This week and last week I’ve spent days in the field. It’s an old service station site, where they used to store fuel in underground storage tanks. The storage tanks leaked so the soil is contaminated with hydrocarbons. We’re drilling 15 metre deep holes until we hit the bedrock — and the soil we pull up at the bottom is still saturated with hydrocarbons.

Personal protective equipment I have to wear at this site:

• Hard hat, to protect my head against objects dropped by excavators
• Ski-standard jacket, to protect me from Melbourne’s most recent cold snap
• High visibility vest, so I don’t get run over
• Steel-capped boots, so if my feet are run over or I step on sharp objects, the boots aren’t pierced
• Ear plugs, to protect my hearing around the drilling rigs
• Safety glasses, so flying shrapnel doesn’t make me blind
• Respirator, so I don’t faint from the fumes

Check it out.

“Joan,” Nada said frantically. “They’re waiting for me in the boardroom! Could you print these three documents out in colour? I can’t seem to do it from my laptop. When you’re done, bring it to me in the boardroom. Thanks!”

Nada dashed off and I wandered over to look at her laptop. I soon found the problem. Her network connection wasn’t working. I pulled out my USB disk and copied the files onto it. Then I printed the files from my own computer.

I plodded to the boardroom, slid the door open and discreetly slipped Nada the print outs. She threw me a thankful look as I slunk out of the high-level board meeting.

I decided to leave via the boardroom kitchen. As I walked through the kitchen, my eyes were drawn to a large glass jar. In it, in their glorious yellowness, were three giant cookies — light lemon cream, sandwiched between two fresh buttery biscuit halves. These were special biscuits for special people, people like CEOs and government ministers. They weren’t for the likes of us. Engineers only ever got Arnott’s Assorted Creams, and if we were lucky on special occasions, chocolate biscuits.

I hesitated for only a second. Quickly, I prised open the wooden lid, reached in and grabbed a cookie. It was so big, I couldn’t wrap my hand around it completely. I hid it as best I could. With the heel of my palm, I tapped the lid shut, then walked casually out of the kitchen.

The thrill made it taste all the more delicious.

I haven’t abandoned my blogging. I see the world with blog-coloured glasses and the stories are piling up in (and leaking out of) my brain.

I’ll write soon.

I’m angry, a raging angry young technocrat.

Raging against the corporate machine! RAAAARGH!

The stupidity, oh the stupidity!

My company’s embarked on a rebranding strategy. New logo colours, new taglines, new business cards (I guess I’ll be throwing out the 480 I haven’t used yet), new templates, new clothes…

What has made me an Angry Young Woman is the damned email footer they’re making us attach to all our emails.

Some marketing genius, in his or her infinite wisdom, has decided that we all need HTML footers. Let me tell you about this footer.

• It’s a 14 KB HTML file someone has put together in Microsoft Word.
• It’s eight, count ’em, eight lines long.
• There are three sizes of fonts, two colours and inconsistent use of capitalisation.
• It’s a HTML footer, when all our emails are sent out to clients and regulators as Lotus Notes files or plain text.
• The signature contains a little picture of a tree. Problem? The tree is the letter ‘P’ from the Microsoft Webdings font set. Whenever our snazzy emails land on a computer in plain text or if for some crazy reason Webdings isn’t installed (are there people that backward in the world?), or if the signature is viewed in any non-IE browser, then our emails will announce, ‘P Please consider the environment before printing’. Oh, the shame!
• When the signature is invariably converted to plain text, the lines are over 72 characters long. In many mail applications, the signature will be wrapped and the whole thing balloons to ten lines or more.

I was so aghast by this monstrosity that I wrote a message to the marketing manager. She said, “I am aware of these issues, however it’s a corporate template. I’ll let you know if they decide to change it.” Translation: Not my problem.

It is your problem! It’s all our problem! I am ashamed to send emails that look like this.

Who can I talk to? Who in the marketing department will be able to understand these (not really all that) technical issues? At the moment, I feel like I am talking to stubborn children.

A-wah!