When Cold Callers Attack!!!
28 July 2006
It's Friday afternoon. We are happily winding down for the weekend. The phone rings. The Caller Display says external. I answer... in my usual friendly tone..."Nick Warren"
The is a short gap and I hear that the connection is bad. Then a lady speaks, english is not her first language.
"I need to speak to Mr Nick Wawen"
"Yes, that's me"
"Mr Nick Wawen I am calling you to extend you an invitation..."
Alarm bells are going off. She has made the rookie mistake of addressing me as mister, which means that a) I have never met her and b) she has nothing more than a name in front of her. (Anyone who had bothered to research Semantic would have known I am not a mister!) *
Secondly she's reading from a script... so I know we are not interested. But she's been trained to read so quickly that I can't can't get a word in...
"... an invitation because I represent <forgettable name> and we are offering you the opportunity to come to Venice in October for a conference that will be held at a casino hotel for all of the important decision makers and events makers in Europe to be held at..."
In the end she's forced to breath so I get my chance.
"Thank-you, but let me save you some time, I'm not interested thanks."
"But how can you not be interested when I haven't finished telling you about our invitation which is for you and a guest to spend three nights..."
She's being rude now, which is a mistake. As I've written elsewhere I have a problem with rudeness.
"No. Thanks. I am really not interested".
Surprisingly she goes for it again, unaware or uncaring that her sales call is going down in flames.
"Well Mr Wawen I think that you should consider how this opportunity..."
"No, please listen to me. I AM NOT INTERESTED THANK-YOU"
The capitals make this look loud but I was still being really polite. There is a short pause, then. she said...
"WELL ACTUALLY I DO NOT THINK THAT YOU DESERVE IT!"
And put the phone down.
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*Chris started his application letter with 'Greeting Web Wizards', which I thought illustrated a certain amount of bravery/nuttiness on his part... but it got him the interview and the interview got him the job.
Posted by Nick Warren at 4:06 PM
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Thorpe Park up for Auction!
27 July 2006
Well, okay... just the front seats on Stealth. Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Branson are currently neck and neck... which is something I wasn't expecting to write when I came in this morning :-)If you have no idea what I am blathering about, and have nothing better to do, take a look at the Stealth Auction page on ThorpePark.com... then click through to ebay to see the race hotting up. Surely David Walliams deserves more that £16.51... at time of writing.
Posted by Nick Warren at 3:48 PM
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'My Chessington' Beta goes live...
The fun keeps on coming at Chessington... today we've released 'My Chessington', a simple service designed to let users create a few customised pages on the site.Rather like last year's 'Reviews at Thorpe Park' test, 'My Chessington' is something of a beta. If the feedback is useful we'll look to build on it in future versions of the site... if people hate it we won't.
My guess is that avid fans of Chessington will find it less useful than those who go once a year... but if nothing else my little boy will enjoy watching the days tick down to his next visit.
Take a look for yourself at www.chessington.com.
Posted by Nick Warren at 10:31 AM
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Off to Chessington :-)
26 July 2006
Semantic HQ will be temporarily unmanned today as we are off to Chessington... and we've decided to let Chris out into the community. Obviously he'll be bound and gagged :-)We'll be out from about 11am to 4pm, but will catch up with anything urgent on our return.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:35 AM
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Fun with particles...
21 July 2006
Over the past year or so I've seem to have spent more and more time building animations in Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash). Most of our clients have flash animations, at least on their homepages, and a large proportion of these are fairly complex. We use Actionscript (the Flash programming language) much more these days, often reading data from external XML files to create 'dynamic' animations.One technique I have used quite a lot over the last six months is the particle system - writing a small program to randomly spawn graphic elements within an animation. The Chessington 'bubbles' we created for the re-launch of Bubbleworks was an example. The fireworks element in the Usborne Books at Home 25th Birthday animation is another.
Obviously we play around in flash quite a lot, testing out new programming ideas before we use them 'in anger' for our clients. My latest little test file is a particle system inspired by the Odeon Cinemas online booking advertisement. If you've been to an Odeon cinema in the last couple of years you will doubtless have seen their 'spinny glittery discs' advert, all pink and spangly and accompanied by retro 1960s pop.
Anyway, this is my latest build. Enjoy!
Posted by Mike Gillett at 9:59 AM
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Semantic's Middle Aged Fly Swatting Ninja
Three weeks ago (when the guys were on holiday) I drew a smiley face on our whiteboard. It sat there happily for a few days until Mike came back and (predictably) drew a mustache on it. The next day Chris added 'buck teeth' and a new Semantic game was born. We call it "Drawn Apart".Since then we've been taking it in turns to add details to the drawing and two things keep it interesting.
1) How the meaning of the picture has changed with each addition.
2) How each of us keep trying to subtly (and not so subtly) undermine the ideas of the others.
The result of the game is that my drawing has evolved from a happy-smiley face into a middle-aged-fly-swatting-ninja with Multiple Personality Disorder... which in a sense mirrors the way it was created. Here it is...
In the interests of science we have kicked-off Round Two of 'Drawn Apart' today. This is Mike's opening gambit. We'll let you know what transpires...
Posted by Nick Warren at 8:15 AM
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Public Relations for Freaks
10 July 2006
At Semantic we've known for quite a while that we are freaks, and every now and then someone comes by to confirm it for us.Typically this happens with professional advisors who want to help us improve our business. Years ago I had a couple of meetings with an advisor working with a UK based agency. The first meeting was a free get-to-know-you kind of deal. He said that he could help us increase our client base and work-rate... and I said I didn't really want more clients, and liked our laid-back (lay-about) lifestyle. Not exactly a meeting of minds.
But I was also kind of scared. I was in business by accident, and knew just enough to realise how hopeless I was. 'We need help', I thought. 'You can't keep on making decisions using your gut rather than your head*'. So we pushed on into a paid relationship, and a second meeting.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The guy came back armed with strategies that were immediately and obviously useless to us. I spent the meeting nodding like a nutter in the hope he would leave as soon as possible... only to have the poor man take it as enthusiasm... on and on he chuntered. It was like 'Waiting for Godot' by Alan Sugar.
In the years since that meeting I've had many similar conversations... which is why it was refreshing last week to meet someone who 'got' Semantic. Ian Peel is a Director at MCC International, a PR company that specialises in dealing with technology businesses.
Ian was good enough to drop by despite my slightly sniffy assertion that PR was something for all those other guys. He made a strong case and, critically, illustrated how we could use PR to talk about the kind of company Semantic is... rather than what it does. Now that's interesting...
Honestly I'm not sure whether we'll do any PR or not... being so busy... but if we do I feel certain it will be with Ian and the team at MCC. Should you be looking for representation in this area I'd recommend a chat with Ian, whether you're a freak or not.
*Actually this still does scare me, even though it seems to work.
Posted by Nick Warren at 8:36 PM
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Where the hell is Chris..?
As we were leaving on Friday I casually asked Chris what he was up to over the weekend. He mentioned a couple of fairly ordinary things and then volunteered the following."My mate won tickets to to the World Cup Final."
Mike and I expressed the usual emotions, surprise, envy, homicidal jealousy... and then suggested he should stow away to see the match.
"Yeah well, he asked me actually, but I said no."
Silence, broken only by the sound of our jaws hitting the ground.
"He asked you if you wanted to see the World Cup Final, and you said 'no'."
"Yeah, well... it's staying in a five star hotel on Sunday night, so I wouldn't be back in for work on Monday."
I think you can see the valuable work we are doing keeping Chris out of the general community. I offered to hold him so that Mike could hit him, but in the end we settled for questioning his sanity... and asking why (in the name of all that was holy) he hadn't brought it up before.
We parted with Chris promising to find out whether the offer was still open (surely it wasn't) and Mike and I rolling our eyes and flapping our arms a lot.
So where the hell is Chris? He's either on his way to the Semantic bunker or in a five star hotel having a five star breakfast.
I know Semantic is a pretty decent place to work, but get a grip.
UPDATE: Sadly Chris has made it into the office :-(
(Title inspired by www.wherethehellismatt.com. Visit the site and click on the video in the homepage.)
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:30 AM
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Service. Another company gets it...
07 July 2006
After a week apart my chair and I have been emotionally reunited. My emotion was happiness, because I won't have to keep using the uncomfortable chair we reserve for guests. My chair's emotion (I'm guessing slightly here) was dread and disappointment, because I am both overweight and a fidget... which I guess is a pretty bad deal if you happen to be a chair.My chair tends to be under a fair degree of stress, and a week ago it cracked, literally*.
Which brings me to Haywood Office Services, the company (just down the road from us) to whom I took it to be fixed. Over the past few years we've bought cupboards, shelves and filing cabinets from these guys, and spent a reasonable if not stratospheric amount of money. They've seen me enough to know my face, if not my name.
I dragged the chair into their showroom and explained the problem to the nice people behind the desk. The guy heroically kept a straight face while expressing surprise that I could have broken that particular part. Apparently it almost never breaks, and is only made by mystical east-european elves during a full-moon. It will take a couple of weeks to get the part he tells me.
Today, a week later as it turned out, they called me to say that the chair is fixed, and there is no charge. That's a line that I use a lot with clients... "there will be no charge".
I use it because for some jobs the value of investing in the relationship is worth more than a few pounds here or there. Haywood evidently understand this as well, and it will work out for them. As long as we are around to buy office furniture, and they are around to sell it... we'll always go to them first. They spent a few pounds to fix my chair this morning, but bought a lot of loyalty.
*This also happened to my previous chair 5-6 years ago... it was only fixed with a welding iron. My working assumption is that I am unlucky, and just keep choosing really weak chairs.
Posted by Nick Warren at 1:26 PM
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Does spellling matter?
Two things have surprised me about the Guest Reviews we've seen on the Chessington and Thorpe Park web sites this year.1) The number (thousands have been submitted).
2) The state of the spelling and grammar.
I believe that things like spelling matter less than they once did. I'm just rubbish at spelling, make constant use of spell checkers, and like the fact that Google seems to magically know what I am trying to type.
I've never agreed with the view that texting means the end of western civilisation. In general don't care whether something is 'great' or 'gr8'.
It's also clear that we don't actually need to spell words correctly in order to be understood. Read the next paragraph, and be amazed at what your brain can do.
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fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.*
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Pretty amazing, huh?
So there are tools to help us spell better, and a very good chance that we'll be understood even if we make a mistake. So there is no problem with poor spelling right..?
No, dammit. Absolutely wrong.
I can tell you that there have been loads of creative, passionate reviews that will never make the web site because of the way they are written. It doesn't matter that I can understand what the writer meant, what matters is that this doesn't conceal the lack of care they took writing it.
When I say 'spelling matters less than it did' what I really mean is being 'able to spell matters less than it did'.
Spelling matters, because it communicates far more about us than the words might say... and effective communication is pretty much required if you want to be successful at anything.
P.S. To the girl that wrote the rap on the Thorpe site. Obviously this had nothing to do with the subject at hand, and will never be published to the site... but we loved it.
P.P.S I've just read this all back, I now realise I have become my father!
*All spelling errors within this blog are merely to reinforce the point made by this paragraph.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:19 AM
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Stupid, pointless fun.
06 July 2006
Earlier on in the year we had stupid, pointless and fun bubbles on the Chessington site... pop them and they make a noise.Currently the site is promoting Chessington's new Season Ticket... which spins lazily in the animation. But click and drag the card and you can send it mental. Stupid. Yes. Pointless. Well yes. Fun for 10 seconds. Absolutely.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:20 AM
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Semantic's Wild Life
05 July 2006
As I've mentioned elsewhere Semantic lives in a secret underground office complex* within the campus of Southampton Science Park.The big reason we came here (in 2000) was that they offered a three month get out clause... or as I call it the "Oh my God, Disaster, Disaster, Dive, Dive" clause. At the time I didn't want to bet my house, my son's future or my marriage that Semantic was going to last the three years that every other office space wanted us to commit to.
So that was the big reason, but the quality of the environment came a pretty close second.
I looked at the typical industrial parks. You know they thing. There are cars parked everywhere... sometimes two or three deep (that's on top of each other)... and the odd desperate weed chronically addicted to exhaust fumes. Bleeeuch.
And then we saw the Science Park. It has a lovely campus feel. It has grass, trees... there is a pond and picnic benches outside our window. And yesterday it had a deer happily munching away on a bush.
I nodded to the deer (we've met before) and drove on smiling.
*parts of this sentence may not be entirely true.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:35 AM
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Chessington Video Online
We seem to be doing tons of little updates for Chessington at the moment... including the first online publishing of a video made to celebrate 75 years of Chessington Zoo.It is interesting to see the black and white images of small children smiling as they hold potentially lethal animals... presumably before the country began to feel that common sense and personal responsibility needed to be enforced by law.
You'll need Flash Player 8 or above to see the 75th Anniversary Video, it's a 9Mb file.
Posted by Nick Warren at 7:25 AM
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Happy Birthday to us...
01 July 2006
When I announced to my friends, family and rather surprised girlfriend that I had handed in my notice at IBM I got a variety of different reactions.Most of these were supportive, but plenty had cartoon-like question marks hanging over their heads as we talked... a small minority of people questioned my sanity, sobriety and general state of mind. A few forecasted my quick return.
Well today is our Ninth Birthday!!!*
Happy Birthday to us. Thanks to all the folks who have made it such a pleasant way to spend our time, and in particular to Mike, without whom, as they say, none of this would have been possible.
*Initially I left IBM and started 'Twisted', a sole trader-based consultancy that turned into Semantic Limited.
Posted by Nick Warren at 11:35 AM
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