Meeting
Posted: Thu 14 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »I’m in a meeting this morning with a client – so all is likely to be quiet ’til the afternoon.
Let’s just hope it all goes well…
Disappearing Client
Posted: Sat 9 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Own Business, Thoughts, Work-related | Leave a comment »A while back now, I took on some work to redesign the ‘new season’ area for an online clothes boutique. It was all very “we need it now”, but at the same time utterly disorganised, and with some truly horrific stuff going on behind the scenes, which made it remarkably difficult to “just slot in” the new season’s items, even without the necessary redesign too.
About five or six weeks later, having worked fairly hard on it – although not having done the (to me) necessary additional work of putting the entire thing into a database-driven system- and having got everything in place (design, new products, blah blah) I contacted the client, and said I was ready to go.
“Oh,” he said “You were taking so long, I ended up getting the design done by someone else. Now they need to ‘just slot in’ the new products.” Fair enough, I thought – I’ve done some work on it, but it’s not the end of the world, so I actually didn’t charge for the work I’d done. Equally, I didn’t send the stuff I’d done through to the end client. It’s ended up relinquishing on my hard drive, and nowhere else.
That was two months ago.
Amusingly (to me, anyway) that client’s new ’boutique’ is still not there. In fact, it now doesn’t even have the holding page, it’s just a “403: Forbidden”. He hasn’t been in touch with me, and that’s his decision.
From my side, OK, I could’ve charged for the work I’ve done. But at the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything either. If I’d shown them a demo, and they’d plundered it for their own needs, I’d be pissed off, and would’ve charged them. But when all’s said and done, I’ve lost nothing except maybe some work time, when I wasn’t doing much else anyway.
The client, though, has now lost four months of sales, and the stock they bought in will shortly be ‘last season’. Because he was in such a huge hurry that a month took too long, he’s lost far more than he would’ve spent on what I did.
Funny how things work out, isn’t it?
@Media Day Two
Posted: Fri 8 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: @Media2007, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »So, another day, another bundle of seminar conference thingies…
Today it’s going to be (most probably) :
And then a train-ride home.
With luck, it’s going to be another productive day.
Managing Work Demands
Posted: Sun 3 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Over the next few weeks, I’ve got one hell of a lot of work to complete, and that’s starting today.
However, with Herself being at work today, there’s also been the problem of dealing with Hound, who sees it more that I’m at home, and thus should be throwing a ball in the garden for her.
On a side point, I’m seriously considering buying one of those tennis-ball serving machines, so I can load it with 50 balls in the garden, and leave it to keep Buggerlugs amused. Very tempting.
So today has started off with taking her out for a long walk, and then also nipping out in the car for a drive, taking her with me, so she kept on seeing new stuff and so on – I’ve found it’s a plan that works.
And now she’s laid here in the living room. Fast asleep. So I’d best get on with doing some work…
56k (Again)
Posted: Thu 31 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Own Business, Thoughts, Work-related | 4 Comments »In some ways it’s actually kind of interesting to be back on 56k dial-up for a few days.
I’d forgotten just how slow it really is, and how much I take for granted that I can access pretty much anything I want without having to wait for it. (As Lionel said) YouTube is an absolute no-no – not that I use it all that much anyway, but still.
And it’s surprising just how many sites fall into the trap of taking broadband for granted. Some of the sites I’ve done certainly do – although, thankfully, not the photography portfolio site, which still loads pretty quickly. (well, in comparison to other photo sites, although it’s still painfully slow on the available bandwidth)
Taking a positive from this enforced period of online-dragging is that I’ve now checked all the sites I’ve done of late, and there’s at least one that may get a rewrite at some point because of those tests. But for the most part, I’m actually feeling quite chuffed that none of them are too painful to load up on this slow-ass piece of crap non-broadband connection.
Overload
Posted: Tue 22 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Introspective, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having a bit of a crisis with regard to my workload, among other things. If I’m honest, a lot of it is down to the fact that- at the moment, at least- I have to admit that I’ve taken on too much at once. As well as the normal day-to-day work, I’ve also got one big project on the side, as well as a couple of smaller ones on the back-burner. (Although that still means they’re in my head, and need to get done) Additionally, there’s one new one where I really need to talk about it a bit with some other people. Oh, and of course there’s also all the stuff around moving house. Not much on at all then.
In fact, if I just listed the stuff I’m getting paid for at the moment, it’s still working 7½ working days per week. Not one of my saner moments, admittedly.
Fortunately, the big project has a first deadline of the end of June, and everything should still be OK for that – it’s just that a couple of the steps along the way have sort of slipped a bit. There’s some reasons for it (and I’ll probably write a bit more about those later) but mainly it’s because I just can’t at the moment motivate myself to go ferreting through bizarrely-written databases. Particularly when they’ve been done in SQL Server, rather than anything decent.
But at the moment, well yes, I’m just feeling a little bit stressed about the entire thing, and not really having all that much fun. It’ll sort itself out, I know – and fairly soon now – but all the same, right now it’s a bit more chaotic and pressured than I’d prefer.
On the other hand, well, maybe I’ll learn something from this. (Although I kind of doubt it, somehow)
Self-Inflicted Overload
Posted: Sun 6 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Not content with all the other stuff that’s currently going on in my workload, I’m now also considering a revamp of the website I use for the work side of my life. The photography portfolio (which is nominally linked to it) is similar in ‘design’, but is lightyears ahead in terms of back-end and technological stuff.
And it occurred to me this week that actually, I haven’t updated it properly in a while, that I need to add in the most recent clients etc., and it started me thinking about what I should do with it, as well as whether the work would actually have any perceivable improvements to anyone except me. Would there be any real return on the investment I put on it? (Oh God, I’ve been working in marketing departments too long, I’m starting to think about Return On Investment (ROI))
Alongside that, I need to sort out a new bank account for the business stuff. Most of the work at the moment is going through Parasol, so all the tax and NI stuff is paid already, but there’s more private stuff coming in again, so it’s looking more and more likely that I need to do a ‘proper’ account for it as well. That’s a task for the next few weeks, though – it’s not urgent. (Yet)