…magazine, that is!
Six (More) Ways to Recruit Women is a sidebar in a related story, Making Your IT Department More Attractive to Women.
My story had to be cut for space but get in touch if you’re interested - it’s a doozy.
There is a certain type of “manager” who rises to the top of his profession by mindlessly copying and pasting information he pulls out of in-flight magazines, foreign newspapers, and things his teenagers leave around the house. He mixes and mashes them about and displays the results with grinning avarice, and proudly demonstrates his skill in bluffing his way through his career to cover up his complete lack of natural talent and ability.
I thought I’d met the king of such managers before, but ladies and gentlemen, meet Dr Van Ham. Indeed.
My other half used his charm to persuade the owners of the boozerie down the street to special order Sam Adams - my national beer - just for me.
I’m glad that April’s crate of six arrived yesterday, because I’m going to need it tonight. After ignoring the elephant in the corner, I’m going to have to shoot the b*****d once and for all.
I have been using Dreamhost to host my web sites for about three years. In the past few months, the service has gone downhill to the point of being inoperative - and this has all happened under the smirking gaze of its sarcastic, juvenile owners. In addition to my account going down more often than a drunk groupie, I am still smarting from their “billing error” debacle, when they billed me for 24 months service all at once, and thought it was funny.
Once again today, all my web sites and emails are down. I can’t even FTP into my own server. As usual their support status blog has nothing to say, and in fact today’s hardware upgrade does not even involve my cluster. As best I can tell, my whole online empire has been completely offline for at least 14 hours. I have literally lost count of how many times in the past two months things have gone down for hours at a time with no explanation.
Honestly, if it was just hardware failure, I could deal with it. It’s the fact that they are quite proud to project the impression that they are run by stoned frat boys working out of a dorm room, and trying to remind them that some of us have businesses to run etc etc gets you personally attacked and criticised as if it was you in the wrong, not them.
I have invested in a VPS through WebFusion and have been procrastinating moving all those files and redirecting all those domains - oh yay, who wants to rejig a server - however, with my business day now having screeched to a halt for reasons which I cannot even explain to my customers, the time has come to load the dart gun.
So, my Brewer Patriot, it’s just you and me tonight.
If Gene Hunt was there when the car exploded, he must have been real.
Stick that up your Drupal.
A few years ago I was moved to tears by the story of the Knockando Wool Mill in Speyside, which was competing to win funds to ensure its survival on the BBC series “Restoration“. Although they lost, they have kept up the fight and this week its survival was guaranteed.
I can’t wait to visit.
Oh, and they’ve got a cracking web site too! It’s proof in action of the marketing axiom that says when you are a charity or a nonprofit asking for money, you need to market yourself professionally but not in a way that suggests you’re blowing all your funds on gloss and sexy PR. For Knockando, the dream speaks for itself.
I am spending my Easter weekend recoding a complex web site to conform to a mythical CSS layout so elusive that it’s more than the Holy Grail. It’s The Holier Grail.
Shouldn’t I have partaken of The Holier Grail the other day?
Come to think of it, last week a potential client denied me three times, so I’m well on course.
The Oban seaplane taking off, as seen through an anchor hole in the Tall Ship.
Damn designers…we can’t just look at a plane taking off. Oh noooo! We have to find some rusty metal hole to squat behind! And then post the picture like it’s some freakin’ piece of art! Sigh.
Pardon me if I get a bit personal. It might be you or me someday.
My mother-in-law’s aunt, the family “Auntie”, who is 80 years old, had to go into a care home last year after her dementia became too much to deal with at home. Auntie showed some improvement in the facility. For a while.
Last week Auntie’s son, my husband’s cousin, found Auntie lying on the floor next to her bed. Her whole left side, eyes to chest, was bruised. The staff said she had fallen out of bed. They later said they had taken her to the local emergency room and she’d been checked out and was fine. It was just bruises.
The next day my husband’s cousin visited again and noticed Auntie was holding her head in a strange way. He had her taken to a different hospital, where she was x-rayed.
Her neck was broken.
How does someone break their neck, and become covered in bruises, by falling out of bed onto a carpeted floor?
It gets worse. It turns out the care home lied about having taken her to the local hospital to get checked out. They never did.
There had been unpleasant reports in the media about this care home before. We just didn’t think it would happen to us. My mother in law is a care home assessor herself. She knows what to look for, she knows what doesn’t pass muster, and she has always regarded this place with baited breath. And now she is advising a formal investigation into the treatment of a woman who helped to bring her up.
Auntie is being kept in the Southern General for her own safety. For the first few days she was so confused and distraught that she had to be kept under sedation. She’ll be put into a private nursing home after this, as I suspect more than a few of her fellow care home residents will be once the Care Commission and the police have finished their investigation.
Auntie never had a bad word to say about anyone in her life. She’s confused, vulnerable, and thinks she is eight years old. And someone broke her neck just because they could.
Tonight I attended the monthly Women into Business networking event in Glasgow. Unfortunately, I had to cut out early thanks to a sinus infection which should have kept me at home in the first place. But for the time I did spend at the event, I heard two things that have given me even more of a swollen head than the cold.
The first was from the client whose web site I fixed last week, that being the one I salvaged from the Chinese fly-by-night. She said that since I fixed her web site, she’s had 15 sales enquiries. She’s a corporate and wedding caterer - do the maths on what she can make from 15 sales. More importantly, her own transformation has been as dramatic as the web site’s. Last month she was visibly stressed and exasperated, and was lost in the crowd in a frumpy brown suit. Tonight she looked radiant in a Japanese silk print dress and was glowing with confidence. If I have helped her even a little to get control of her business, and therefore her life, the wall-banging frustration of playing web design detective was worth it.
The second head-sweller was from the personal image consultant who was the guest speaker. She told me she was crazy about both my outfit and my accent. Someone who dresses women for a living complemented me?! Considering that a part of me still sees myself as I looked when nine months pregnant, four stone heavier, and wearing a potato sack, it was a nice jolt into reality.
I hate my accent, which is the peculiar tone of an American who has lived in Scotland for five years. I am not trying to sound different, it just comes out of my mouth that way. I cringe when I hear my annoying American nasality. But she said my voice was “sweet”. I’ll take it at face value.
As for the outfit, which I admit was a bit creative, I’m pleased about that. Part of the joy of starting my own business was being able to bag my business suits, monochromes, and “corporate wear”, and throw it all in the Sally Army donation bin like the garbage it was. And say what you want about Trinny and Susannah, but they helped me to see what styles work for my body shape and which of my “comfort clothes” were just wrong. So I’m now settled in a late sixties-early seventies Carnaby look, and I’ve never felt more confident.
And hey - I paid my dues. I was working on Capitol Hill in a black pantsuit and pearls when I was 19. Hillary Clinton? I dressed like her. At the age of 19. When in Rome, as they say. Now? This isn’t Rome, this is £$%&*#€ Glasgow!
There is always a bit of panic when you are dumping a decade’s worth of corporate black into the charity bin - as you think “what if I have a corporate client?” - until you realise that it’s up to you if you have a corporate client or not. I choose not to focus on corporate markets; there are plenty of web designers who can deal with them, in their suits. So I don’t need the black.
I wavered for a moment when it came to a black “Scully suit” which my late mother had bought for me when I was on Capitol Hill. On the one hand, it was one of the last things I owned that I could say she bought for me. On the other hand, I tried it on, and heard her voice somewhere laughing at me to take that ridiculous 90s cowl off. It had shoulder pads, for god’s sake. So it went in the Sally Army bin with no regrets.
Owning your own business means you can define your own identity. But you’re never quite prepared for how deep those changes go, and how rewarding they are.
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