Oh ho, James, what are the chances? I had just finished reading all the comments when one of my bosses came in and said "geelly, you haff to tek a taxii". So are we re-negotiated?? Thankfully, I did not take said taxiii, nor will I have to as she just did it herself instead. Fair play really, I think she must have seen the look of terror in my face...

I am now going to tell you all a little bit about my job, it seems only fair if I'm going to be whining about it, but don't worry I'll try to put in as many interesting links as I can along the way to amuse those of you with limited attention spans... like me. Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

I am working for an advertising agency in Barcelona for a year of obligatory Spanish learning as part of my degree in Hispanic Studies at Glasgow. (I don't want to write the name in case it shows up on search engines and I get in trouble... can that happen??) I work in the cuenta or accounts department on a team of five girls. Cuenta is the department that handles the client. We communicate the wishes of the client to the creative department upstairs and vice-versa. It means you have to be very organised... That's me. The account that the five of us are handling is Frigo aka Walls aka Streets etc. My job is, basically, to do all the smaller things that my four bosses don't have time to do. It's a bit like housekeeping... The latest thing has been the new price boards, you know these boards that you see when you're out and you go to a street vendor to buy an ice cream and you point at the one you want on the board..? That's the price board and there's a lot of time and thought in it. But I haven't been thinking too much, mostly checking high resolution images so that everybody has what they need and everything can run smoothly.

My year this year is about as far from my year last year as possible. I am working for a client who is spending lots of money, paying us (well, not ME) to put its logo in every country around the world. I read No Logo and while I didn't think it was a great book, I agreed with a lot of Klein's arguments, in principal. My ideas about globalisation are getting more complex; a lot of people have a tendency to think in terms of GOOD or BAD, LEFT or RIGHT...and I think like that all the time without researching or really thinking properly. Students should be the ones to think properly and carefully about their political ideologies because they seem to be the ones making the most noise, they shouldn't be band wagon-ed into shouting for something they don't know they don't agree with... But my opinions are changing. My image of the blood thirsty company executive is being changed and blurred. Well, as yet I haven't encountered any Unilever or Nestle bosses (both companies that we advertise) and from personal experience I know that they can be pretty brutal, but these ad kids aren't so bad; all young up and comings with lots of style and good teeth. They are working hard for clients, travelling about and missing out on family life just so they can provide one... It's a bit catch 22... But it is hard to get your head around. They work so that you choose Nescafe over any other coffee. They work so that even if you went in to Tescos to buy loo roll you come out with loo rolls, Nescafe Gold Blend and some Golden Grahams...
A friend in the creative department who is training to become an art director for greenpeace or similar told me it was like playing God, like getting inside people's heads and changing their thoughts, making sure that they choose your product over anybody else's.

Hard to get your head around. It's an awakening from a dream I was having last year, a small, naive dream about red paint, spray painted oil cans and Karl Marx staring down at me. But I enjoyed it. It's nice to be on this side for a while though. I listened to everything people told me while I was sorting through the "what the heck am I doing here?! This isn't meeee!!" and decided to try and learn as much as possible, it didn't mean that I was selling my soul.

PLUS, as a present, Frigo gave us a freezer full of ice cream so I will be a capitalist pig dog for as long as they want me to.



And J, my shoes are entirely practical.