Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Details of your incompetence do not interest me. ♥ 8:29 AM
As very few of you may have noticed, the title of this blog is a quote from Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. Therefore, this post is about work. The last day in Paris will have to until tomorrow, or depending on how ambitious I feel maybe later tonight.
Let's start with yesterday. I can hardly even remember because everything has been such a whirlwind. But today Professional Beauty had to go to press, so yesterday we were supposed to be frantically doing majorly important things to finish off the issue, the stress level at the 4 Professional Beauty desks in EMAP was high. Then, modern technology failed us. The power went out. We spent about the next hour proofreading and preparing items for our editor, assistant editor and Sarah and go and work from home or an internet café while Claire and I were left to man the desks (in other words, answer the phones and call them if the power came back on, since without it we could do nothing else). By this point it was 2:00 and Claire and I were next to the last people left in the office, and we had to stay at the phones. We still hadn't been able to take lunch so we went in turns bringing it back to the office. A bit after we both were back eating at our desks, other people who work at EMAP began to tell us that to phone our editors and say that everyone was telling us we should leave because the power wouldn’t be back on until the next day. Jenni told us to go ahead and go and gave us a list of things to do from home, so we spent until almost 7 that night emailing with her and working with her on getting some things done last minute.
We worked for basically over an hour past the time we were supposed to, but because of the circumstances she had asked us to come in today instead of Thursday, and since we have class at 4 on Wednesday ment we would have a short day.
Today the Tube strike began, meaning nearly all the tube stops were closed and the tube is just basically not running. We are supposed to be at work at 9:30 so we left the flat a few minutes before 8 to catch the bus on Cromwell. The first bus was too full to get on, so we got on the next one just barely. We were on there for about 45 minutes to Baker Street where we were supposed to take another bus to a stop that was right outside our work. But the bus that came by was so full it didn’t let anyone one, so we walked to the next stop and encountered the same problem with the next bus. So we walked to the next stop and I’m sure you can guess what happened next, the bus didn’t let anyone on. So at this point we had pretty much decided just to walk, it should have only been about 30 minutes, which wasn’t bad. But the streets were poorly labeled and we took a wrong turn and got a little lost. We ended up walking 45 minutes in the rain with only one umbrella not really sure where we were going. We ended up getting to work about an hour late, after having left an hour early.
We only had a few hours at work and we were very busy for all of them. We had to proofread, replace last minute reader panel dropouts, find some last minute statistics and that's pretty much it but it took the whole time.
We found the bus going home alright but it didn't go all the way to where we needed it to so we had to walk for about another 15 minutes.
It's been a crazy 2 days.
The End.