This Is Not A
BLOG!
This is now...
Missing, Presumed...Included?
Team meeting earlier in the week. Manager required to take us through a report which had come from our Quality Monitoring people regarding the deficiencies in our responses to customer enquiries.
Manager (reading from brief) states that our letters are often inadequate because they "...do not answer all of the customer's questions, or contain missing advice."
I interjected, because I think that clarity of communication is important and I wanted to be sure I had heard what I thought I had just heard.
"Hold on a sec <manager's name>", I asked, "do you mean "contain misleading advice"?"
Manager looks at sheet again. "No, it says "contain missing advice"."
"But how", I ask (because I'm too far into this to retreat now, and too far gone to care anyway),"could anything "contain missing advice"? If it's contained, then it isn't missing; if it's missing, it can't be contained in the letter can it?"
"It'll all become clearer in a minute", says manager.
Guess what? The only thing which became clearer was that the person who wrote the brief had Van Gogh's ear for language.
And these are our leaders and betters...
Pic-ed up
I've done a bit of tweaking to The Gallery, and added some pictures from a little walk I had yesterday.
Admin Notice
I envisage that - for a while during today (Sunday) - The Gallery will be unavailable.
This is because I intend to upload it in its new form, and it's easier to do that by removing the old one in its entirety (otherwise I may get confused).
An update will follow once the job has been done.
Update:
(Well I did say, didn't I?)
As Speedy Gonzales once said, "Thees won' hurt - deed eet?"
Yes, The Gallery is now open in its refurbished guise. A few notes and comments:
- The overall look of it isn't much changed, as it reflects the look of the whole site, so don't go expecting novelty.
- I've given it a better structure in thematic terms. Whilst this means that there are more levels to navigate through, it should make things easier to find. It should also make it easier for me to add categories, images or pictures later.
- On the subject of navigation, most pages now have more than one picture on them, so I've duplicated the navigation arrows at the bottom of the page to help avoid too much scrolling (an idea which only came to me last night, truth be told). Oh, and apologies for the fact that those navigation arrows were bloody huge; as I only tend to view those pages on my home copy of the site, I hadn't realised that the wrong size of image was on the public version. Sorted now.
- The fact that there are more images per page means that pages may be slow loading for those of you still on dialup in suchlike locations as Colorado, Arkansas and other Third World countries. Please bear with it best you can.
- The text on a lot of the pages has had to be re-written to reflect the changes in context.
- Similarly, there are more links between pages than before.
- I've gone through and checked the map references - I found that some of them were hundreds of metres out.
- Oh, and if you had bookmarked any pages or images on the old version, these will no longer work. Sorry!
And that's that. It's taken me about two months to sort out, and I hope you'll think it worth it. All the same, if anyone spots where I've made a screaming foul-up, I'd be grateful to be told.
"A Dirty Mind Is A Thing Of Beauty And A Joy Forever": Discuss.
Two headlines from the week which made me chuckle:
I keenly await the unearthing of Samuel Johnson's French letters.
She was probably advised to pull it out at the last minute.
Adjusting The Picture
Just to let you know - as if you cared, of course - that work on revamping The Gallery continues apace, although it is proving to be more involved than even I had suspected.
I reckon another couple of weeks at the most should do it. Updates to follow.
R.I. ["I'll Have A..."] P. ["...Please, Bob"].
Robert Wentworth John Holness
Broadcaster and actor
b. 12 November 1928, d. 6 January 2012
I remember hearing him first presenting Late Night Extra on Radio 2 in the early 1970s. And my mother never missed Blockbusters when he was presenting it.
(Strange thing: he had a walk-on part in a dream I had last night).
