Atlas and Alcohol

Last month, my employers had a fun day with various competitions, one of which was to design a contact lens poster. Based on the Farnese Atlas, I substituted the globe for a contact lens side on, and won a bottle of plonk for my troubles!

(Click for bigger.)

I later consumed it and tripped over my bed on my way to bed. Good job my bed was there to break my fall. Oops.

Hateful Customer

I had a happy experience this week. Happy in the sense that, well, it wasn’t at all happy. As I have mentioned, I work in customer services, processing orders and dealing with myriad customer issues. I like doing my job, I take pride in it and I have said on more than one occasion that I wish to treat my customers as I would like to be treated myself (I have very high standards when it comes to being a customer). I have completed two award levels through the Institute of Customer Services (http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/) and coached two more people to success in the same award.

I answered a call on Tuesday from a customer who wished to speak with my employer’s sales director. Following procedure (set in place to filter cold callers etc) I directed his call to one of two other colleagues who take any requests to speak to the MD or a director, neither of whom were at their desk. Rather than dump my caller onto voicemail, I offered to take his telephone number and pass his request on so someone would call him back.

At this point he demanded to know where my organisation’s head office is (USA), their telephone number, my name and the names of the staff (the team leaders who oversee customer services) who have told me I have to try these two colleagues for calls such as his.

Unfortunately for him, due to protestors, my organisation has a no-names policy, which in my case I am not allowed to divulge my (or any colleagues’) surname. He informs me he will be telephoning my organisation’s head office to get one or both of the team leaders fired for not letting me put his call directly through to the Sales Director or the MD (whom he has now requested to speak with as well).

He then proceeds to tell me a long-winded story about how he was pressured into attending an interview with one of the armed forces way back when, how one of the interviewers (a brigadier, if I recall) said something which he took as an insult, and how to exact revenge for this slight, later called said officer a rank below that which he was. Can you say petty?

The point of my caller’s story was thus: if I can’t think for myself, and if I can’t think to ignore the instructions laid down for me then I should tell my superiors where they could stick their rules and resign.

Yes, this customer was telling me to leave my paid employment (of over five years), in this financial climate, with the daily horror stories coming out on the news about forthcoming private sector job losses, with no job to move onto, solely because he couldn’t speak to the person he wanted and because I wouldn’t (and couldn’t*) do anything about it except remain calm, listen to all he had to say without interruption and repeat my offer to have someone return his call as soon as.
I don’t think so.

If I hadn’t been so angry I’m positive I’d have been in tears. You may say, oh, what an adult reaction. Indeed, however in the time I’ve done this job, taking 150 calls a day (approximate average) I’ve cried once over awkward customers, once when I was new and a bag of nerves.

*I couldn’t because we don’t have an official receptionist so calls which would ordinarily be dealt with by that role (such as this one) are dealt with by my customer service colleagues and me. (I will iterate here that I am not a receptionist and I have a bloody good idea of what that role entails, it actually being my previous salaried role. In the call centre environment I am employed in, I have specific, measurable targets to meet.) Reception-style calls as efficiently as possible using the two staff members who filter such calls on our behalf.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I wrote this for the Empire Magazine forum top 100 TV shows http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2850596

I was interested in this premise ever since the much-derided (and rightly so) film was released with Kirsty Swanson in the titular role. I never had the chance to see that when released but always wanted to see it even after seeing my first few episodes of the series (Season 2, episodes The Pack and Go Fish, to be precise) to see how it fitted in.

The premise is simple, really: "Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers. She is the Slayer." However the show is so much more complex, blending in the usual teenage crises, trials and tribulations while trying to maintain a secret identity from the authorities, her mother, and classmates, with the help of two close friends and her Watcher.

Over a seven series (and seven year timeline) arc, we get to see the gradual evolution of these four main characters, plus sundry others too and virtually everyone is shown to have a side which upsets the viewer’s assumptions of them: not all vampires are evil, not all humans are good – nothing is what it seems, but it maintains a sense of perspective and never jumps the shark.

Joss Whedon’s ‘Buffyverse’ ends up being a rounded, comprehensible, upsetting, comedic, dramatic and clever invention. It gave us five series of Angel to boot, and many of his regular actors appear in his other shows Firefly and Dollhouse.

Series highlights are The Wish, Doppelgandland, Hush and The Gift.

Top Gear

I wrote this for the Empire Magazine forum top 100 TV shows http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2850596

Before I started watching Top Gear religiously (I am one of those, along with former Star in a Reasonably Priced Car Will Young, who watches the endless repeats on Dave), in my books cars came in colours with a wheel in each corner and one in front of the driver’s seat.

The programme in its current iteration has turned this air headed woman into one who tweets regularly that I could do as good a job as Messers Hammond, Clarkson and May for half the price, who will bite off the hand of the first person to let me play with a Bugatti Veyron, who was insanely jealous of a friend who recently rallied to Mongolia via the Transfagarasan route, who now claims I can fix anything with the judicious application of a hammer and a bag of chips and knows the Gospel of ‘if it’s stuck and shouldn’t be, use WD40 and if it’s moving and shouldn’t be use gaffer tape.

Cars now interest me. It’s thanks to Top Gear that I can maintain a half-decent conversation about them with my father and my car-minded male friends. It’s thanks to Top Gear that for a little over a month a couple of times a year, I am overjoyed and deliriously happy with the state of television programming in this country.

If you can ignore Jeremy Clarkson’s right-wing rhetoric, Richard Hammond’s forays into prime-time presenting (though he is good at it) and James May’s boys’ own nonsense (Man Lab notwithstanding), on any given episode you will find a funny and engaging programme despite a lot of the cars’ prohibitive price tags. And more than occasionally you will find moments of pure comedy genius: Jeremy thrashing round Basingstoke’s Festival Place shopping centre and Jeremy drowning Ross Kemp.

Shooting Stars

I wrote this for the Empire Magazine forum top 100 TV shows http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2850596

I am biased. I am an unashamed and unapologetic fan of Vic and Bob since their Channel 4 series and have endless time for their escapades. This said, to describe Shooting Stars inevitably requires frequent and honest use of the term anarchic. It’s a tired cliché when it comes to Messers Moir* & Mortimer but more justified for them than for many other acts to whom it’s applied.

It is Shooting Stars who we have to thank for George & Marjorie Dawes, for Ulrika Jonnson’s otherwise inexplicable popularity and for B3ta’s propensity for the SPANG meme. However I forgive them this.

There is a format for the show... just. There are two teams, captained by (team A) Mark Lamarr, Will Self and Jack Dee and (team B) Ulrika Jonnson; four guest panellists (though team B will often have a semi regular, previously Jonny Vegas and Angelos Epithemiou), a scorekeeper (formerly George or Marjorie Dawes, most recently Angelos Epithemiou), all led by Vic & Bob as the question masters. However questions should be taken in the loosest possible sense: a question could be ‘name a popular fruit’ and if ‘apple’ is given as an answer, the correct answer could well be Graham Norton or vice versa: if Norton is given, apple would be correct. For a contestant to score points seems to be on the whim of the score keeper, if that.

Though this all sounds like a big complaint, the best way to appreciate it is to watch it yourself. Look out for repeats, specifically from the original series where Jarvis Cocker is twatted with a watermelon and from the most recent series, with Jack Dee getting smacked in the face with bacon. Sublime.

*Call yourself a fan if you didn’t need to Google ‘Moir’.

Mock The Week

I wrote this for the Empire Magazine forum top 100 TV shows http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2850596

This is a topical news comedy but different from HIGNY in that it primarily (and, I think, solely) has comedians as its panellists, both regular and guest. With Dara O’Briain hosting, all seven are given virtually free reign to make comments on the week’s news events. The highlight of these are Hugh Dennis, Russell Howard and Andy Parsons, the three regulars. (Had I been writing a year ago, I would definitely include Frankie Boyle who would cut very close to the bone, suffered a media shit storm as a result and stepped down of his own volition.)

The show gives all the panellists a chance to air some of their current stand-up routines (so if you are a fan of Live At The Apollo and Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow et al you may see some crossover) but more often than not the material is fresh and more importantly, funny. I mean, crying with laughter, side-splittingly hysterically funny.

Catch repeats on Dave weekly, and watch out for “Nemo! Where the FUCK have you been?!” Best. Line. EVER.