New Strides

So I'm going for a small gathering today. The previous small group I was with had all signed up for a combined church training program with a schedule I was unable to commit to. As such, I was deployed to another small group where the average age group was 23. You can imagine I had a hard time fitting in, particularly since my life had been an eventful one.

So I haven't been there much. A friend from my old small group then recommended another small group that was just starting out to me - one that her best friend and pursuer was in. The said pusuer was the leader of the small group, and my friend was not interested. To allay her guilt for constant rejections to dinner, movies, flowers even, she introduced people to help out in his small group instead.

That was yesterday. Continuing this entry today, the gathering last night did me wonders. The host worked for a Dutch oil company, very hospitable, charming and talented. The new people I met there were more my age group, and you could tell that they all had eventful lives too as there is a certain toughness to them. My stress and panic attacks were considerably dispelled near the end of the night.

I rushed home at 10.30 pm to hook up with my financial planner where we connected via his server to start our quest together in Never Winter Nights. I started a new character profile as a Wizard with Transmutation spells. I am so powerful that all mind spells would not be able to affect me, and I have a "Disintegration" spell to blow people into smithereens at the flick of my hand. If you have seen Fantastic 4, you would know what I mean. How the Phoenix disintegrated everything into nothingness with no mess, no blood, no fuss...

How I wish I could export those abilities into real life. No mind spells of organization change and new boss highhandedness can affect me. And any time someone dares to mess with me, I will just disintegrate them into nothingness and there would be no evidence pointing toward me as the culprit for disappearing persons... *evil grin*

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Breakdown Signs & Symptoms

Cold sweat, blanked out mind, Confusion, blurred vision, trembling hands, pervasive feeling of anxiety... nothing that a good, hot cup of coffee can't fix!

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I'm Sorry, Did you say Gaming or Gambling?

A friend of mine had heard about my work woes and called me up yesterday. Apparently she had mentioned me to a friend in the gaming industry who needed a web and online marketer. He was interested, and wanted to talk to me.

"No obligations," she said. "Just meet up with him and you never know." I was intrigued. Having recently started Never Winter Nights gaming with my financial planner, I was soon enthralled with the technology in producing a game. Especially now when it was almost like producing a mini movie with cut scenes, voice talents, character profiling, etc.

And there are some very smart cookies out there in the gaming industry for online marketing. Capturing an already existent fan audience, they created comprehensive walkthroughs of the game, how to gain influence on characters so that they wouldn't betray you in the final battle, how to craft weapons and armor, etc. What they then created was a huge hit stats for their web page, which equalled huge advertising revenue. Using DHTML and layer style sheets, these ads splash over the contents of the page and you are forced to view it while it plays out. It could be hugely annoying, but site owners keep the ad to 5 seconds, and only once in 24 hours. So if you regularly return to the site within a day, you will see the advertisement once only. In addition, the ads are hugely graphic and visually engaging, so the pain is minimized. They also give you options like the "X" button, or "click to skip the ad". Small price to pay for the number of spoilers in the site. And given that the ads are of other games in the same category, you might just click on the ads out of interest or simply to support the thoughtful people who created the site so you can win the final battle against the Lord of Shadows...

Anyway, I was looking forward to the chat to dig up the expose behind the gaming industry, and agreed to talk to him. He was considerate enough to call after office hours, and he went directly to what I was doing and my qualifications as an online marketer. I mentioned to him my previous positions and scope of my experience, and then he went into what he was doing.

"We are a company that does games for gambling. We don't actually collect bookings, but help our clients to market gambling in online gaming."

"I'm sorry, did you say gambling or gaming?" (that's me seeing all my excitement and fantasies of getting into the gaming industry as an online marketer being smashed like godzilla crunching his foot on them and viciously pounding them into the ashes...)

"Both. Of course its all legal and approved by the government...."

I didn't hear much of the conversation after as I couldn't quite decide what I felt about working for a gambling industry. While it is legalised here, there is something in my moral upbringing that is glaring at me with disapproval and heaping tons of guilt on me even being part of this conversation. You can blame my parents for that - I would have been filthy rich by now if not for my morals.

I politely followed the rest of the conversation through with him asking me to take a look at their website, and meeting for coffee later. I don't think our appointment will survive the week, as I don't think I can last the moral glare for an entire week. Oh well, back to the classifieds...

A Feeling of Foreboding

Its been another trying day, and work is starting to become a chore for non web related projects. Things are not boding well with Prima Donna who's already started taking over the functions of my current boss who is leaving end of this week.

As the last thing she could do for us, my boss had arranged for our performance agreement meetings (used to rate our performance at the end of the year by checking it against the list of our deliverables agreed on) this week, when she was still around, with Prima Donna sitting in. In this way, our agreements on the number of projects would be fair, our deliverables will remain fairly reasonable and consistent, and our budgets would be safe.

It was not to be so. In her quest for world dominion starting with AP, Prima Donna had pushed all the meetings to next week. My boss would not be around, and she would have full authority to mess with our deliverables and projects. Following that move, my boss also recalled all previously agreed on budgets for 2007, deferring it to Prima Donna's leadership.

In addition to that, we have just received an email that she wants to meet us on a fortnightly basis to get reports from us. This because our new VP expects the same of her. While I think this is a good discipline for a boss to have, I doubt it will be beneficial for us as her intention is to give our new VP a good report rather than to give us direction or mentoring. I'm definitely going to miss my boss...