You know when you go out for a meal and experience disappointment when the food is no better than you could have prepared yourself?
That happens in so many ways…
At work today we received all the files for the 2005 Hamble Valley Vistor Guides from 3 Men. They are a fairly big agency around here, big offices and a good reputation. Seeing there stuff now on CD and looking at it in InDesign, their work is crap and nothing better than we will do. Some of the ads are poorly designed too, which is even more disappointing, but generally they haven't used the software properly, there are several typos and the files are littered with hundreds of unused colour swatches, empty text boxes etc.
Having sat last night and seriously read through interviews with Foxx by Record Collector Magazine, Rolling Stone and Steve Malins (all the stuff on the sleevenotes) I realize too that they are not well written and no better than anything I could do.
I'm not trying to be arrogant. Disappointed more than anything else. It seems all tooo easy to churn out rubbish. It does mean that I am less respectful of these people than before.
And I think that hits a nerve too, and I think about my feelings toowards D. We had a better day today and do generally work well together, but its when he doesn't see his own ideas through (fillin g in his own forms etc) and lies on the phone about the company that I struggle with the whole respect thing.
Now it turns out he has taken up a place on the City's Council of faiths!! Its because he is a good speaker and does get things done,a nd likes to be the Big Cheese - he has less faith than just about anyone else I know.
He's a Jew by birth and by culture. He has religion but he doesn't have 'faith'. Strange but ironically true - he is also quite seriously racist and chauvinistic.
Here's an issue I have not dealt with. Came into the office Thursday morning last week to find him. not unusually out for the day doing deliveries and meetings. Clearing up the "meeting table" my eye is caught by the image of a male model on a piece of paper in a plastic folder. Closer inspection shows it to be one of several pages downloaded from a gay porn site the 'net. Pages of erotica and sex stories describing gay sex in graphic detail. Flick flick. Then several more conventional hardcore pictures from the Hun's Daily galleries.
I stacked it up under some other post and put it on his desk.
Haven't had an opportunity to mention it since.
I would imagine in a more conventional office environment this is a "disciplinary offence".
I wonder if Jo saw it?
I wonder if she thought it could be mine?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not offended by the material per se but its totally out of order that it should be left lying around the office. I did later check his history file and found it totally empty, which again has made me suspicious.
Is he using office computers for porn?
This would make sense if he doesn't want his partner to know of the habit. Which presumably he won't.
It's interesting too that he should be getting off on gay porn especially.
So many people obver the last few years have asked me whether or not he's gay, and I thought so myself for the first couple of years I knew him. I've spoken to Trx and she suspects he possibly is. With the classic Jewish mother and blue-eyed boy situation it would be very difficult to come out.
I imagine if this is the case then (apologies for the character assassination, but I have a problem with people not being true to themselves) he will be in some kind of confusion and have some kind of identity complex.
Which in itself would go some way to explaining all the lies and empty undelivered promises. Creating the illusion of something that isn't actually what he seems. It might explain to something of the resentment and awkwardness he feels when I pick him up on these things. There can't be many people that have seen the man on the other end of the phone.
I worry for his partner, for she does not see...
So anyway, how to deal with the porn in the office thing?
And why doesn't he have an internet connection at home...