Work Work

At work, the milk frother had started acting up again. No one was having their morning coffee. And everyone was cranky. Our milk frother came as a set with the coffee machine – a Nespresso Gemini CS 20 – was making milk bubbles instead of foam for our cappucinos. Not keen on waiting on a Nespresso technician, various colleagues have taken to trying to fix the machine themselves. Alas, their efforts were to no avail. I came onto the scene, stared at the machine for a while, thought for a bit, and accurately deduced the problem.

Now, lest you think this is a self-congratulatory tale of my own brilliance, rest assured it is not. Instead, it is a cautionary tale about pragmatism. 

I read with slight amusement this afternoon this article: Google, ANZ, GE Money ads caught on porn sites. Why? Because it’s within scope of my job, and I couldn’t help but felt I had done quite well. In short, it gave me pride in my job* It's a strange feeling. I don't usually feel that - I usually feel that my work could improve - I felt good. And yes, because of that, I am going to write and brag about it.

You see, the company I work for (hereforth: my company) is not a large company with a lot of resources, and it is quite comforting to know that bigger, better-resourced companies face the same problem too.  We’ve recently been pursuing brand safety as a selling point for the agency-facing side of business. Come to us, we say, for we would sell you only brand-safe inventory, and we only show your advertisements on brand-safe sites. It is a bold claim for a medium-sized company like ours. I happen to be the one who is doing quite a bit of the work in the brand-safety side of things (no, I’m not the only one. My colleagues also play a large role in creating our brand-safety policy). Join me, as I regale to you, my dear reader into the world of online advertising.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: I’m bored, and I have a writer’s block – I have so many things to blog about and absolutely nothing to blog about.

Friend: You know what you should do? You should blog about work.

And here it is – my first work-related blog post. But first, let me treat you to an image, the result of preparing for this blog post:

Lately, I have been questioning my own actions. Actually, for the majority of the last month I have been bogged down by a lot of work, and a lot of work means I start questioning myself a lot more – my sanity, my ethics, etc. I meditate a lot, and I can quite confidently say that I am quite fully aware and mindful of my own thoughts, which of late has become more of the “YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON” thoughts.

So, I decided to write them down, and today I am publishing it, because hey, the Internet needs more pollution, amiright?

In the past, when I faced exams, I rarely panicked, even if I was severely underprepared (incidentally the only exam I ever panicked for was also the only exam I failed). The moment after the exam though, the panic sets in. Thankfully for me, I had fairly solid basics – toss me any derivatives and given enough time I could work it out. Which worked out okay for me in exams – because you know, there was a set syllabus, and the curviest of curveballs I ever had was a sneaky metric spaces question in a microeconomics mid-semester exam.

Right now, my life is going past me at breakneck speed, and like exams in the past, I am not panicky.  And this troubles me greatly.