Can't Think of a Title

Another wonderful week at Laughlin. On Monday, I finally got to do some work for Master Lock, a real, current client. So that was pretty cool. Besides that, though, I didn’t get much to do with week aside from the usual social media content scouring.

I’m finding it’s just the luck of the draw as an intern; sometimes there’s work for you, and sometimes there’s not. I talked with Laura for a while on Friday, and she mentioned that it’s totally different when you’re a full-time employee. Your job is more structured, of course, versus when you’re an intern, you’re pretty much just doing all the random tasks no one else has time for.

That’s equally comforting and discomforting. It’ll be nice to actually have consistent work to do, but I kind of like having my hands in all different projects, doing something totally different from week to week.

But I should be grateful for the tasks I’ve been getting. On Monday, Andy showed me his latest task. First of all, he’s up in some secluded hallway on the third floor. Second of all, he’s in a room full of boxes of ancient beta tapes, and he’s got to go through them, one by one, and write down what’s on each one. Geez.

Something else interesting happened this week: It was discovered that an employee that left LC back in 1998 had some money left over in some sort of retirement account, but they couldn’t get a hold of him. Internet to the rescue!

There was a guy running a marketing agency in New York, but he didn’t have Laughlin listed in the experience section of his profile (but his partner did). Anyway, it turned out that was him. Oddly, there was a Journal Sentinel article with a random photo of a man of the same name, shopping in a store. That was weird.

I think I’m starting to loath social media. It’s a lot of stress, often TMI and I’m questioning whether it’s really worthwhile for all the things we’re trying to do with it. Still figuring all that out.

Wednesday was supposed to be a major snow day, but we all saw our hopes dashed. Well, I guess the suburbs got a lot of snow, but downtown got a pathetic sprinkle.

While I’m remarking on negative things, I’ll take a moment to profess my hatred toward Zimbra, our Web-based e-mail/calendar system. I wish we could just use Google… The most important benefit of Gmail over virtually any other e-mail client is that it groups e-mails by conversation. Since it’s a communications agency and we’re collaborators, there are tons and tons of e-mails floating around all day—people responding to different parts of other people’s e-mails. It’s a major pain to have to sift through an inbox of, say, 40 messages when there are really only 3 or 4 conversations. Why must we be so archaic?

And speaking of archaic, there’s been a lot of fuss lately—well, not really—over our intranet, which is equally 20th-century. It kind of bothers me that, as a communications agency that posits itself as forward-thinking and modern can so blatantly overlook its internals. But it’s not exactly that we’ve overlooked these issues; everyone knows they’re there, it’s just no one makes any effort to correct them.

I suppose it’s because the decision-makers don’t have time to work on all this stuff. And it’s a pretty major thing to change; there’s the huge investment of training every employee on the new software. And that we just recently “upgraded” to Zimbra. (I shudder at what must have been before.)

On a better note, Thursday was the annual holiday luncheon, and that was absolutely brilliant. I ate way too much.