One follower? Holy shit balls, someone likes me! ... Wait, hang on, quell the excitement ... it's only me. Yes, I followed myself.
So I'm leaving my current job with the devil tomorrow and I genuinely can't wait to get the hell away from here. Granted there's no eternal agony, fiery brimstone or big red naked dudes with pitchforks but it has been a soul destroying experience none the less. Okay, fine, that's going too far again but it drained my passion for writing to its very depths and I've only recently recovered from that. I reckon it's the knowledge that from 4:30pm I'm free that helps. Weight of the world off my shoulders and all of that. Splendid (great word, you'll notice I use it a lot).
Let me explain a little bit. Eight months ago I applied from a job titled 'Creative Writer' and to be fair that should have set the alarms bells ringing immediately. I mean who actually advertises real writing roles like that? I'll tell you who; no one. Yell, however, have no problem bending the truth.
As you've probably surmised I got the job. And I enjoyed it for a week, maybe two? The problem here is Yell promote their websites as a fully bespoke customer driven product yet we work to templates, we directly tell the customer that our way is better than theirs down to the finest, irrelevant details (if they want a picture of a pretty pony, by Gawd, let them have one!) and essentially give most of our customers a rather undignified 'fuck you, we're doing it our way' with each website. Not very bespoke.
The management are on us constantly about hitting targets, targets that just aren't feasible. I understand you get this is every job but Yell are incredibly talented at being dicks about it. It dawned on me long ago that our managers don't truly understand what it takes to create fully optimised, bespoke content for a 6+ page website. They aren't writers and that is there first major failing.
I'm not here to complain though. Well, not really. I'll do my fair share of complaining but it's not my primary reason for blogging. It's just a rather nice side benefit because frankly I love a good whine. Actually, now that I've got this far I've realised that I really did come here to complain.
Good riddance, Yell.
The problem here is that the managers from those departments at Yell that build the sites are from Operations or CS. As a result, you are simply a battery hen for producing websites. I miss the days of working down there...... alomst.
ReplyDeleteHopefully the 'new' strategy will fix this. Until then, wheres the Wrestling talk you mentioned in your first blog post, its probably more therapeutic to talk about that than the 'challenges' of working for the 'Devil'
Yeah, most of them are seconded from other departments. We were definitely battery hens and unfortunately the finished product (and the customer) suffered because of this.
ReplyDeleteThey had plenty of writers within the department to take advice from. Oh well.
My issue is predominantly with the way we promote the websites and the way we actually run them.
PS. Wrestling talk is forthcoming. I'm waiting to see what goes down with Punk at MITB first. Oh yeah.
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