Nowhere Near Friday. Boo.

Paranoia and spite abounds at work this week. Not fun. I wish I could write about all of this, just to be able to go back and get things straight in my head, for one thing, but it’s not worth being dooced for. Not when the name of the company is too obvious from even the slightest hint. (Thank you all in the past for not guessing.) Anyway, another videoconference with the US office this afternoon…they are the sand in my shorts…

I’m SO nervous about the test this weekend on Lizzie. Will she go in the trailer, if she’s only been in a massive horsebox? Will I remember the damn test, and not go blank mid-test? Will she be relatively controllable, or will she cart me back to the parking lot? Who knows. Ah, well, if all goes completely awry I can just withdraw from the class.

Farrier tomorrow, which means that I’ll have to duck out of one of the meetings with the SEO firms. God knows what my boss expects them to do that we aren’t already in the process of doing. What we need is optimised copy, and we have no one in-house capable of writing search-optimised copy that has a strong sales message and doesn’t degrade the brand. The trouble is, SEO firms (and more and more new firms are jumping on the bandwagon every day) can’t write decent copy, either. I refuse to place a giant vomited-up wad of keyword-larded nonsense written only for search engines as visible copy on the pages. Some of the other things that I refuse to do are: microsites, gateway pages, table tricks to make the copy appear first, re-writing URLs with lists of keywords, etc.

I’m venting. Will cease immediately.

Unsettled and cranky today. I’ve been writing point-by-point responses to lists of demands, and documenting all interaction with our last SEO firm, and trying to make some last-minute code changes before we publish whilst trying to ignore all the people who are screaming into phones. I feel like such a stroppy mare today. (Having known Lizzie, I now know exactly what that term means.)

Solution (temporary): chocolate.