I didn’t watch it. And having read Grace Dent’s review in The Independent I’m glad I didn’t. The trailer was enough for me; but according to Ms. Dent, a person who normally love trashy TV, it was much worse than the trailer would have you believe.

The boss of this call centre is a man called Nev. Nev likes to force his staff to sing karaoke each morning to get them in the mood. Nev likes to throw office items at his staff if they yawn because he finds it offensive. Nev likes to humiliate his staff if their personal life is getting them down.

Nev is lucky to be alive.

I worked in call centres for several years and while I didn’t experience any manager as bad as Nev, I did have an awful time of it. But it didn’t start out that way.

I used to really enjoy it. In fact my managers were amazed that I was one of the very few members of staff who would often tell them how much I loved working there. We didn’t do cold calling, we were placing orders for people who rang up. It was flowers at first, then home furnishings. Then I was put on a team to help push the new website and advise customers how to use it. I trained the rest of the call centre, designed the entire training program and wrote the manual for staff to keep with them. I did the same thing for the new food ordering system and even travelled to that London to test the improvements they had made.

Then it all went to shit.

I don’t know why exactly. It just sort of came over me one day. Maybe it was building up but I didn’t notice. The first I knew about it was when I was being bundled off to the recovery room they use for people who have suddenly become a bit sick.

I was not sick.

I was nothing.

I’d been in work for a few hours and had been a bit quiet. I’d logged out of my computer  and been for my break and was now sat at my desk. But I wasn’t doing anything. I was simply sat there trying to log onto my computer. I say trying, I mean I was sat there but the thought of turning that thing on and taking another call was too much.

I also couldn’t speak and my face had gone grey. So off to the recovery room I went.

When I came back I was sent home on the understanding I would go to the doctors. This I did and he prescribed a couple of weeks off.

A couple of weeks later I felt brilliant and came back to work all raring to go and everything. I lasted about 30 minutes. I went home again and went back to the doctors. This time I was put on anti-depressants and given three months off.

Being off was great. Being on drugs was great too. But all I could think about was the impending return to work and that didn’t fill me with fun thoughts.

When I went back I was put on light duties.  That meant no difficult calls and a lot more emails. It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. I was loaded up on Citalopram which controlled the depression but I still had to cope with the insanity of the call centre. And that mostly meant managers who didn’t know what they were doing.

We had a supervisor who was younger than everyone on the team and who was more interested in pushing her career forward than in looking after us. We had a morale problem that was “solved” by turning Friday into “Thank Crunchy it’s” Friday. This involved giving everyone a fun size crunchy bar each Friday but being told you weren’t to eat it at your desk because of health and safety. I had HR sending me to be tested by the company medics in case my own doctor was lying about my condition. And I had all my senior advisor advantages dropped so I was no longer training people or being given the interesting jobs away from the phones.

On top of that we had a call centre manager who decided to improve morale by greeting everyone in a cheery manner. This involved her shouting “MORNING!” in a sing song, fake cheerful style, each and every day to each and every person.

I’d be lying if I said that every morning I heard that voice, I wasn’t sick in my mouth. It was without a doubt, the worst, WORST way of starting my day. And being told to cheer up didn’t help. I barely managed to stop myself from lashing out.

Maybe now you understand why I decided to not watch The Call Centre. If I’d been working with Nev and his forced singing, his throwing staplers at people who yawn and his humiliation of his staff, I would have smashed the fuckers face into a bloody pulp before writing my letter of resignation on the wall using his own entrails.

The world of the call centre does not need twats like Nev. The job is awful enough without having to put up with managers like that.

As for me, I decided to leave that call centre and get a job at a different call centre. I figured a change would do me good.

Despite a earning more money and having a very attractive team leader, I lasted three months before I started throwing up every other day.  Then I found myself struggling to log onto my PC again and I decided it was time to call it a day. Call centres were clearly not for me.

So I left to put up with the idiots at the job centre who think they know more than a doctor and who, while claiming to help you find work, actually just threaten to stop your benefits and pay no attention to your own needs and wants. But my rant about those cunts can wait for another day.

I now work from home. It’s ace. I still get bouts of depression, but I can more easily see them coming and do something about it.

I will never EVER work in a call centre again. Certainly not while there are fuckwits like Nev about. Never again will I have to listen to some idiot of a manager try to improve moral by faking cheerfulness. Never again will I be encouraged to live the brand. Never again will I have to sit through a presentation aimed at making me love the company like it was my family. Never again will I be able to flirt with my sexy manager… I knew there’d be a downside.

How depressing

That was mostly because I went shopping. And since that’s one of the best ways I know of not writing I decided to use it as my excuse for the whole day.

And I still am.

For those who don’t know, I run a small web-hosting company called CakeHosting where I provide space for people who want to run blogs on their own domains. I also offer support for people who need it even if they don’t host their site with me.

Today, I’ve been updating the billing software and it’s always nerve-racking. It’s one of those things that, if it goes wrong, can seriously mess up everything. I hate doing it, but for the sake of security, I have to. Now that it’s done and all my clients still have websites that work, I’m happy.

I’m so happy that I’m going to relax and not really bother with writing a proper blog post today. I shall go and play an “escape the room” game or two and then get back to the re-plotting of Monkeygeddon instead.

Sometimes procrastination means having to do real life stuff.

I had a bloody good think.

I thought about my many writing projects and tried to work out what I can do about them all. This was brought about by mention on Twitter of a new film called Sharknado.

In this film a large tornado tears through small town America, but this is no ordinary tornado. This funnel is full of sharks. Large, angry sharks.

Sounds like just my sort of thing and it made me think, I really should get Monkeygeddon written up properly before someone else thinks of it. So I stopped what I was doing and had a good old think.

My main problem is that I have lots of ideas for stories. Worse, I think they’re all so good that I want to be writing them all, all at the same time. Clearly this isn’t going to happen, so what can be done?

It didn’t take much thinking before I remembered Walter Gibson.

You might not know Walter Gibson but you probably know his work. Mr Gibson was a magician and writer of pulp fiction stories in the 30s and 40s. Most famously, he wrote The Shadow series of adventures. But even if you knew that, you probably don’t know just how prolific Walter was.

Walter Gibson produced over 300 pulp novels in his time as a writer. He would write two 60,000 word novels each month for two years at one stage. This was done by getting up early-ish and  writing 5000 – 10,000 words each morning. Then he would take the afternoon off to relax or maybe make a handful of notes for the next morning.

I presume he edited as he went, which is not something I would do much of. And he made things easier for himself by writing to a formula and reusing a cast of characters, but even so, that’s a pretty impressive rate of storytelling.

Anyway, the point is, Walter found a way to write a lot of stories in a short space of time. Now, I don’t think I could get up to that sort of speed anytime soon, but I know I can produce 50,000 words in a month because I’ve done it. And if I’ve done it once, I can do it again.

So my big think lead me to this conclusion: Get on with it.

And so I shall. I shall rework the plot outline for Monkeygeddon over the next day or so. I shall start a Monkeygeddon Facebook page as a sort of nag to remind myself to get on with it. And I shall write a new 1st draft of my tale of killer monkeys. And a month later, I shall do the same for another project from the ever growing pile.

Honest.

Oooh look, a penny.

You can follow my progress with Monkeygeddon if you like. There is now a Facebook page for you to Like

One of those things was Rory’s Story Cubes. They looked interesting and I thought they might be a nice prezzie for the Not-Girlfriend’s little boy. But the more I looked at them, the more I thought they seemed like something I’d like for myself.

So I bought a bunch of them.

I’m not sure how much use the boy has had from his Story Cubes, but I love playing with my set.

For those who don’t know what Story Cubes are, I shall explain.

In the box you get nine dice but instead of numbers, each die has pictographs. The idea is that you roll your cubes and using the images presented you must form a story. What’s clever about them is that the pictographs are vague enough to allow you to use them either literally or figuratively as you see fit. For example, is a lighting bolt an actual lightning strike or is it a flash of inspiration? Or is it Usain Bolt suddenly turning up to save the day?

It’s up to you.

Some of the images are quite clever. One shows a child being stalked by a monster. But on closer inspection the monster appears to be the child’s own shadow. In another image an office block or block of flats shows only a single light on in the whole building. Every time you sue them you’ll come up with something new.

Here are the cubes as I threw them a moment ago. What kind of story would they suggest to you? You don’t have to use them in the order they appear but you must use them all.

You might prefer to roll them one at a time. If you’re playing in a group or with a friend you might take it in turns to roll one cube each or you might roll all nine and then have the next person roll all nine but have to continue the story.

That’s the best part about Rory’s Story Cubes, it’s entirely up to you how you play them, there are no rules.

You can probably guess that when it comes to procrastination the cubes are the perfect device. After all if you’re going to avoid writing you might as well do something creative. And if it helps your writing, then that’s a bonus. They might even help you to think your way out of a plot hole you’ve dug yourself into.

Anyway, here’s my story using the cubes above:

Once upon a time there was a petty man called Manners. He spent each day say in his ivory tower (tower) looking down on the people he knew. But he started to feel sad (sad face) that he didn’t have any friends. You might say that other people were alien (alien face) to him.

Then he had a bright idea (light bulb), he would leave his tower right away and go to visit the people who lived below him in the gardens. He didn’t fancy going down all those stairs so he pulled on a handy parachute (parachute) and leapt from the window of his tower. He floated down but had no control over where his chute was taking him.

“Look out!” he shouted to a passing tortoise (tortoise), “Get out of the way!”

“I’m trying!” said the tortoise as he moved very slowly to one side. But it was no use, Manners was coming toward him as if he were being pulled by some kind of giant magnet (magnet).

Manners landed with a crash right on top of the poor tortoise who was on his way to the shop to buy more stationery. Manners also loved stationery and they shared many stories of the various pens they each owned.

Soon they were the best of friends (friendly face) and they went to the stationery shop together.

“I’m sorry I spent so long in my ivory tower looking down on you,” said Manners.

“That’s OK,” said the tortoise, “It’s all water under the bridge (bridge).”

The end.

You’re welcome.

And if you want some Story Cubes of your own, and I recommend them to everyone, you can get them here

Panic sets in as your characters start doing things you hadn’t envisioned them doing. This would normally be great, after all it should make the writing easier if your little actors are doing their own thing.

Trouble is, it can mess things up. If you’ve planned your plot then you’re expecting things to go a certain way. That involves your characters doing certain things. But as they evolve it can leave your plot looking clumsy.

You might, for example, find that you’re so concerned with sticking to your plot outline that you start to force your characters to act out of character. They won’t sit right in the story and can leave you with a plot that just doesn’t flow properly.

Alternatively, you might let your characters do what they need to do but find that it takes you away from your original plot outline. That can be fun and is exactly what pantsters enjoy when writing their stories. Unfortunately it can result in you writing yourself into an unforeseen corner with no obvious way out.

Avoiding both of these problems comes down to knowing your characters. The books will tell you that you need to know your character inside out before you start writing, but sometimes you get so excited about your idea that you just want to get on with it. But if your characters are causing plot issues then you have no choice, it’s time to stop for a spot of procrastination.

I recommend you have a word with your characters and a great way to do this is with a questionnaire or interview.

As soon as you find yourself being dragged away from your plot or find yourself unsure about what your characters are trying to do, stop. Get your notebook out or open a new word processor window and start to ask you character some questions, such as

• Who are you?
• What do you want?
• What do you hope to achieve by diverting things this way?
• Are you drunk?
• Do you think you’re real or something?
• Why do you want me to rob this bank?

Let them speak in their own voice and explain their motives. Once you understand what they’re up to you’ll be able to see where the plot is going. Remember I keep saying that procrastination is all about taking a step back from your WIP? Well now do you understand?

Seeing where your plot is going will also allow you to more accurately predict how other characters will react. Because once one person does something you didn’t expect it will have a chain reaction, like the butterfly effect. Your only hope is to keep ahead of your characters. Knowing, or at least having a better idea, of what is about to happen because of the actions of one person will make it much easier to keep going.

Having written out your character interview you can relax with a drink and have a bit of a mull before getting back to work. Trust me, you’ll feel better for it.

And that’s why procrastination can be useful.

I thought I might do one of those “clever” posts where everything starts with P. I was positively panicked at the potential paradox of putting pen to paper that I pouldn’t peven pake phis pentence pake pence.

Or something.

So I stopped.

Stopping is always good. Of course it is. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have picked procrastination as my theme.

I stop for all kinds of reasons. Luckily I’ve got the list of things down to a few that I keep coming back to. I will always stop for pork products. Sometimes I even stop to photograph them. I haven’t painted any pork products yet. But I have done this:

When I do photogrpah things, I do this:

As you can probably tell, I’m not putting in much effort today. That’s because I am procrastinating. Do you see?

Yes it’s a cop out, but what did you really expect? join me tomorrow when I shall be Quietly Quacking into a Quilt.

He got as far as finishing the first paragraph and then proudly read back the work he had done. Right away he noticed some spelling errors and corrected them. Then he noticed that he’d written form, instead of from, several times and corrected those mistakes too.

Soon he was moving words about because they didn’t seem to make sense, something to do with split infinitives. Then he read his work out loud and found that it didn’t scan properly and was hard to read. So he deleted a bunch of stuff and rewrote it. Then he read it out again. This time it scanned properly, but it didn’t really say what he wanted it to.

So he deleted the entire paragraph.

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wrote a story again.

He got to the end of the first paragraph and wondered if it would be better if he started with some dialogue. So he added some dialogue in the first sentence.

Happy with his work he continued to write, feeling smug about the clever joke he’d managed to get in right at the start of his story. But as he wrote he began to wonder if the joke was a little too near the knuckle for his intended audience so he went back and edited the joke to make it a little more family friendly.

Joke done he carried on from where he’d left off. But then he found that the tone of the joke at the start didn’t match the tone of the rest of the paragraph, so he deleted everything he had written.

Once upon a time, there was a writer who wrote a story eventually.

He decided that if he was going to write a story then it should be something he would want to read. So he opened with some dialogue and put in some risqué jokes. He chuckled to himself at his cleverness and crashed on happy in the knowledge that if he found it funny, so would other people and that would be his audience.

Then he remembered reading something about never starting your story with dialogue, or the weather, or people talking about the weather… or at least he thought he remembered. So he stopped writing and went to his bookshelf to look for the book he thought he remembered he might have read it in.

He spent over an hour looking for the rule but could only find something that was almost but not exactly like what he remembered. Then he saw a description of the hardship of writing as being like wrestling a leviathan and he paused to imagine what that would be like.

Soon he was trying to find out exactly what a leviathan was.

Upon seeing the picture his brain began racing and the vagueness of a plot began to form in his gin addled mind. Where would a creature like this come from? What would happen if it were unleashed upon the world? What could stop it? Who could stop it?

Soon our writing hero was searching for a pen and some paper to make notes of this great idea he’d had. Leviathan Unleashed he would call it, until he could come up with a better title. Obviously that would require more research.

Once upon a time there was a writer who wrote an entirely different story form the one he had originally sat down to write.

Once upon a time there was a writer who wrote an entirely different story from the one he had originally sat down to write.

He got as far as the first paragraph and began to wonder if he should do more plotting and planning first. You know, just to make sure he knew where the plot was going so he wouldn’t write himself into a corner.

So he stopped and began researching plotting methods…

Turns out I still  am gorgeous.

So in the name of procrastination and not really be arsed to write anything today, Here are some pictures from the collection.

Click to view slideshow.

You’re welcome.