It started with me sleeping thorough 30 minutes of Radio Bollocks. When I got to work, I had to sort yet another techie hassle with email. This delayed my most important task: ensuring that the reprinted Higher Maths answer sections could be put into the books currently languishing in the warehouse. (It also further delayed some planning I have to do but more on delays later: reasons for delay have been delayed!) The warehouse just aren’t letting our printers know when the books can be collected so that the answer sections can be replaced. Meanwhile Trading Standards have made a branch of WHSmith take Higher Maths off the shelves because there’s a tiny error on the cover so all WHSmith branches have ceased selling this title. The print-run is only 18,500 so we’re not at all concerned. We’re writing to all bookstores who have bought the book, sending them replacement answer sections and a note that there isn’t really a mistake on the cover! The letter says that all stock will be sorted by 8th October. Fat chance of this is we can’t get the books back this week.

I found another mistake in a proof: our repro house say they check proofs before they send them out but apparently they don’t do so thoroughly!

All day I was trying to contact people and so didn’t dare go to lunch – my lunch consisted of beans and chips brought in by a colleague at 3pm.

I got shit for not printing someone else’s crap instantaneously – it’s not my fault they fucked their printer twice in short order.

Our admin assistant has been excused phone duty because the orders have built up and so she is too busy entering them to handle customer calls. Yet we know that the past papers release is going cause hundreds of calls because people are impatient for their books. Apparently, if we asked for a temp to cover the totally predictable 1 or two mad weeks, customer service would have been moved to Swindon. How fucking stupid is that? Either we look bad now or we look totally shit later when customer service are miles away and are even less on top of exactly what’s happening. Part of the rush to enter orders is to get revenue showing on the books. What difference can it make if we show the income this month or next month? Surely it’s the total income for the whole project that counts. Businesses have agreemetns with banks to cover cash-flow issues. Meanwhile production can’t work properly because we’re taking calls from Mrs Wank-features and her coterie of harridans who don’t appreciate that if we do a series of nearly 70 books, some are going to arrive before others, especially when we’re dependent on outside organisations and individuals and even more so when some of these outsiders are slow to do their work and when at least one of whom is actively obstructing production of his subject’s book. Of course we have absolutely no power to make them do the stuff we depend on them doing.

The obvious solution is to not say they’re published until they’re all in our warehouse but then we’d be accused of being late!

Two more printer’s proofs of answer sections arrived – one got approved without changes but the other was approved subject to further correction. I’m buggered to understand why it’s taken over 10 working days to create these proofs since all they had to do was feed the files into platemaking software and watch the pages print – and that will take a few hours at the most. Since the files are PDF-IT, it makes sod-all difference whether the answers are text or graphical. PDF-ITs are just dots and so there is NO parsing process. No bastard wonder these books won’t be ready for another 2 weeks.

Meanwhile my publishing colleagues have asked me to arrange an advance of a book that won’t be delivered until 15th October to go to a customer NOW! So I get another set of proofs output, hoping that they can be wiro-bound and sent to the customer. God knows what it will cost – it’s a nice gesture which won’t hurt our customer service reputation (which is somewhere in the subsoil just now) but sets a horrible precedent.

Why is our CS rep so shit, you ask? Well, much earlier this year, about 14 books flagged up as being close to selling out. So I sorted the covers and title pages to include the new logos but just after we’d run out, it was decided to totally revamp the covers and title pages. So the designer we’re tied into delivers the new covers two or three weeks after his agreed delivery date (by which time the new school year had started). Then we found that the spine widths we’d been working to are now incorrect, because the books are now being printed on standard GL paper which is thinner (but fortunately not weaker) than the paper we’ve used previously so the new designs needed to be tweaked. Half of the covers had been created in QwankAbcess and so our repro-house could sort them. The others had been created in InDesign: at first I was asked to tweak them: I wasn’t keen, because I was (and still am) up to my neck in Past Paper shite, and because I have almost no experience with InDesign and so can’t promise that I’ll get it right. Eventually our repro house said they can do the job. We found out another two weks later that they had subcontracted the job to some other bunch of repro-artists who took their own sweet time. Finally, the printing of the books had to fit in with GL’s batching of titles (to save money) which delayed them even more so they’re not set to arrive until about 2 months into the new school year.

Oh yes, the planning I had to do today: This was to check and then implement schedules for 4 new titles I’ve been handed to pass on to my staff. The schedules needed a lot of work to even begin to understand them. When I graped them side by side, I saw half the time my colleagues are supposed to be actively working on two projects at once – which means I’ll be doing a lot of fire-fighting. Then again, the schedules are self-contradictory but still there appears to be no real opportunity for me to take a holiday. The date proposed for celebrating this year’s past papers project is in one of the weeks I’d most want to be away from all things Leckie.

Good news? Well, GL give us 25th December to 3rd January off on top of our annual leave (and I still have 15 days of annual leave left to take) and Elly-total-nice-person has sent me some lovely Lush-stuff and a lovely email.

With Jayne and David’s help, I’ve been putting stuff back in the loft. There is still a lot of unused storage space. Tools are neatly bagged up in the loft, camping & travel gear is in a neat place of its own, I’ve been able to start to rearrange clothing storage and books will fit on the argos wardrobe.

I’ve had a chance to oxfam or dump a reasonable amount of stuff and I’m sure more will go as I sort through books and clothing. So I have achieved quite a lot and there is the prospect of achieving more and getting more stuff out of the living room.

Many thanks to Will for helping me put the wood in the loft and cut it to fit. All faults in the work are mine!

The only fly in the ointment is I missed speaking with Julia – she’d left early for college and numb-nuts Bruce had left iCHat signalling that I was still at work.

Well, I’m clever. I got to sleep at at 7.30 this morning. My eyes feel gritty and I’m likely to be very impatient with the world. Tea … tea … I must have tea

pub was too noisy to even attempt a serious conversation. No mention of presents. Jane Ann won’t be at pub lunch tomorrow and I don’t feel like telling them individually. Tried to invite P&J back here but Pete too knackered and I didn’t want to beg. So do I tell them after Gavin, Lisa et al or do I just not bother with the pub tomorrow lunch? I want to clean and tidy here but not have a timetable. (e.g. must wake at X, at 2 pm must go to pub, at 4pm must meet Adriani, must get home from them in time to see Celia) Need to unwind else I’ll never make it through next week and god I need to survive until payday so I can afford to go away somewhere and cry.

Take the quiz: “Which Random Irish Gaelic Phrase Are You? ”

Ta me air meisce
Ta me air meisce – ‘I am drunk.’You enjoy a drink – or five – now and then. You can usually be found in a pub – it doesn’t matter which one, because they all look the same after a few drinks – or hugging the porcelain.

1. huge thanks to Jayne and David for helping me get the wood (which will soon floor some of my loft) home last night.
2. it’s been an interesting day
   • The new proofs of the stuffed maths answers weren’t ready first thing this morning (which had been promised)
   • Some chasing got them to appear
   • I checked them and signed them off
   • Then arrived two other proofs ready for sign-off, so I checked them and signed them off.
   • But they arrived with a proof of a book which should not yet have reached that stage – we’d had to stop it because of a © problem
   • so phonecalls ‘er, if we have to reprint this section, this is at printer’s cost, cos we told you not to print it yet’
   • Then our secretary calls up – she took someone to Dundee and then had a puncture – can my colleague go rescue her
   • so he did, and reapperared 3 hours later, cos they’d had to get her new tyre fitted to the wheel, take this back to the car, get the car unimpounded, fit the wheel and then get home
   • meanwhile phones were going crazy!

Then got parcels from Lady Ja nd had to deal with her embarrassment at who she is. But she has FUCK-ALL to be embarrassed about. We all have our faults and hers are mearely the impetuosity of youth, and are far outweighed by her central concern (almost to a fault) for others!

Right, time to go plank my loft!

I planned to tell folk in this order:

1. Pete and Jane tonight but Jane’s away till silly o’clock this evening
2. Elly (cos Heather already knows and it seems wrong to treat them unequally)
3. Angela and Mark (Angela introduced me to IM which got me together with you in the first place. They, along with Elly, Heather and Richard are my oldest friends)
4. parents
5. those who need to know at work

Also, I feel kinda bad at demanding back the overtime from the Past Papers considering I’ve just cost GL a load of money. I have 15 regular days of holiday left and want to see the PP project through, then go somewhere and do the necessary crying, so I can get it over with and start to try to reconstruct my life.

Part of this will involve trying to sort with J how I need to interact with her from now on. She is a nice person and there are so many parts of her that are worthwhile and and delightful to interact with but I need to convince myself not to want a return to the ‘good old days’, while still seeing her as a special friend?

Update: 10.44pm: just spoken with Elly, so plan not too badly off-kilter now.

On top of all that’s happened

1. the answers to Higher Maths Past Papers contain only 2002 to 2004 but the book also has 2001’s exams
2. the cover says ‘2000 to 2004’

I signed off the answers and the person who signed off the cover reports to me.

We can reprint the answers but we can’t reprint the book.

This is the worst possible mistake in my professional life – a complete reprint of something for which I am responsible.

Many thanks to Jayne and David for helping move the wood and showing me that life goes on.

Heather took me to a club. It was a real eye-opener. I think I understand her better now and I think I understand myself better too. I’ll write more about it later but for now, Heather: THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!

Is there no end to my clumsiness or at least lack of thought? Whatever I do as ‘natural Bruce’ hurts Julia. OK, I could say it’s none of her business but by telling her, I make it part of her business and she can’t help but have feelings. So I could either not do something or do it and lie. Of course, I do it and tell her…

… and she is horrified and numbed, right in the middle of a college crisis.

And to cap it all, one of the leading components of my tension is that I haven’t been able to talk with Julia properly, so I go out and do something that makes her have more feelings and makes me tired so I have even less time and ability to communicate!