gone in an instant
I was just sitting here with my cup of fruit tea reaeding Mr Seb’s blog post about death and the afterlife when my boss called all of us in to a break out room. We have a meeting scheduled from 10 until 12 today anyway, but she said she needed to speak to us quickly and urgently. We all exchanged glances.
It’s very sad news. The sister of one of our colleagues was killed in a big car accident yesterday. She was just 18. Understandably, we haven’t heard from our colleague.
I really hope that there is an afterlife.
Filed under: Blogging | Leave a Comment
the burning pits of hell
Armpits, that is.
This morning I drove to the little market town of Blandford Forum from my mother’s house in deepest, darkest rural Dorset, having packed The Mechanic off to some Truckfest or something at Shepton Mallet for a day of drooling over, er, trucks. I don’t know how someone can find so much enjoyment from walking around looking at trucks but I don’t ask questions.
At Blandford, I parked the car in a residential road just up from the town centre and walked down to the Health & Beauty salon for my treatment. Whoever coined the phrase “pain is beauty” was spot on and, just minutes after entering the salon, I was brutally reminded why it is that I gave up on waxing in favour of shaving, as time consuming as it is and despite the short-lived results.
Popping two painkillers a short while beforehand did nothing to calm the pain. The fronts of my legs down, the therapist announced we’d do my armpits as I was lying on my back. A sharp whipping of wax from delicate underarm skin and roots from follicles drew out a loud yelp, and then she said “Oh my goodness! I have never seen anyone bleed as much as you before!” She looked quite alarmed and I felt compelled to reassure her that it happens every time. And so she continued with ripping out my hair and by the time she got one strip through my second pit I was actually crying and she was practically begging for forgiveness.
When it was over, she liberally smothered me in tea tree and looked down at my stricken face with real compassion and stroked my upper arm. On rolling on to my front so she could torture the behinds of my legs, we discovered that my vest top was drenched in sweat and stuck to me. She gently pulled it away and a rush of cold air ran down my back.
Had I not still been reeling from the armpit wax – comparable to being doused in petrol and set on fire – it would have been quite erotic.
I’ve recovered now, some six hours later. And I’m going back to shaving.
Filed under: Blogging | 5 Comments
i told you i am a fatty!
And this is a “flattering” angle. If only it was also a flattening one too.
I look preggers in this one. (I am not.)
Nice boobie though.
Filed under: Blogging | 18 Comments
and i love the fraise blonde
“Do I look like a mug? Have I got a handle? Am I made of china? Am I kept in a cupboard or on a small wooden tree? Would you like to put your lips on my rim? You may answer that question, the others were rhetorical.”
Filed under: Blogging | Leave a Comment
I am a yeti, a monstrous, hairy, minging yeti.
I have been growing my body hair. Well, not growing it so much as neglecting to remove it. It grows a little and then I shave it off, but I ran out of razors and didn’t find the time to buy any more and The Mechanic doesn’t care anyway. By the time I got around to buying them, it was long enough for me to think “hey, I may as well wax” but not quite long enough to do it last weekend. So, as I have been travelling up and down the country this week, I have been short on time and I thought I’d just get it dealt with at the weekend at a little salon in Blandford that I have been to before.
Obviously, this means another week of no shaving while the hair grows all the while.
Ming!
I have pits to rival Julia Roberts and if I were to be so stupid as to wear a skirt and let the legs out, I would promptly be herded up by zoologists claiming to have at last found Bigfoot. Although, that said, my feet aren’t very big. My hands on the other hand, crikey, I think they are huge!
But I digress.
So I am all booked in to be de-fuzzed and quite looking forward to it. Apart from the pain aspect. There is nowt so painful in this world than having your underarm fur ripped out. Not even the bikini line tops that.
And on Thurs 25 July I am booked in to my favourite little salon to get a cut and colour, which sounds a bit like a cut and shut, but involves more hair dye and fewer cars. Then I will be beautiful again.
If a little fatty.
Filed under: Blogging | 27 Comments
Well, I have just handled one of the hairiest interviews of my (admittedly) short PR career. I’ve been slogging my guts out in recent weeks trying to persuade a magazine to show some interest in something that we are doing. Nice and specific that, isnt it? 
Well, the magazine did bite and I did a load of running around getting client approval, setting up an interview and basically getting free coverage for the client (as well as my company) without them having to lift any media relations fingers themselves. The interview was held as a joint interview between the client and one of my guys.
My guy and I (aaaah) sat down and did a big pre-interview briefing. He flagged up some of the contentious elements of the project and I advised on how to handle any questions relating to them (as these were all mostly political questions, he would bat them over to the client to answer, and he would be focusing on our involvement in the project). I gave him my two big pieces of advice:
Firstly, if you don’t know the answer – or if you do know it, but aren’t at liberty to give the answer – just say “I’m afraid I can’t answer that right now as I don’t know” or “I’m not sure, I can check it and come back to you”. There is nothing wrong in not being able to answer something. Far better to say you don’t know or you need to find out than risk giving out something that is incorrect or that you do not have permission to discuss. You can always “check the facts out” and then go back to the journalist and explain that you can’t provide the answer. I often grumble that our clients don’t let us discuss a lot of what we do -limiting our PR opportunities substantially. By the same token, they also provide a degree of protection as we can always say that we are not permitted by the client to discuss x, y, or z.
Secondly, never feel compelled to fill The Silence. Journalists are very good at this trick. They ask a question and you answer. Then you sit and wait for the next question. But it doesn’t come. The silence hangs there. This is a technique that is particularly effective for telephone interviews – where you can’t make eye contact with the journalist and indicate through, say, raising your eyebrows, that you are done with responding and they can move on. So, the question is posed, you answer and then nothing… The silence just hangs in the air/over the phone and the journalist makes no move to ask you something else. This is because most people hate silence. It makes us feel so uncomfortable. It is human nature to try and fill that void and many an interviewee has been caught out by it. The silence sits there and they just can’t help themselves, and they ramble on and on – often without real focus and forgetting the question posed so that all sorts slips out. Before they know it, they’ve said something that perhaps they shouldn’t have said.
And, she did exactly that and my lovely guy had taken everything in and handled the contentious questions as planned and stopped when he had said all that needed to be said. We sat there with a notepad between us, jotting down comments to one another.
The client? Well, he came on the call without a PR person to support and guide him and it was clear that he hadn’t been briefed or had any media training. In the five minutes we had together before our journalist friend called in, I gave those two pieces of advice, but he didn’t seem to take it on board and there were moments during the interview where I winced. There is only so much guidance that a PR Officer for one organisation can offer to someone from another organisation during an interview like that. There are so many sensitivities involved. We all know exactly what was said and who said what, so if something does get printed that someone higher up the chain on the client side is unhappy with, it’s an internal matter for them. The bummer is that it could make them clamp down on discussing this project with other media outlets full stop, which ties our hands there.
There is no point in worrying about it though. I debriefed with my guy and then later with my manager and it was managed perfectly on our side. We can only do our best and we can only manage our own reputation. Here is hoping that it all goes ok.
Filed under: Blogging | 3 Comments
i wish i had a harpoon
There is a chap standing at the printer. He keeps sniffing. I’d like to shoot him.
Sniff, sniff, sniff. I bet he was at the coke this lunchtime.
Filed under: Blogging | 5 Comments
put down your gun there, laddy
Y’ain’t The Milky Bar Kid, y’know.
It appears that diplomacy may have won the day in the media hostage negotiation department folks. I almost don’t want to type this for fear of invoking Murphy’s Law and the whole thing going to pot in a rather spectacular way.
Or worse.
The whole thing going to pot without so much as a small raspberry noise.
After MONTHS of my lovely lot mucking Mr National Journalist around, it appears that this thing might now actually be coming off. As in, holy moly, we might get some coverage out of it.
Or, more specifically, I might be able to put another national clipping in my coverage file. Ok, you PRs who are used to national coverage every day might yawn, but for my company, it’s dance around the room news.
And I think I am in love with this journalist. He has the patience of a saint. (Or we have a REALLY good story. I don’t think it is the latter, however).
Filed under: Blogging | 4 Comments
eat my pr planning shorts!
In other – much better – news, I got an email from the CIPR this afternoon. Yes, the outcome of The Evil Bitch Planning Assignment From Hell.
And I passed.
With a merit (again!).
Pity I’m going to end up deferring the final project for three months… Still, I passed it! Yay! Two down, one to go (eventually).
Filed under: Blogging | 3 Comments
monday moodiness
Another tired and miserable Monday morning. Yeah, the sun is shining outside and it is a lovely day, but I’m not feeling the love today.
I came out of our catch up meeting to discover that one of our senior directors had sent around a PDF clipping of some coverage I got and demanding one of the internal comms people reproduce it on the intranet. He then got pissy when I put the brakes on everything – firstly, mate, you’ve just broken our NLA agreement just sending that around. That is copyright infringement there, break the fucking law why don’t you. Secondly, no, we can’t reproduce it for exactly the same reason: IPR means that every word printed on that page in that order BELONGS TO THE MAGAZINE. It doesn’t matter if our man has been quoted, he doesn’t own his own words. Don’t like it? Tough titties. That is the way it goes.
It shouldn’t be this hard. I shouldn’t have to say this sort of thing over and over. Hey, wait a minute, can you get it inscribed on my gravestone please?
I’ve barely slept this weekend and it’s going to make today just drag along. I feel tense, shoulders tight. I keep trying not to think about it but I can’t seem to keep the subject out of my head for more than about ten minutes at any time. I feel guilty for feeling compassion, where just days ago I recoiled in utter disgust. Christ, if I feel so headfucked about it, I can’t imagine how other people are feeling.
When death was an option, life became so important and now that the absolute worst case scenario is out of the picture, maybe the second-to-worst case scenario doesn’t look so bad. Although, to other people, those were the best case scenarios. I’m sitting on my fence here, one leg straddling each side and pulled in two completely opposing directions. Whatever happens, The Mechanic is the loser. Whatever the outcome, he loses. While one of the two warring parties may be able to claim a sick victory in all this by the end of the week – a small victory compared to what everyone has been through – The Mechanic will get no such thing. It doesn’t matter what happens, whoever the “winning” party is, he will lose. And nobody will care. Because nobody has cared about him from the start of the process. He just hasn’t figured in anyone’s plans. Of course, he isn’t important enough in all this.
And then I feel bad for wanting out, and he feels bad for despising me even momentarily. Then I hate him for not understanding the burden. And then I hate myself for not being more understanding.
Filed under: Blogging | 10 Comments
-
-
My blog is worth $28,227.00.
How much is your blog worth?
-
-
-
-
