Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

As I’ve been tagged by Dr. Nic Williams, and I never get tagged for anything, I figure I’d have to come out of retirement for this post. The meme is ‘five things you don’t know about me’, so here we go:

1. I was interviewed for the position of head of online media at the BBC. Back in the late 90s headhunters and recruitment agents were going nuts. So nuts, in fact, that they sent a 17~18 year old me to a job interview for the top online media job at the BBC. It was extremely funny, and there was no way in hell I was going to get the job, but it was a great experience in a very tough interview situation and I got to wander around in Broadcasting House. The recruitment agent never contacted me again. Problem solved.

2. I have OCD. I am starting to get it under control, but I am constantly checking doors, and can never trust when someone else has locked a door (unless I really try). If Laura locks the front door, I will check it after her. I can’t stop it (again unless I really try hard). I am beginning to develop an attitude of “who gives a f**k” to the situation and am trying not to check anything, but I know that approach could end in trouble.

3. I got paid £10,000 for six weeks’ work with no spec, no management, and which was immediately discarded at the end. The company involved had no technical spec (just a vague idea), did not want me to create a spec, and the supposed project management did not actually do any managing. A workable product was, however, delivered, but did not meet the unwritten specifications of someone somewhere, and the whole project was discarded, although I only found this out through my co-developer weeks later as the company in question never contacted me again. Very weird experience. This sort of experience is why I am tending not to do client work anymore.

4. Laura found me on Match.com. Actually, she found me. I had given up hope by that time, but I happened to have a profile still on there from when I was in Los Angeles the year before. I randomly got a message one day in January 2005 from Laura, and it all went from there. Yes, she pursued me, so how could a man resist?

5. I was too cheap to pay Match.com any money. You have to be a paid member to reply to messages on Match.com, so when I got the message from Laura, I wasn’t sure whether to bother signing up. Luckily, however, they had a 7 day free trial so I figured I could sign up, somehow get her phone number quick, and then cancel before I got charged anything. I actually did this.. making me the biggest cheapskate ever.

I’m not tagging anyone else to do this as I have a guilt-complex about putting on other people (#6!) so if you want to post five things in the comments, feel free to do so and I’ll enjoy them!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.