my ex-job

(Working on the mage post. Still raging, a bit, so it ain't coming any time soon. And this one's been owing longer, anyway).

~

My ex-job is not a thrilling one (well, I thought it was), but I want to share about it, because a few people have asked me and honestly I swear I had the best boss in the world, and everyone needs to know that. Honestly.

So what I did was that I scanned stuff, and then cleaned up the scans. Mostly books, sometimes maps, and sometimes vaguely esoteric things like acetates with stuff printed on them. But it was fascinating, because the books weren't all the same sorts of things - there were things that like:

~ the directories that were like precursors to Yellow Pages

~ there were theses (I learnt some academic German from some of those, which serves me absolutely no purpose at all)

~ there were maps! Mainly of Cumbria, but I love maps, and so does my ex-boss (which is why he took 'em on as jobs, I guess)

~ one of my favourite jobs was scanning the photos of Irish people - I don't know why they were catalogued in the first place, but it was interesting seeing all the different facial types, and so on (I love faces, too). At the same time we also did a whole load of postcards of Ireland, which later got uploaded as an archive (I now can't remember where), so I could show off my work skills to my family.

~ there was also the one job with the legal docs, where I basically spent the day in a room full of boxes, listening to 90's radio and cataloguing the lot and it was AWESOME.

There was a whole bunch of other stuff as well, but well, I kind of feel weird talking about it (job before that I wasn't allowed to talk about*, so I guess it carried over?)

(*I shit you not, I had to sign the official secrets act. And that's the most exciting my employment's ever been).

There was also the time the BBC (I think?) were filming a version of A Room With a View edit: Room at the Top (for some reason I get those two mixed up??), and I took the dog out for a walk at dinner time (as I usually did because I am secretly a soppy bastard, and I like walking dogs), and sort of accidentally ran into the film crew and more than likely a lot of the cast (I didn't see anyone famous or important, but the dog got a lot of fuss from the crew so win?)

One thing we used to do a lot was produce ebooks, which is partially where my hatred of them springs from in the first place. For the most part, it wasn't too hard, but there was a whole batch I remember being really difficult to clean up and ugh did not want.
(For the record, I've mellowed where ebooks are concerned, but I'd still rather have the actual thing in my hands).

And yeah. My boss. I liked him a lot because he treated me like a friend, not like an employee. I don't know whether he should've done that or not, but I appreciated it. And he was really good about dealing with me being mentally ill, even if I felt like a flake the majority of the time (and I really did). He got me some counselling when I needed it, and he was cool about giving me time off work (like the day I couldn't stop crying - I can't remember now if that's the time I ended up taking the rest of the week off, but whatever). He used to nerd about technology with me, and also photography, and the one time we came back from London, we listened to Queen loudly and obnoxiously in his car, and it was awesome. He also said if I ever wanted to work for them again, I'd be more than welcome (I don't know if he'd still think that now, but it was nice of him to say so).

I'm actually sad that I haven't kept in touch with him, because he made me promise when I left, but I am atrocious at keeping in touch with people at the best of times. (It's been nearly four years and I think it'd be kind of awkward now).

OH YES AND. If you would (sort of) like to see where I worked, you could do worse than watch Happy Valley, which is a TV show that was on last year, set in and around Halifax (which is where I worked!) For reference, the place where Steve Pemberton's character works was actually filmed in the factory next to the one where I worked, and the clock tower you can sometimes see is the one on the building I was in. So there you go! Also if you've been playing DA:I, it's got James Norton and Ramon Tikaram in it, which I find a hilarious coincidence, so you can also see what they really look like if you don't actually know.

Just be careful watching it, though, if you choose to, because it's very violent and could well be triggering in some places (because one of the characters is a rapist and trust me, the show does not fucking hold back on ANY OF IT. There were complaints). The title is, apparently, what the local police actually really call the Calder Valley because of the drug problem, which is the one thing about the show that I can say is absolutely on point (the rest of it, I don't know).

So, um, this didn't end up as long a post as I thought it might, but that's ok, right? The ones about college and mages are going to be waaaaaaay longer.