Personal: Email, Email and Sleep

Blarg and flibblepenguinahoy (hello to all of you who found this blog through those keywords – yep, the email you received is probably from the same person, and talk about cryptic comments 🙂 ). Today’s been “one of those days” where I had a few major projects to work on (2 clients need websites designing, I’m still working on automating the Nominet DNS registrations and I’m just trying a few things with a shopping cart package), but I spent all day (and I wish I was kidding) just responding to emails and sales calls – I’m normally just search engine optimising/tech support, but some of our sales team have been off the past two days so I had to chip in.

I think I’ve managed to get a couple of sales sorted for our lower-end search engine optimisation service, maybe two e-commerce shopping cart customers and maybe even a reseller signed up (we work with a number of web design orientated companies who then outsource/resell their search engine placement and promotion services to us: we get customers without the hassle of having to contact each one and bill them individually – it’s slightly cheaper for us to send one monthly bill to one company that we know is a ‘good payer’ then 100 smaller bills to 100 customers and then having to check they have all paid – and we pass this discount on), and then I had some tech support issues to work out…

So the amount of work I “actually” got done today in my eyes: 0. Amount of work I hopefully generated for the company: Quite a lot (a couple of ‘minor clients’ have said they’ll be referring a few people to us because of the good support and positions we’ve given them). Fingers crossed, as we can always do with more work (things are ‘ticking over’ nicely, but if we do get a flood of work, well, we’ll just have to work longer hours and train up my new co-worker BRCW on how to do search engine optimisation and stuff).

Luckily, apart from the minor technical support queries (such as ‘I’ve forgotten my password’, ‘How do I use FTP’ etc), there’s been nothing major in the last few days, and I hope it continues that way. Most queries can be answered via our technical help desk system, but some people just don’t want to read…

Apart from that, I’ve been really tired again. Was nearly late for work this morning (too tired to move, then my trousers broke and then I realised I only had 2p cash, so I had to go down to the cash machine – all delays I don’t really need now that I’ve got my timing to work “just right”), got home and fell instantly asleep. My parents phoned me at 9pm which woke me up (with a bit of a fright I have to confess – I answered the phone so quickly my Mum didn’t even hear it ring at her end!), which just kept me awake long enough to have dinner ( three-quarters of a very small microwavable pizza – why aren’t I hungry?) and to watch “Baddiel+Skinner Unplanned” on TV. It’s true what Frank (Skinner) observed near the end of the show, David Baddiel is just about the only person in Britain who could get a laugh out of getting a mention of Auschwitz in a comedy sketch (Baddiel is Jewish by the way, so he’s “allowed” to). According to Frank, David only recounted the story of going to visit the memorial at Auschwitz so that he could claim back the expenses of the trip from the production company (although it was quite funny hearing that as he was deep in thought at the memorial, a bloke came up to him and asked “When is Fantasy Football coming back?” ( ). ).

Anyway, I’m off back to bed shortly, so goodnight one and all!