And, of course, I'm talking back. What follows is probably more a series of unconnected responses to comments than a coherent entry.
C says, quite rightly, that it's a huge investment to bring a new television show to the air and that she deplores the waste when a show is cancelled before it has time to find its feet. It is a huge investment and I don't imagine anyone hates the idea of wasting all of that effort more than the people whose jobs are directly tied into the success of the new shows that debut yearly.
I agree that it sounds as though "Firefly" could have been a sleeper hit, growing to become a favorite. I don't suppose, though, that when you're sitting in the isolation booth of an LA studio, it's all that easy to tell the difference between "Firefly" and "Family Affair." There were some people watching both of them. I'd be interested in seeing the ratings numbers on "Firefly" to see exactly what the "improving ratings" someone mentioned looked like. I'll have to surf around and look for them.
As far as "stupid-ass decisions", well, the television industry doesn't have a monopoly on those. Alvin and I, for instance, are currently reworking the business model for this new company for the third time since I started working here because neither of the two original concepts was well thought-out.
And the ego we're working with might not rise to the glorified heights of an arrogant network executive, but I assure you that the Chipmunk is quite arrogant enough to serve our needs.
Also, a company I worked for a few years ago lost a multi-million dollar contract by bidding completely incorrectly on the RFP no matter how loudly I screamed, kicked, and argued with TPTB about it. They were determined they were right, even though I had more experience both in the industry and with this particular client.
Stupid is pretty universal.
I agree it's a bitter pill to swallow when a show you really like bites the dust but I stand by my statement that it's just silly to think people deliberately cancel a show that has the potential to make them money. There are assholes everywhere but few even of them deliberately set out to cut their own throats out of spite.
I still think that if people had put half as much effort into evangelizing about the show before it went under the axe as they have since the event, maybe some of that precious "buzz" would have been generated and the show would be facing a long and healthy future.
Chris Carter is Satan's minion and I refuse to discuss his multiple failures.
I will say that there's such a thing as throwing good money after bad and that even though a studio has commissioned half a dozen or a dozen episodes doesn't mean they're going to be willing to incur the extra expense of airing them.
Especially if the advertisers announce that they'll buy ad time on reruns of Gilligan's Island but not the new show.
I agree that the fans should be heard. It's just that I wish they'd speak up earlier. (While I'm at it, let me say that it would be a lot more honest if the people who actually are watching the show were the only ones writing in and speaking up, okay? It's absurd to have ten thousand people write letters of protest when only a thousand of them are actually members of the viewing audience. I consider it an artificial inflation of the numbers to convince five or six of your closest friends to join into your campaign and it's also an attempt to dishonestly convince the network execs that there are a lot more of the "vocal and committed" fans than really exist.)
Merchandising is great for the successful show. It's a sweet frosting of profit to spread over the richness of the cake, but it's not enough money to really make a difference if the core viewership isn't there.
Fans willing to buy merchandise in enough numbers to make it profitable are a small percentage of the number of fans watching, okay? Not every viewer buys merchandise.
Anyhow.
Enough of my opinions about fandom. Who cares what I think, anyhow?
Let's talk about Spike Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I got the Season One DVDs for Christmas and have watched four or five of the early episodes and I'm actually pleasantly surprised and impressed. I commented previously that my only problem with the show is how predictable the action is but in these early episodes I'm finding that it's not predictable at all. I'm also, as could have been expected, coming to like all of the characters more as I see where they started, versus where I've been seeing them. Even Angel, he of the relentless brooding mien, was a lot more fun in the early days.
No Spike, of course. I understand he doesn't show up until the third season or something, but there's Giles! I love this early Giles. I want to take him home and make him cups of tea and cuddle him while he reads to me from his monster books. (I also want to get him nekkid and do naughty things to him, but that's probably TMI.)
So far I'm not seeing any slash in this show, though. I have a lot of trouble with the whole "16 year-old children" thing. Giles is yummy but there's no one to pair him with so I can't tell if he'd be slashable or not.
I also got books for Christmas, thanks to friends who love me. And jewelry! And chocolate! I even got red socks! I love red socks.
Loot! I love loot. I love occasions where people who pretend to like me are forced to prove it with gifts. Heh.
And. I had Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off last week. I'm getting New Year's Eve and New Year's Day off this week. Life is very good.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:40 AMYeah, I'm blunt, but I honestly do try to keep from crossing the line into outright "rude to your face," I promise. My last post was not intended as a slap in the face to the folks who have commented on the Nielsen ratings system.
These comments simply reminded me of some thoughts I had over a year past when watching a "save our show" campaign for a show that, quite frankly, I didn't think deserved saving. I should have made that clear. I was posting thoughts I had a long time ago, before I had a forum like this to post them in.
Consider:
#1 - Nielsens are what we got. Live with them or find a better system yourself. (Me, I'd resist having a monitor on every, single television in the country so that people would know everything everyone watched, but I have Privacy Issues.)
#2 - Send letters before "your" show is cancelled, to both the networks and the advertisers. Make your voice heard before TPTB have made up their minds to toss something into the garbage. (If I''d heard half the praise of Firefly before the cancellation that I heard after it, I might have tried watching it again.) If a show is good, get the word out.
#3 - If you love a show, go out before it's cancelled and campaign to get people to watch it. It's not sufficient to sit on a "Firefly list" and talk about how wonderful the show is. You have to tell the people who aren't yet watching it.
Be creative, people!
Why not take out an ad in Variety or somewhere, thanking the network or production company or advertisers for putting a show on the air while the show is still alive and viable? Or, since that will mostly reach "industry" people and what you want is to gather in new viewers, why not pay for an ad on a large-volume website like (wincing) TWOP? (But try and show some class, even with on-line ads.)
Do both. But do whatever you do publicly, in a forum that will reach new people who might be encouraged to watch the show, thereby improving ratings. Work within the system and give TPTB what they want. Public strokes, reinforcement, and free, to them, publicity.
I just....sheesh. I'm getting all pissy again, aren't I?
Disclaimer: This is directed to the world at large and not at anyone who may have read, commented on, or fallen asleep over any blog entry I've written.
I just hate these reactionary campaigns full of invective about how evil it is for people trying to make a living to make the best living they can, okay? They don't want to cancel shows and it's ignorant to sit around saying that they do it out of spite.
If TPTB cancel a show, they have to find something else that will do better. I think we don't have half an idea of how hard that is, but I'm willing to bet that they avoid it if at all possible.
You all know the ratings game, you know what constitutes "good" numbers for a show, and you know how the process works. If you love a show, pump some love into it early on, before it goes critical.
(P.S. I should never compose straight into the blogger software. This is probably full of typographical errors and I've no doubt said something that's twice as insulting as what I sat down to apologize for, but there you go. That's sort of how I am and it's the kind of thing my friends pretend not to know me because of. I just want to note that my New Years' Resolution this year is to try and learn to stop ending sentences with prepositions. And to learn how to use a semi-colon.)
(P.P.S. Doggone it, I got all sidetracked.
I was rude to the people who commented previously and I'm apologizing, okay? I seem to have an inability to just say that, straight out.)
Posted by AnneZook at 10:17 AMThis is in response to the comments to my previous entry.
I'm no Nielsen expert :) but I've always heard that the ratings system has about a +/-2 percent accuracy, which is pretty accurate. Statistical sampling isn't a new technique and it wouldn't continue to be used unless it was pretty reliable and I think most of us will admit that.
I fault the economy. Or no-neck beer drinkers. Or women who really do watch soap operas. Or George Bush. Or someone like that.
The bottom line is that a "growing" body of viewers isn't always enough to convince advertisers to keep committing money to a show's production until it pulls enough viewers to make it a cost-effective proposition for them. Paying for a television show is expensive and science fiction shows tend to have hefty FX budgets that increase their costs even more.
Similarly, if a show pulls a reasonable number of viewers, but they're not the "right" demographic, advertisers aren't going to keep paying money to keep a show on the air.
I don't know any polite way to say this, so I'll just say it.
Advertisers and production companies care a hell of a lot less about hearing from twenty thousand passionate thirty year-old women than they would about hearing from 5,000 rabid eighteen year-old boys.
They want the boys watching. They want young viewers whose purchasing habits aren’t set and who can be convinced that this car will make them sexy or that soda pop will make them cool or these jeans really are babe-magnets, okay?
Advertisers aren't nuts. They know that the average 40 year-old makes more money than the average twenty year-old, but they also know that the 40 year-old already has brand preferences and is, statistically, very unlikely to change brands because of a catchy new advertising campaign.
I'm even less impressed about the effects of write-in campaigns from a "rabid" audience that is, in the end, a core group of dedicated fans and ten thousand volunteers who jump in to save any show someone loves, regardless of whether they watch, or intend to watch, the show themselves.
Every single time one of these campaigns succeeds in bringing a show back, even for one season, and the viewing audience either remains constant or (as often happens) drops, that makes the next campaign much less likely to succeed.
When these campaigns were rare, they had real impact. Now that every single show that manages to air two or three episodes before being cancelled gets a similar write-in campaign, the effect of each campaign is just that much more diluted.
I know "Firefly." I watched it in the beginning although I didn't watch it for long. But I've never even heard of the show called "Prey" that's quoted in the CNN article as having a "Save Our Show" campaign on a par with Firefly's.
Is Prey equally worthy of saving? Does it have the quality and potential attributed to Firefly?
I'm just asking, okay? Because the "rabid fans" organizing these campaigns don't seem to know the difference between true quality and "hey! I like it!" most of the time.
I could go on with a long list of shows I have heard fans crying over but whose cancellation didn't surprise me in the slightest, but there's no need in pissing off the entire world at once, is there?
The fact that "fan favorite" shows get cancelled doesn't automatically make everyone in the business of television some kind of evil troll.
The bottom line is that TV networks and execs and advertisers put their money where the numbers are. If the Nielsen's weren't accurate, TV networks and execs wouldn't use them because they get paid for success. Advertisers, similarly, would not be paying huge sums of money to fund various shows if they weren't damned sure that those shows were, in fact, pulling something very close to the number of viewers the Nielsen numbers claimed for them.
The fact that the large viewing audiences are tuning in to those half-witted "Survivor" and "Marry a Millionaire" shows is just that. A fact.
If you want someone to blame for the death, or the dearth, of what you consider intelligent entertainment, blame the tens of millions of Americans who don't want to think while they're watching television and who prefer the back-stabbing politics and jiggle factor of "Survivor" or the vapid Cinderella-story of some aspiring actress pretending to fall in love with a rich man while making sure to keep her best profile turned toward the camera.
Don't blame the people who produce the shows. Like yourselves, they have a job to do.
And don't forget that just because "everyone you know" thinks a show is great is not proof that it's great. Fandom is made up of a self-selected group of people (as are you and your friends) and we are not a valid group for statistical sampling.
In closing, let me add that one thing and only one might work. Write to the sponsors of the shows you like and swear you'll buy their stuff if they keep paying for the show. Then buy the stuff. If enough people do this, they'll keep the show on the air.
Of course, "enough" is a relative term. If 10,000 rabid fans start buying Bounty Paper Towels, that's hardly going to be a blip on the radar, is it?
Isn't it a shame that there aren't, in fact ten million people watching the show who would be willing to switch to Bounty to keep it on the air?
Posted by AnneZook at 02:37 PMIt's interesting how these campaigns get more and more attention from the national media. And it's gratifying that the campaigns are treated seriously.
But, in the end, I don't know if they'll do much good.
" "It's gratifying that so many fans are speaking up for these shows," said one network executive. "But where were they in October?" "
Indeed. Publicity can bring a show back for an additional season, but if the viewership doesn't improve, it won't make a difference in the long run.
In other musings:
HAPPY HOLIDAYS, everyone!
Posted by AnneZook at 08:44 AMI had it for breakfast yesterday. It's called "The 18-Wheeler" and you get it at La Peep, the breakfast place we walk over to once or twice a year. We don't go any more often than that because I'm pretty sure that every meal there increases my cholesterol count by out 20 points.
I don't have high cholesterol, understand, but I also don't want it, and I'd imagine that eating two slices of French toast, two eggs, two slices of bacon, and a heaping helping of fried potatoes at one sitting could be considered a step in the wrong direction.
I barely ate anything at all for the rest of the day.
Alvin is off in the conference room "beating on"' the Chipmunk via telephone. Once he finishes that portion of today's business, he'll bring me in and make it a conference call. Nothing I like better, approaching the holidays, than being invited into the room just after everyone has had a fight.
Blah, blah, blah. I am completely ready for the holiday, including being ready to not work for a couple of days. I've been here for 3-1/2 hours and the only work-related things I've accomplished so far are to check my e-mail and voice-mail.
My head is still full of Spike, in spite of the repeats being in a Spike-free zone at the moment and yet I'm still finding the show itself woefully predictable, I'm afraid. The plots of the episodes I've been seeing recently have been yawningly unsurprising, anyhow.
I'm willing to believe that things improve, but I am, after all, watching Season 3, so it's not like I'm judging the show by its freshman year or anything. I have to assume that, by now, the show has hit its stride. Still, I find it easy to believe I'll prefer the upcoming episodes, set after the characters graduated from high school.
I've also heard a lot about "snappy dialogue" in this show over the years, but I've heard darned little of it in the episodes I've seen.
After a while, a character responding with tangential non-sequitors becomes so predictable that it's no longer amusing, and having half the characters constantly making sarcastic rejoinders isn't, in my book, enough to qualify as "witty dialogue." The writing seems to be good, so maybe it's that the actors aren't delivering the lines in a way that raises them from "lines" to "repartee" or something.
Dialogue requires rhythm and that's what the show seems to lack. There's this sense that many of the actors are delivering their "line" and then stopping politely to let the next person deliver the next "line." Drives me nuts to hear it.
There are, of course, exceptions.
(Long, uneducated rambling about the acting of the various actors removed. Suffice to say that I think Giles and Spike are sexy, that I'm impressed with how the actor handled the part of the Mayor, and that I love the character of Willow but that I think the actress needs to stop trying so hard.)
I have no idea why I'm writing all of this. It's not like I have any intention of becoming involved with any of the online fandom/reading/writing contingent.
I think I'm just bored and avoiding honest work since I am fully aware that I haven't seen enough episodes to make an overall judgment about the show yet.
It's been an hour, maybe more, and Alvin is still locked in the conference room. I wonder what in the heck is going on?
Posted by AnneZook at 02:30 PMNot much to say today.
I might, in my newfound lust enthusiasm for Spike Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, have forgotten to mention that, in addition to the uncle's heart attack and the aunt's broken hip, we were dealing with my foolish mother's head-first plunge off of her porch last weekend.
Turns out that she cracked a bone in her finger, had to have 14 stitches in her hand, and bumped her head badly enough to make the E.R. folks shove her down the hall to get an MRI, but nothing worse, thank goodness. The MRI showed that her brains were unscrambled.
Some weeks you're almost afraid to answer the phone.
Lust Random unconnected thoughts
And, speaking of Spike, although I know I wasn't actually, I was favored, in yesterday's re-runs, with two non-Spike episodes, confirming me in my opinion that it's Spike and not the show that fascinates me.
I was reading Metablog last night, a thing I like to do from time to time, and stumbled across a link to an LJ post by elynross about Spike. I agree with her take on the character.
I like seeing him evil, seeing him having to do the 'right' thing only because he's made a temporary truce with 'the side of good', and seeing him conflicted between his homicidal impulses and the chip in his head. I neither want nor expect to see the character all redeemed and "good" because he's obsessed with Buffy. Character development is one thing but that would be character assassination.
It wasn't out of character for Spike to attempt to rape Buffy, either, when he was so frustrated at her dumping him. It was, in fact, quite typical of the way Spike reacts to problems with his love life. (Remember when he was going to go find Drusilla and torture her until she loved him again? Remember the whole, "love is pain" speech?)
Love doesn’t make you into someone new. It might make you act differently, but underneath is all you're the same person and under stress you'll react like who you are and not who you're pretending to be.
The entire relationship between Buffy and Spike was sick and twisted. She was, as she told him, "using him." I wonder if there's any history of slayers becoming so attuned to the evil they're supposed to be fighting that they sort of "go over"?
Spike isn't a "nice" person. He may have been a tortured poet before he was a vampire, but where is it written that a poet can't have a wide streak of brutality in their nature? I'd say that the fact that he survived, and grew stronger, as a vampire indicates that there's a part of his nature that isn't at all at odds with the violence.
He's also incredibly emotionally unstable. I think it's something that, at his most evil, he was able to sublimate to a certain degree, but with the chip in his head, it keeps causing him more and more problems. That's what the whole "love's bitch" speech was about, after all. It's not just Drusilla or Buffy, it's love. Most of Spike's precarious emotional balance is rooted in whatever "love" relationship he's in at the moment. He's not good alone, even as a vampire he's not very functional when he's alone, which is why he bounces from relationship to relationship and why he usually goes for very strong women. He's looking for a strength in them to bolster up a weakness in himself.
He's not, as elynross points out, a likeable person. He's vain, weak, insecure, untrustworthy, and has violent, even homicidal tendencies that are only tangentially linked to vampirism.
(I figure I'm about two sentences away from talking myself out of being in lust with the character.)
In a side note, I'm not that crazy about the Buffy character, either.
She's one of those impossibly virginal, pure characters that is very hard to empathize with, but she may grow on me as I watch the show.
In the admittedly few episodes I've seen so far, she's very self-absorbed, and emotionally shallow about everything except her own needs. She did use Spike, she treated him like some kind of object that she could pick up and drop, like a puppy dog she could kick around whenever she got mad at the world and it serves her right that he attacked her*. That either has to be an incredibly shallow person, based on what she knows of the emotional capacities of some vampires or bad writing.
*I'm not in any way, of course, excusing rape or attempted rape. But the character said it herself, "she 'forgot' what he was." Why did she forget? Because she was so tied up in her own wants and needs that she didn't consider him as an individual. Again, in the few episodes I've seen, the character seems to frequently 'forget' to consider other people as people, even her friends. So, while Spike was "wrong" to try and rape her, he wasn't acting like anyone other than himself. She was just as "wrong" to treat him like a toy she could throw around when she was in a bad mood and then stuff in a drawer when she got tired of it.
I wonder how I'll be viewing the characters once I've actually seen more than about ten episodes of the first six seasons?
One thing I'll say for this show is that they don't hesitate to offer unusual characters. I'm hoping some of the others will grow on me.
I'm also hoping that no one jumps out of the bushes and tries to slay me if I say that I think Angel was an annoying, mouth-breather whose posture of brooding angst wore thin on me about five minutes after I first saw him. At least Spike does lighten up from time-to-time, even if it's usually because he's just killed something.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:37 AMAn article in the globeandmail.com about fanfiction, and slash. Apart from cringing at the end to see "steamy excerpts" lifted out of context, I found it interesting.
I can't believe this has been out for weeks and I never heard about it.
Posted by AnneZook at 07:13 PMI'm busy at work. Very busy.
Someone tell Spike to leave me alone!
Posted by AnneZook at 12:16 PMAlvin and I are still brooding over exactly how to best position our new concept for our product to be most successful. We've spent a lot of time discussing this over the past couple of weeks, as well as how to get the Chipmunk up here and beat on him until he does what we want the way we want.
Okay, that last part isn't true, but we've spent a fair amount of time bemoaning the fact that he seems to be spending about ten minutes a week on business for this company and when he is working, we never know quite what he's doing or to whom he's talking.
Drives me nuts. I'm not a control freak, don't get me wrong, but I feel like I'm floundering around drooling on myself when I realize I'm unable to follow-up on a three week-old conversation that I only heard of five minutes ago and during which I'm entirely uncertain what precisely was discussed or agreed upon, when following up on things and making them happen is what I was supposedly hired to do.
If you're confused after reading that, imagine how I feel.
Also, it looks like Tuffy the Tank overstepped the bounds in her Friday meeting with Alvin and demanded not only that our two companies merge, but that she and her current partner be given 44 percent of the equity and that she be named CEO of the new company.
Based, as I'm guiltily aware, on a lot of my own information on how Tuffy was as a boss in my previous experience with her, Alvin's not really willing to go that route with her.
Which makes me glad because while I don't doubt she has the energy to go out and make the sales to make us successful, I cannot convince myself that the emotional pain and mental exhaustion that come with working with her are worth it.
Buffy! I'm still embarrassed, but I'm completely in love with Spike (in a fannish, but non-writing way) and I rabidly disappointed on Sunday when I watched the eps I'd taped last week and realized that FX is starting their re-runs over at Season Three, which means lag time between Spike episodes because the character apparently wasn't a regular back then.
It's weird, okay? If they've finished the run of shows that they bought the rights to, why start over with Season Three instead of One? Or do they not own the rights to repeat Seasons One and Two?
It's nice to have Giles, though.
On the other hand, I know one of those amazingly gorgeous, talented, and generous fans and she says she's transferred all of her Buffy tapes to DVD, and she's offered to give her old tapes to me, hooray! I should have plenty to feed my obsession in January. Hooray for K!
I want to transfer all of my VCR tapes to DVD, too!
I'd love to be able to capture some of the shows I watch and rewatch, put them on DVD, and save the 200 feet of storage space currently occupied by VCR tapes.
For instance, they're rerunning Sentinel in January. We almost never watch it any more, but occasionally we do and it would be nice to get rid of those lousy-quality VCR tapes we have and have a short stack of tidy, clear DVDs.
However. Taking a quick look at the budget convinces me that I can't have any more high-tech toys for the next three months or so. I just don't have $1000 to invest right now.
Anyhow, I'm all torn on the subject of new toys.
I might want to bail on ATT Broadband and get a satellite dish instead. Maybe I want TIVO, too. And then if I could TIVO and transfer things to DVD instead of VCR tapes, I'd be in techno-heaven, wouldn't I?
The thing to remember is that I watch about three hours of television a week.
From whence comes this urge to spend $2000 on fancy equipment purely as toys for a three hour a week activity? I don't know, okay? I only know that when I hear people dissing Americans for conspicuous consumption, I tend to hide under the table and pretend to be a shoelace.
I want the stuff anyhow. Like I wanted the $45/month cable modem to facilitate the five minutes a day that I spend checking my e-mail. I neeeed these things! (My car needs tires and a new windshield, too, but those aren't fun.)
Of course, now that I have experienced this sudden and inexplicable burst of lust for Spike interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'll have to be watching an additional 10 hours (Good grief!) of television a week until I get caught up on the repeats FX is showing.
I'm not sure how long this will last, though, because I don't think I've ever watched 13 hours of television in a week in my entire life, outside of something like the Olympics. It's a fairly major commitment of time.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:32 PMLet me see. I can write a blog, or I can go watch four hours of Buffy that I have on tape.
Such a decision....
Posted by AnneZook at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
Blog stoppage
I had one today. I mean, besides dinking with my template this morning. Stayed home sick. Seems like for the past six weeks, all I've done is travel, sneeze, or cough. I think Alvin is getting really tired of hearing my coughing, he told me to leave early yesterday, so today I just called in and said I was staying home to rest.
He sounded all serious and worried when I talked to him, which made me feel guilty. He figures that as sick as I've been when I've been coming to work, I must have been really bad today to stay home. Truth is, I was just flat tired, had a bit of a headache, and felt like a day off.
Still, I did have a nice nap and I'm sure I'll be all bright and perky tomorrow. (Cough. Cough.)
I taped the two episodes of BtVS that were on this morning and watched them. Annoyed because the tape stopped about a minute before the tag ended and I missed a Buffy-Spike scene that looked like it was starting out to be a good one.
I love the way Spike takes his clothes off at the drop of a hat, I must say. A very attractive quality in a man.
I really want to see the early episodes where he was all totally evil and stuff. Even as a not-quite-evil guy, he's a lot more interesting than that other character, Angel, that they used to have Buffy involved with.
No Giles, though. Sigh. I think they're in the middle of a season where his character wasn't around or something.
Posted by AnneZook at 06:34 PMAlvin's annoyed at the Chipmunk.
I am, too.
The more we work on this project and the more we learn about what it's going to take to make it successful, the more we're beginning to realize that all of the vaunted "expertise" the Chipmunk was supposed to be bringing to the table (in return for his generous stock option program), is mostly smoke and mirrors.
In pointed questioning over the last two days, I've elicited the information that of all the times the Chipmunk has tried something similar to the program we're starting up now, not one of them has ever been successful. There's always some excuse, someone else whose fault it was, but the bottom line is that the man has never successfully brought a project to completion.
That means I'm going to be spending the next three weeks tearing apart all of the training and marketing material we have and completely restructuring our approach and rewriting all of it. The new approach has to be ready to go by January 2, when we hope to roll out our new and improved program.
I hated New Orleans but now I'm admitting that it was a good thing I made this trip myself. I learned a ton of things, mostly about what we're doing wrong, that I might not have learned for six months, if ever, if someone else had gone. Fortunately, I also came up with at least a few vague ideas for how we might trying doing it instead. And, just as fortunately, Alvin agrees with me.
The point of all of this is that we've been having discussions, almost since the day I arrived here, about whether or not to bring The Terminator on board to work with us. She used to be my boss a couple of companies ago and while I'll admit she can bring results, and sales, in the door, I'll also stand steadfastly by the fact that many times you seriously question whether or not you want to be successful that badly. Is the pain worth the gain? With her, it doesn’t always seem to be.
However, she's been working hard on changing and has improved immensely. Enough so that she's more Tuffy the Tank than Terminator these days.
I think what Alvin and I are eventually going to decide is that, with a few boundaries drawn in carefully before the fact, bringing Tuffy on board and finally getting some real momentum going on sales is worth the potential problems.
Buehler, who has only previously been approached about bringing Tuffy on board as a sort of outside sales person, is in for a shock. He's worked with her before, but not this closely, and I don't think he has any idea of the total chaos he's about to face.
Serves him right. He's owned his part of this company for over ten years and it's still dinking along from one cash crisis to another and there's no excuse for it. His product and his concept are really, really good. He's just never put the consistent effort into the business to make it successful.
IDoJeannie really is leaving. Looks like it's official on January 1. They've hired a replacement, but before she gets here, Alvin and I are snagging IDoJeannie's double-sized office for ourselves. A couple of those acoustical "cubicle" walls to split it into two spaces and we'll be good to go. The new receptionist can sit where a receptionist should sit, at the desk in the reception area.
Since I stopped answering the phone for Darrell's company after IDoJeannie leaves around 2:00 each day, he has, if possible, spoken to me even less often than he used to. The Other Brother Darrell seems to be up to something. He's always wandering casually by my desk and asking what I'm up to. I think it's because one day he came over and found me playing "Bookworm" on my lunch break. They suspect me of goofing off all day.
Of course, there are times when this would be an accurate description of my day (NaNoWriMo!), but that doesn't change the basic fact that it's no part of my job to play receptionist for their company or the parent company.
In embarrassing news, I woke up the other day and found myself an addict. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm going to have to hit Blockbuster and see if they have the early season DVDs for rent. (I hate to buy anything unless I'm reasonably sure I'm going to want to watch it more than once.)
Anyhow, imagine my chagrin, after flaunting my indifference to this fannish phenomenon for lo! howevermany years. It's not my fault, though, it's my company's fault.
Specifically, it's the Chipmunk's fault.
If he hadn't pissed off the client, I wouldn't have been in N.O. with time on my hands in early November and wouldn't have seen a couple of episodes of the show with "Giles" and "Spike" in them, and fallen into lust with both characters.
Also if the Chipmunk hadn't pissed off the client, I wouldn't have had to go back to New Orleans this past week and would not have had time on my hands to sit and watch Spike gettin' all nekkid and stuff.
It's the Chipmunk's fault, okay?
Anyhow. I'm still not sure how much I'll like the show, but I'm convinced that I need to see Spike in his early, evil days. And that I need to see a lot more of Giles.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:41 PMDay 1 - Gee, but I wanna go home.
it's not a good start when your landing for a trip you don't want to take anyhow is delayed for half an hour so that the stupid President's stupid plane can take off. I mean, everyone knows the man does no work (he had more vacation days in the first year of his Presidency than most Presidents take in three years, including taking the entire month of August, 2001, off) but he could at least stay in Washington and pretend to be doing something, okay? Why does he have to be where I am?
As I may have mentioned before, I hate 2-star hotels. I can't remember the last time I stayed in one and this Ramada Inn is reminding me of why I stopped.
I had to move the coffee pot from the bathroom area into the sleeping area because the cover over the outlet it was plugged into in the bathroom area seemed to be falling off the wall, with the wires connected to it being the only thing holding it on.
I was grateful, to have a coffee pot, though. I'll admit that I'd have been more grateful to have had coffee and a cup as well. Fortunately I had some kind of disaster premonition and brought coffee, filters, and a cup, things I don't usually carry when I travel.
The room needs painted and repapered, badly, and while I appreciate the table to work on, I would have equally appreciated a desk chair. However, I've decided that by pulling the armchair over and perching on the arm, I can probably type for about ten minutes before I lose all feeling in my butt. Or my knees, which are crammed under the lip of the table.
The hotel dining room (I never book a hotel without room service and a restaurant) was closed this evening, for no discernable reason. Not having eaten all day, I decided to walk the block to the Holiday Inn that I was told was the only food (besides Burger King, yecch) close by.
Probably the worst meal I've ever had in my life. I had to pick between "jambalaya" and "red beans and rice", both local specialties. I've had RB&R before and loved it, so I finally settled on it but a disgusting mound of tasteless white rice surrounded by a lake of some unidentifiable brown bean sauce and a couple of slices of bland sausage is not what I've been served before when I've ordered it, okay?
Now I also remember why I order chicken 90 percent of the time when I travel.
I know, you can't expect something fabulous from a hotel restaurant, but I think one that has the nerve to charge an average $15 a plate for dinner entrees is obligated to present edible food.
It's nice to have three closets ( Three? Three! In a hotel! And one is a walk-in!), but I'd have been more impressed if there hadn’t been a total of seven hangers in the three of them. I had to hang my clothes all over the place and I'll probably forget something when I leave. Sigh.
But I spoke to the client, she was very friendly, wants me to meet her in her office at 10 tomorrow, and she seems to have had some kind of ESP moment because she said she didn't trust me to drive myself around town and she's enlisted her boyfriend to haul me from place to place for the next three days.
Isn't that sweet? I mean, I could have rented a car but I didn't because I have the world's worst sense of direction, so I was going to take cabs and just nick the company for the cost, but she was appalled at the expense (maybe it's just me, but I don't consider $20 that expensive for a cab ride) and made different arrangements.
Honestly, I'd rather have the freedom to just call a cab when I want to go somewhere, but how can you fault that kind of generosity?
She's also decided they want to take some time and show me "their" New Orleans, including some place she said we had to eat, because she's appalled that I saw nothing of the city the last time I was here.
Again, by the end of a day visiting various offices, cajoling reluctant people to at least try the equipment, and troubleshooting any IT problems with the installations, and, it seems, making nice to her boyfriend in between times, I'd rather collapse in the hotel room and fall apart for a few hours, but there's no way to refuse that kind of offer.
Sigh. Especially not after I worked so hard to make these people like my company. (Okay, I don't know if they like my company yet or not, but they apparently like me and that’s certainly a start, isn't it?)
Fine. Now my butt is numb.
Day 2 – I don't like it here.
This city smells funny. It's the swamps or bayous or whatever they call them I guess. Kind of sour.
This morning at 8:00 I discovered that that metal plate next to the outlet cover that's falling off of the wall is where the hair dryer for this room should have been. I called housekeeping and they said they'd find me a hair dryer.
This morning at 9:45 I went to the front desk to complain that said hair dryer had not appeared and they told me they'd find me one.
This afternoon at 4:30 I got back to the hotel and to my room and there's no hair dryer. I just called the front desk and they've said they'll find me one.
It might have been cheaper to take a cab today instead of using my client's boyfriend since it turns out he's charging me for the service. I don't mind it, he's not asking for that much, but I didn't understand from the client's phone call yesterday that this guy was going to want paid for picking me up, driving me to two places, and bringing me back to the hotel. Still, I keep telling myself that tomorrow and Friday the offices I'm visiting are much further away and that it will be more cost-effective in the end. He's a nice guy and all but six solid hours of "making nice" about wore me out today. Especially since he's all born-again about some 12-step drug abuse he helps administer.
Considering how long I had to wait for a cab outside the hotel this morning, it might be worth it to have a car and driver waiting on my convenience as I work these offices.
I've decided that it's not that the client likes me that much that she made this arrangement. It's because, (1) her boyfriend needed to earn some extra money; and (2) they think I'm dimwitted or something. He not only drove me to each appointment, he walked me into each office and then sat there and waited for me. In retrospect, I'm kind of insulted.
The three of us wound up having lunch in a food court in the mall that the client's office building sits next to. People are always raving about the food down here and while I know I haven't seen a decent restaurant yet, I'm...well, I'm annoyed that I've eaten six meals in this town (between the two trips I've made here in the last three weeks) and I haven't seen a decent restaurant yet.
I found a wobbly little vanity stool in the dressing area and I'm using it for a desk chair. It's about 6" too low and, as I said, wobbly, but is easier to use than the other chair since I'm not getting numb knees.
The client wanted to take me to, "the quarters" tonight, which I assume is either somewhere in the French Quarter or some other part of town, that being the local slang for it, but I begged off saying I needed to work.
I don't, but I'm tired and I can't take One. More. Minute. of being twelve-stepped today. I haven't had a decent meal since I've been here, but just for this once I'm willing to trade nutrition for peace and quiet.
Hey, hey! I called the office and now I have internet access!
Sigh. No, I don’t. I can dial in to my office e-mail, that's all.
I want to go home!
Day Three – Cold
Last night it rained, which explains why it was so muggy all day yesterday.
Today it's cold with a chilly breeze and I mean inside the hotel room. There seems to be a crack running along the underside of the windowsill and the wind is blowing in it. I'd turn on the heat but the heating unit has nothing but cold air to offer.
I went to the front desk on my way out to my first meeting this morning and stood over the woman until she found a hair dryer and called someone to take it to my room. When I got back this evening...no blasted hair dryer! So I went back to the front desk and it was sitting there, still in a box. They let me bring it upstairs, though, so I guess I won the battle.
I'm very grateful to have it. I used it a few minutes ago to thaw my feet out.
Sigh
I'm rethinking the "deal" the client offered my about having her boyfriend drive me around. Yesterday wasn't bad but cabs would have been a lot cheaper today. I don't think there's any way I can get out of it tomorrow, but I dread to think what he's going to charge me for a trip to an office 25 miles away since another thing I didn't understand is that he intends to charge by the day, extra for gas, extra for more than two stops, and extra for more miles. I get the feeling I'm being had.
I'm just cranky I guess. If I'd been scheduling this, I would have done the first four offices in one day and then I could have done the other two today and have gone home tomorrow. I'm bitter that I have to stay until Saturday morning.
Maybe I'll take another shower to warm up. (And dry my hair!)
Day Four - Get me outta here!
My head cold that was disappearing has returned with a vengeance and now I've got bronchitis, I'm spending about 20 minutes at each of these appointments which means most of my day is wasted time, I still haven't had a decent meal (I offered to buy them dinner today and we wound up at freaking Bennigan's and I'm starting to think all of this talk about the fabbo New Orleans food is a lie), I'm having to sleep with all of my clothes on because it's so cold in this room, and I hate New Orleans.
Five o'clock this morning my phone rings, scaring the life out of me. (Since I got here, I've been called and told that one aunt fell and broke a hip and that an uncle had a heart attack and emergency heart surgery.)
This time it turned out to be the client with a brilliant idea that I should address a doctors' committee meeting at 7:30 this morning to explain to them what exactly is going on with this project. I'm starting to think the guy who signed these people up for this kept it a complete secret from everyone involved.
Naturally I said yes, rolled out of bed, pulled myself together (a hair dryer! Hooray!), and staggered downstairs by 6:50 so they could pick me up and drive me.
The day went okay. Today's scheduled office visit was 25 miles away and we wound up driving over what I'm told is the world's longest stretch of bridge that goes entirely over water - 24 miles. That was pretty cool. But. An hour's drive there, ten minutes inside, and then an hour's drive back, not including the time my "driver" spent getting lost. This is not a good use of time, since this was the only office actually using the equipment.
Still, I went, I made nice, and that's my job, right?
In other news, when I paid the boyfriend for today's trip (which I declined to make a substantial sum), the client looked surprised and it was pretty clear she hadn't known he was charging me money. That makes me feel better.
This evening, I came back to the room, packed, and now I'm going to sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the clock until tomorrow morning and I can get out of here.
The client asked me when I was going to be back and I managed not to spit, "when hell freezes over", which I think was something of a triumph.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:23 AMActually, I don't have any. Alvin's working at home today, not that I mind having him in the office, and my little corner of the world is fairly peaceful.
I've decided to develop a better attitude about this blasted business trip. It is, after all, what they hired me to do and much as I might wish we could get only non-stupid clients, the world doesn't work that way.
The mood-adjustment could well be connected to discovering that I just might be able to hook into our network while I'm traveling so that I can, at least intermittently, check my e-mail. I know, it's a sickness, but I can't help it. I can't be off-line for five days!
Now all I need to know is whether or not there's a coffee pot in my hotel room.
Related to writing
The NaNoWriMo project is over and I'm glad and sad.
Glad because I was spending far too much time not working at work.
Sad because it's the first time I've written in several years and it was kind of fun. I actually felt at loose ends on Sunday, wandering around aimlessly and not quite able to settle down to anything. It took me a couple of hours to realize that I've spent the last two Sundays writing madly and that I was missing it!
Along with the NaNoWriMo piece o'crap, I've been dabbling with a fanfiction story over the last couple of weeks but I can't really go any further with that until I get my OaT tapes back from the person I loaned them to a few months ago. It's not an easy fandom to write in under the best of circumstances, what with the crappy characterization in canon and all, and I wouldn't dare try it until I'd re-watched several episodes.
Until that point, I've amused myself over the past couple of days by going through the NaNo'crap and deleting the worst of the worst that I wrote. I've only managed to remove 6,000 words so far (mostly gratuitous sex scenes and one endless passage of interior monologue that served no purpose but to pad out the word count), but I'm sure I can get another 10,000 out of it easily. I have huge sections marked in blue (code: re-write) that should wind up substantially shortened.
Original fiction is an interesting problem and I'm beginning to get intrigued by this story. Unlike my fanfiction, I didn't immediately have "voices" for the characters so my main character didn't really develop a personality until about 25k into the process. Even now his personality isn't what I'd call well-defined or memorable. In fact, he's appallingly bland. In fact, most of the characters are essentially interchangeable.
That's what comes of not planning in advance.
I wasn’t in the habit of planning most of my fanfiction stories out ahead of time (What was there to plan? Characters yakked and then had sex. That's pretty straightforward.) You can't write OC fiction that way, though. (Well, you can if you're just writing porn, but I wasn't. At least not at first, even though it turned out that way.)
Must. Stop. Digressing.
As I was saying, you can't really write original fiction that way. Since you can't rely upon the reader's memory of the characters on-screen to fill in voice, personality, and diction, you have to work a lot harder to establish your characters. And in order to do that, you have to know yourself who they are.
If you begin, as I did, with the vague idea of a good-looking guy with brown hair, green eyes, and a nicely developed set of muscles from the scalp down, you don't wind up with much in the way of memorable characterization. (In retrospect, I should have made him smarter, but whatever.)
It's turning out to be sort of an attractive problem, though.
What do you do with a primary character of average intelligence but not much given to introspection who finds himself in the middle of a major confrontation with the Forces of Evil? He has a slew of intelligent assistance and will probably even wind up being the sidekick to the guy who does the real work, which makes it troublesome to decide just how to present the story and what is to be gained, if anything, by using such a traditional mythic structure but breaking with tradition by making a secondary character the eyes through which the reader sees the action. Sort of, "Dr. Watson meets Ulysses" I guess.
In my own defense, I never expected the NaNo'crap to develop anything resembling a plot in the first place. It wouldn't have happened if, 30,000 words into it, I hadn't gotten bored with my Hero and with writing huge, indigestible lumps of backstory and exposition.
The point of all of this babbling is that I've come to the conclusion that one thing that must go from the NaNo'crap is the only part of the novel that I really liked, the beginning, and that pisses me off. Not only because I liked it, and I almost never like anything I write, but because now I have to come up with a new beginning and a catchy opening scene is both vital and hard to come up with.
I love this blog/journal thing! Not even my nearest and dearest friends want to listen to me rambling on endlessly this way and I know it, but there's something about a forum like this.... Even if I'm just talking to myself, it feels like a conversation.
I get the benefits of discussing my problem "out loud" without actually having to inflict it on anyone and without anyone having to try and compose a coherent response that sounds like they care.
I have no idea if I'll be able to get on-line over the next five days or not. If not, you can always hope that my interest in the NaNo'crap will have waned by the time I get back to town.
Be good.
P.S. The Chipmunk just called and suggested that as long as I'm going to Louisiana, I might as well go to Alabama. What planet does this man live on, anyhow? I said no. I already have my tickets bought and I have a full schedule over the next five days. Sheesh.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:33 PM