I regret to say I’m feeling slightly uninspired this week and for no apparent reason. Perhaps I have early onset S.A.D and my mental state is declining as fast as the quality of TV programming these days – who knows. Anyway, in light of this don’t expect any real amusement, verbal swordsmanship or high-brow bonhomie because you just. won’t. get. it.
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Hmmm….I wrote the above just yesterday when I was feeling slightly more tired than usual, ever so slightly ‘fluey’ and the weather wasn’t as good as it has been…what a fickle mistress mood can be sometimes! You’ll be happy to hear that I’m far more chipper today, fresh weather this morning, still not too much sleep but you can’t have everything!

Sadly, what started as a thoroughly enjoyable rotation this week descended into a stagnant mire of meteorologically related ass enterprise . I have been working for a client heavily involved in campaigning for improvements in the environment and more topically, climate. Again, on first blush this would seem like a very important, interesting and involving area to work in. On second blush however (if there is such a thing), it proves anything but. I’ve spent the last few days basically copying and pasting the same website, but in ten different languages into an Excel document. As I sat in a miasma of my own burning irritation, my mood descended as a prisoner’s in the tumbrels en route to the guillotine. Like Sisyphus, with no real end in sight, this task was slowly gnawing away at the skin of my very essence and greedily slurping my soul through a straw, leaving me a mere shell of a man, hunched, sallow over the keyboard and illuminated by the soft glow of an eastern-European homepage…and not even a rude one at that!

Fortunately the human spirit is a remarkably stoic existential creation and through the power of mere positive thought, I managed to fight off this soul sucking harpy that was gorging itself on my very existence. In reality, what really happened was that on Wednesday I finally finished copying and pasting all the multi-lingual code into excel and so was freed from my sadistically tortuous task…still, it’s nice to believe ‘innit?

I was given a few other tasks on Wednesday to lighten my mood further but sadly, they were very short and not particularly involved so a lot of the time was spent waiting for things to do. You can ask for work as much as you like, but if there simply isn’t anything or the team is too busy, there is little you can do other than, say, write your blog entry! What I did do was write a short sell-in to the team at a large beauty agency, promoting the benefits of one of our blogs to them and effectively, to counter the old adage, trying to deny that beauty really isn’t in the eye of the beholder but at the end of a lipstick or in a clutch of foundation and that we could give expert and promotion and advice (via a special-agent style syndicate blogger) to a trusting public on how best to use their products to counter God’s devilry in making someone…interesting looking/ugly as sin. I also used my limited creative verbal capacity to construct a newsletter introduction for another client, the usefulness to a reader of which was anteceded only by its brevity.

As you can probably gather, despite my conspicuously ebullient mood today, this week has been one characterised, more often than not, by my boredom. This is a shame because the first half of my rotation in EIS was good and I enjoyed the responsibility given to me to sort out the NAT client. I guess, as with everything in life, you have to take the rough with the smooth. It’s just that this week has been particularly abrasive. There was one real ‘high’ for me this week and that was to secure a really great bit of coverage for the National Aids Trust from Sunderland TCPT. Whilst it may not sound groundbreaking and certainly won’t cure third world debt or prevent the spread of AIDS, it was of such a high quality and volume that it perked me up somewhat.

To end on a slightly lighter note, it’s now Friday at 14:42 and tonight we’ll be out on the tiles (or on the ‘toon’ as Davies might well say….howay the lads!) in the West End for a drink with the combined forces of JCPR and Edelman. It should be a good, if horrendously wallet spanking affair. Then, feeling no-less than bright and breezy I have to rise from my pit of fug and heady confusion at about 8am on Saturday and head down to Lewes for their paganistic style fireworks parade and display…lots of loud bangs, bright lights and not an insignificant amount of alcohol – sure-fire way to cure a hangover!