Another long work week! Aaargh!
Not entirely in the mood to be honest, it just seems like an unbelievable mission right now – Thursday is sooo far away! My to do list never gets any shorter, and it is not very often that I get to cross things off… Most of my time is spent chasing people to do things that they said they would do – the problem here is that everyone just says yes, yes, and then nothing ever gets done – literally! A completely exhausting way to exist!
A simple example – I was given the opportunity to publish an article in a magazine – great, free PR. But because I am in marketing and not PR, I had to hand it over to PR to write. So, because my English is better than anyone else’s here and I actually understand the product, I wrote the damn article and sent it to PR – so they could check it and send it out as their own (which they were very grateful for, by the way). I did this on 3 Feb.
I then followed up on 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20 Feb (email trail, phone calls, and personal visits to PR debt, escalating etc), and on 21 Feb (our deadline was 20 Feb) I received a rewritten article that now included incorrect facts, bad english and spelling mistakes…
This is just so typical of Egyptians! They drive me completely crazy! I have at least 5 situations like this arising every day, which may have something to do with my lack of inspiration.
Another thing that drives me crazy, is that I have to get Legal to sign off my marketing material – fine, makes sense, fair enough – but what really grates my carrot is that they start to correct my spelling, and changing the words I use… What part of ENGLISH IS MY FIRST LANGUAGE do they not understand, and where do they get off changing my message in my ad. Their job is to make sure my ad is legally compliant, not to change “Win a trip for two to England” to “Win too FREE tickets to England” (spelling error included)… Aaaaaaarrrrggghhh!
Just to give you an idea of the English I am dealing with here, check out this email (it takes me longer to try to work out what this guy is trying to say than it is worth). He also had a spelling mistake in his signature on his mail (maneger)… I eventually plucked up the courage to tell him, and he deleted his signature but didn’t even acknowledge my carefully worded email…
Good day all. Hope this find you well.With reference to the above mail subject I did went to maadi site yesterday with the company representative for the new auto mailer machine for testing the availability of packing the booklet with the statement automatically .The result end to that we can go it but still we have lots of damage copy from both statement and booklet.The site is not yet finished means it is under constructions and the environment is not good conditioned to production.End results we have to follow the manual process.Future results :They can provide us with the specks the suet the machine for out packing if the site is get ready after constructions is completed. Regards
It stops being funny after a while…
