot be measured by the quantity of the physical work that goes into it, but by the quality of the results that come out of it. I was encouraged to work flexible hours, to leave early if I’d finished my day’s work, rather than stay in the office and pretend I was working for the sake of it. I was even given a Blackberry so I could stay in touch with the office in case anything came up. I got a good pay rise, I got to learn a new trade and I felt valued. My boss was supposedly quoted as telling people (in my absence) that I could do work in an hour that would take most people 3 days to do.
Sadly, as the story goes, small company does well, small company sells to big company, things begin to slowly make their way south. Startups are often set up by people who themselves dislike authority and want to make some money and not have to work in a nasty, corporate environment. As a result, there’s none of that bollocksy “us and them” mentality in small companies. Directors and managers don’t force authority upon you unless you do something bad. There’s lots of nice touches that are meant to make the working environment more fun and the general atmosphere is relaxed, even when things are busy.That was then. This is now. Flexibility is not a quality favoured by our new insect overlords (let’s call them the Evil Empire for fun).
SEO for moms
So my mom, who’s a family and couples’ therapist in Israel, has a website, which she had set up for her without talking to me about it first. She gave the designer free reign (*shudder*). So now she has a flash-only site and is not ranking for anything apart from her name, which is in the domain name. I’ve been trying to explain SEO to her and get her to add an HTML site with actual content on it.
The conversation sort of went like this:
Mom: I can’t see my site on Google at all, when I search for “couples’ therapy” it doesn’t come up.
Me: That’s because the search engine robot can’t tell what your site is about. You have to change your site so that it can tell and then get people to link to it.
Mom: ???
Me: It’s like…. Imagine if you had some bananas and you wanted some monkeys to come and eat them, really stupid monkeys.
Mom: Monkeys?
Me: Yes, so you put all your bananas in the fridge, but the stupid monkeys can’t open the fridge, so you have to get the bananas out of the fridge.
Mom: Ok…
Me: And then you have to go and get the monkeys to come and eat the bananas.
This carried on for quite some time, at the end of which my mom accused me of ruining her day by making her understand the amount of work she’d have to put in. My job here is done.
If anyone can beat that one for a lame similie, I’d love to hear it. Save me from my shame.
The good life
Sometimes I do love my job. Although most of my work involves sitting in front of the computer answering emails and looking at reports, occasionally I get to do stuff that is far more spiritually rewarding. Like being bribed. Today, for example, one of our major advertisers took me out to lunch at Ping pong which is pretty damn cool by any standard. I’d never been there before but had heard a lot about it. It’s wicked. The food actually had that elusive bit of X-factor that most food in this country lacks. I had the special jasmine tea with the flower that opens up in the water. How cool is that? I had to help it along with a chopstick cause it didn’t want to turn over and sink to the bottom like it should, but that’s besides the point. It was still pretty special. One of the advertisers confessed to always getting a round of those for newbies like me for street-cred value. I can see why.
As an extra clever achievement, I brought along our head of dev for the free lunch, thus ensuring I’m in his good books without any actual effort on my part. Years of working in clubs taught me how to spot the people you need to keep sweet if you want an easy life. If you want an easy life at a club, you get pally with security. If you want an easy life doing online marketing, you get pally with the techies. Unless, of course, you want to do all your own technical dirty work, which I am not particularly inclined to do.
The saddest reason to be happy
In Hebrew, the term for “pitiful” has a slightly different meaning than it does in English. I always think of the English meaning having more to do with something that should be pitied. In Hebrew it means something that invokes pity. I’ve always thought of personal blogs as somewhat pitiful, in the Hebrew sense. They always seemed to me like little tiny cries for help where people wrote about things they couldn’t relate to anyone in their own lives so that others, far away could pick up on them and give them a sense of belonging. The medium of blogging is full of loneliness and isolation. This is one of the many reasons why I held off blogging for so long. It came as somewhat of a sad surprise to me to discover that my own life is not in itself lacking in a certain element of such isolation and detachment. There are things in my life I want to talk about, but I am lacking in people who’d actually care to hear what I have to say about them.
Today is a good example. Today I’m happy, but for the saddest reason. The little website I made for my book is ranking. It’s ranking after about 2 weeks or so of being up and it’s ranking at #2 on Google UK and #4 on Google US (for queries made in the UK, at least, which is all I really care about). I’ve added some content to the thing with the blog and all and someone’s actually gone and commented too. I knew controversy would sell. Luckily I was born controversial 
So this is a very very tiny cry of “yay”, because even I know that being happy because of something’s page rank on Google is pretty damn sad.