Monday 6 September 2010

QA Briefing, Jobs at Risk, Ash and the Vacancy, Hit Men, Ovi Share,Cloud, Dawn, Silent Nights (bad pun), One Thousand Works, Karl Popper,Going On and On and On….1,400

Tonight we had a very long session with CC about the Co’s failure to achieve its quality assurance targets. This was a long brief and it highlighted the problems they are having in getting front line staff to comply with the regulatory requirement of the FSA.

It’s true that many of these regulations aren’t applicable to our team (we are on the graveyard shift, with limited access to the Co’s systems and dealing primarily with out-of-hours “emergencies”) because we aren’t involved in selling (of insurances), however it did bring us up to speed with the problems that the Co is experiencing with many of the in-day staff (through bad training, lack of understanding or because of other reasons) not carrying out their jobs properly.

Now, given the possible catastrophic consequences of these compliance failures, for both the business as a whole and the directors personally, this issue will not going away anytime soon!

I suspect that, over the next few months, quite a few people are going to find out that the Co no longer wants to offer them gainful employment!

I, for one and I’m sure I’m not the only one, wouldn’t want to be occupying or even applying for a management role in this Co anytime soon. It was made abundantly clear during the briefing that managers who didn’t get their shit together and stop their teams from breaking the rules would be for the high-jump and that there wouldn’t be many, if any, second chances on offer! Don’t call me a Loon, I say Pretty Soon - It’ll be High Noon in The Last Chance Saloon!

Now Ash, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be too discouraged by this possibility as he continues to write, rewrite and re-rewrite his application for an vacancy advertised within QA…Three Days and counting; it’s got to be in by tomorrow matey!!!

Mind you, the vacancy is, as I already mentioned, in the QA department, and seeing as they are going to be “the hit men” (to borrow, if I may, a Mafia expression) as opposed to being “the hitties”, there is, I’ll concede, apparent method in his madness.

On an entirely unrelated note; that’s quite unrelated to the foregoing…is THAT Clear? I was using the Ovi Share facility to acquire a copy of my “hippie” photo to upload as my AudioBoo profile photograph this evening. After this had been done I decided to remain logged into Ovi Share with a view to continuing the sorting and organising of the photographs and videos I’ve got stored there.

I’d not done this for a while and as a result of this long time away I’d forgotten quite how badly Nokia had crippled this facility; everything, it seemed, to have been made extra hard to do! When they first created Share it had been extremely easy to use and very responsive and tweakable. Now, even simple things were difficult; trying to play an album as a straight forward slideshow presented insurmountable difficulties. Each time it was tried the SS would start off at some random point within the album and would then display pictures until, for reasons unknown, it choose to return to the original photo. No matter what I tried I could not get it to play a simple slideshow starting with the first picture in the album and ending with the …you guess!

Come on Nokia you Finny Chaps say you want to rival Google’s cloud services, and given that you’re also abolishing “Nokia Files”, thereby saving yourselves a ton of cloud space in the process, so surely it’s not too much of us (Us =Your Loyal Customers) to ask that you once more make your photo sharing service functional…is it?

Before I forget, tonight was the first time that both Dawn and I have been at work together since I went off on my hip-hop sabbatical last May; mind, having said that, because she was covering EA tonight, we didn’t actually get to do more than exchange a few pleasantries the whole shift. In fact, and much as I hate to agree with CM who predicted this, since we’ve been able to access TV services on the internet most of the team barely speak through out the night!

My how it’s changed from when I first joined the team nearly six years ago. Oh well as always there’s an upside; if everyone was chatting merrily away I’d never find the time, or have the peace and quiet, to write this enthralling blog; if that should happen just think of the effect there would be on the history of World literature…there wouldn’t be any!!! Well it might, a little, if I, or the kids, were suddenly to become famous and the Press began clamouring for information about us all.

I was kind of hoping to make it to the thousand word mark tonight, if for no other reason than to pass the time more quickly and distract myself from these horrible clammy sweats I’m seem to be suffering from, but I find myself with little or nothing I can think of to say let alone write. I think this is going to require a little thought, on my part; there’s still far to far to go to allow me to get away with filling the remaining space with meaningless verbiage about having nothing more to say.

That bolt hole is, I think, firmly closed to me on this beautiful moonlit, struggling for appropriate words, night. Yes sure it works when you’re trying to fill up a paltry thirty or even forty word gap but when that gap, between what you’ve achieved and what it is you want to achieve, is still several hundreds of words long then the task becomes too much for a simple man, of few and limited letters, such as myself. An Orwell or Verne or even a Rev Aubrey would, probably, in fact almost certainly, be up for it but that’s because they were seasoned writers with many, many years of experience under their respective literary belts.

Whereas, me, I’m nothing but an apprentice wordsmith, a mere journeyman, if you will, a dilettante, with, still, less than two years of scribblings under my belt... I mean, even now after the pointless meanderings above I’m still about two hundred words short of my target.

Proof positive, if ever such a thing, as proof positive, were possible (which of course it never will be; because such a thing is impossible under the Poppian theory of knowledge to which this World – at least the rational part of it anyway – subscribes. Poppian theory tells us that falsification is the only proof and that is proof negative, if you will, never proof positive) that I’ve still a great distance to travel if I’m ever to arrive at a position where I can honestly compare myself with such illustrious fellows as these!

One day, perhaps, I’ll have achieved the same, apparently, effortless skills that they use to manipulate and bend the written word to their will but I’m afraid that day appears to be coming none too soon!

I am, I suppose, now at the writer’s equivalent of the marathons runners’ wall; I’ve got to find it within me to keep plodding on when my every fibre is urging me to give up. Keep in there Boy, there’s not far to go now; you know you can make it if you just hang on in there and believe in yourself! You know what? I did keep on hanging in there and I hadn’t even realised that I’d crossed the finishing line a fair few words back! Can I make it to the big 1,300? Now someone who had a pointless point to prove would see if they could continue on to the 1,300 mark but that would be silly because as soon as they reached there the little voice in their head would only whisper to them…”go on you can make it to 1,400, you know you can, go on, go on, I’ve got every confidence in you that you can do this”. But what would be the point of that? None as I’ve already explained…damn, I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve just realised that my explanation as to why it would be pointless to continue has in fact caused me to continue and that if I write just another nine words…1,400!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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