Diary of a wannabe barrister

What’s the fastest way to entice someone into your shop to have them buy something?

Tell them they actually need it - whatever the cost.

What happens when it reaches the point that they realise that they really don’t need it?

Create a ’special day’ and tell them their loved ones need it.

It’s Mothering Sunday today, and this is precisely the sort of day which was dreamed up in the boardroom: “lets take a day that is not that important, create an array of goods aimed at that group and market it”.

Surely, the only days that should really be of any importance are your Birthday and Death-day, and if you are so inclined, your Wedding anniversary and maybe the day you got together.

Now everyone knows that these days happen every day of every year, needless to say there are no specific marketing campaigns around them, but for other days that fall on more or less the same day each year, there is a massive amount of marketing, with the worst contenders being Christmas and Easter both of which completely miss the point nowadays.

Christmas was a time when Christians would celebrate the coming of their Lord (regardless if it was around 4 months after his predicted birth), it was also a time when other religions would celebrate either the Earth or their Gods or anything they want. Now however, it is just about the only time of the year when the family will eat together.

Then there is Easter, again when Christians traditionally celebrated the resurrection of their Lord, now it is a time to receive chocolate eggs and increasingly, more presents.

Soon, Mother’s and Father’s day will go the same way.

Ok, so it has been a long while since I last blogged - I believe I was involved in solving a murder; I will quickly summarise the last 3 months

• Went to laser maze, did an all-against-all with Pip and the neighbours
• Christmas came, ate lots didn’t get fat woohoo!
• We got a cat, we named her Boo as she reminded me of Boo from Monsters Inc, this pissed off my Aunt who is consequently my landlord and she tried to up our rent, I threatened to leave and she backed-off.
• New Year came, dogs were spooked didn’t go out because they were really scared
• Saw a colleague off at a meal in the pub, service was poor, meal was massive and nice-ish - overall good
• Rik’s Birthday came, went out Pip got drunk - was driving so couldn’t, got back to the house to feed the dogs and drunken Pip drove my car (on private grounds - no roads - totally legal, thought she would crash it but she didn’t, went down to the dogs the next morning to find Pip had stripped off her clothes and left them there the night before.
• Over 3 weeks, Boo had both lots of injections on both occasions sending her to sleep…aww!
• Been drafted onto a major project within Barclaycard and now have ‘threats’ that I will be going out to Italy shortly with Orly - yay (well if you’re gonna do it, do it with style)
• Within major project having to do a multitude of process flows so we can get things right.
• Going to be moved onto a new team to utilise my legal and technical skills, happy with the role, not so happy about leaving my current team *sniff*
• Decided that for what it’s worth, Thunderbird is actually quite poor in comparison to Outlook (I know I link to it on my main page but hey I’m not about to point you to Outlook now am I and continue to line Bill Gates pockets!). Decided that Thunderbird is just too much trouble and when compared to Outlook, it is possible to do almost anything (don’t even get me started on the memory leak (Thunderbird running for four hours 56MB, Outlook 5.3MB))
• Spent this morning migrating everything back to Outlook.
• Fully cleaned my pc - it is running smoothly again - yay!

And now, I’ve just spent the last hour-and-a-half upgrading Wordpress (a task i hate doing) becuase it usually goes wrong when uploading - I either get a critical transfer error on a multitude of files across multiple locations or the server times out when unzipping. In the end, I had to micromanage the upload.

And this brings me to here, Pip is back home atm and is retuning tomorrow, in the meantime, I am just chillin’ looking for a new place to live closer to work - may play Sims(2) tonight, got some other stuff I need to upload as well.

I will try not to leave it so long in future.

Ps - whats the betting that Akismet taks a big hit here as I have mentioned a whole heap of spam-able items…

And finally,  Happy St. Davids Day.

Pip and I went to a murder mystery night at the Talbot Hotel on Saturday night and I have to admit, whilst it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it was a most enjoyable night * I even got to sit next to the nice blonde who didn’t actually end of dead - though her pig of a fiancé did.
The food I have to say was absolutely amazing - I had the most scrumptious lamb shank and Pip Thai Green Curry (odd for the 13th Century I know) and we were just tucking into dessert (rhubarb and custard) when the victim (who was sitting right opposite me) re-entered the room and promptly died complete with a gush of blood from the mouth - oddly enough, Pip and were no longer interested in the dessert.

Since it was only an evening jobby, all the action took place over dinner so we didn’t get to march all over the place of a pseudo-cluedo type game but I have noticed that the company responsible Murder Incorporated Ltd do hold weekend events where such movement does follow.

Whilst we had to guess the murder and why, we never got to choose how which in my view would have increased it much more.

On the whole 8/10 - an enjoyable night and would certainly partake in a future event

Wahey! On 26 May 2007, I finished my exams and, my degree; on 29 May, I started looking for a job, and didn’t stop even when I secured a temp-to-perm position with British Gas, largely as I knew I would be leaving within the month.

Having moved back to Northamptonshire, I managed to secure a job with none other than Barclaycard at their headquarters in Northampton woohoo!

It does get better as there will be plenty of opportunities to progress through the company and lets face, its not going to look too bad on the CV either.

Well I’ve now been there six weeks and can verify that it is a great place to work though it’d perhaps even nicer if my mentor wasn’t so swamped in work and actually had time to just talk - oh well, I’m sure I’ll crack her soon (poss literally!)