How to Make Call Centre Work More Exciting

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Adam Randall

Recently I’ve been doing some part time work in a call centre. It’s not very exciting. It’s just taking a call, speaking to a customer, then taking another call and repeating the process for several hours. On the one hand, it’s easy, stress-free work, but it can get boring. So, sometimes I try and think of ways that I could make the work more entertaining.

Now, just to be clear, I didn’t come up with anything that would actually make things interesting, but I did come up with something which, if it existed, would help. So, as the day goes by, a counter fills up and you see how many calls you have had. I had the idea: what if that counter was actually earning you points in a game? Then I thought, why not make them experience points or money in an RPG game? You could even have a button to press each time you deal with a particularly difficult customer, to get you a bigger reward.

This would all be connected to a big online game, where players can use their EXP to do different things, earn money and buy items. It need not be an overly complicated game, but I know it would certainly make call centre work much more exciting for me – especially if you are connected to the game, while playing. Plus, it would be a good way to get people to apply, even if they’d otherwise not have been interested.

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My Second NaNoWriMo Attempt

Posted on December 2, 2017 by Adam Randall

In 2010, I discovered NaNoWriMo, which is where writers try to write 50,000 words of creative fiction in a month. I took part in it and successfully completed a 52,000 word story. This year, 2017, I decided to do it again and, once again, I was successful. This time I wrote 50,000 words or so, but the story I was writing is still incomplete. I hope that I find the motivation to finish and edit that soon. Here are a few of my thoughts on my second attempt:

  • For me, the second try was an awful lot easier than the first try. I wonder if I’ve just become a faster writer?
  • I realise now that when you choose a specific project to be your main focus for NaNoWriMo, your other projects suffer a bit. In my case, it was this blog and my webcomic. Two things I didn’t have in 2010.
  • Every day felt very rewarding, because I felt like I’d done something worthwhile. This is a type of satisfaction that, for example, my job does not provide me with.
  • Recording the word counts each day is awfully addictive.
  • It’s a lot easier than you may think, to fit daily writing sessions around a job.
  • It’s possible to do this with essentially no planning. I got the idea the day before and didn’t write anything down.

In many ways, I feel like this second attempt was a more significant experience for me than my first attempt. The 2010 me was writing stories all the time, while the current me only writes them every now and then. To know that I was able to do this was very reassuring for me. I’m quite excited to do it a third time, at some point in the future… I’d recommend at least giving it a try, if you are a writer and remember: any amount of writing is a success, even if you don’t reach 50,000.

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DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Adam Randall

I’m quite a fan of the DC Universe (especially Batman) and I am also quite a fan of the Alien franchise. These are two things that are quite different and I enjoy them in different ways, so I was quite surprised (and excited) to discover that there were a selection of stories which mixed elements of the two together. The DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens collection brings together several stories which have DC characters encountering Xenomorphs and it’s a collection I quite enjoyed. Here are mini reviews of each story in this collection.

Batman/Aliens by Ron Marz
On a “mission of mercy” Batman finds himself in a jungle on the Mexican-Guatemalan border. He soon encounters a group of military people who are also there on some kind of top secret work. You soon find that they’re there to investigate a crashed space craft which landed in that jungle – its crew made up of aliens, aliens who have been killed by Xenomorphs. Obviously, I don’t want to spoil anything, but I really quite liked this story. Nice art (by Bernie Wrightson), good atmosphere, Batman is well characterised, there are good side characters and I think the Xenomorphs are used in a good, creepy way. It’s probably the best story in the collection. Rating: 8.5/10

Batman/Aliens II by Ian Edington
Last time Batman faced Xenomorphs, it was in a jungle, far from his home. But this time the Xenomorphs have come to Gotham. As it turns out, an explorer had inadvertently brought them back to the city decades ago and then locked them in a vault to stop them from harming anyone. Naturally, they later get out and it’s up to Batman to sort things out. This story is a bit longer than the previous one, and I have to say I didn’t enjoy it quite as much. It read like more of a comic romp than the previous one, which managed to capture the horror element from the Alien films much better. Towards the end, it got downright weird too – in an entertaining way, but still quite weird nonetheless, which might put some people off. Rating: 8/10

Superman and Batman Vs. Aliens and Predator by Mark Schultz
Unlike the previous two stories, this one is more focused around Superman. Batman still plays an important role, but it definitely feels like Superman is the main character. I’m fine with this, since I quite like Superman and I feel like he comes off especially well in this one. The story goes that a group of researchers up in The Andes have been killed mysteriously. As it turns out, there’s a secret civilisation of Aliens and Predators living there. I was a bit disappointed, in that Superman and Batman both make reference to encounters with Predators which aren’t shown in this collection and Superman knows the Xenomorphs too, which also isn’t shown, so I felt like I was missing a part of the story. But overall, I really quite liked this one, particularly some of the moral dilemmas faced by Superman and Batman. The art by Ariel Olivetti is the best in the collection too. Rating: 8.3/10

WILDC.A.T.S/Aliens by Warren Ellis
I think, perhaps, that I didn’t have enough foreknowledge to enjoy this story. This was actually the very first WILDC.A.T.S story that I read. As it was, it felt like a very generic story featuring Xenomorphs. I didn’t really feel that it was particularly atmospheric, that it had much emotional depth or that it raised any interesting questions. Perhaps it feels much more significant if you know the histories of its characters (and there are a fair few references which seemed to allude to earlier stories) but without that understanding of the franchise, it reads like a story where undeveloped characters face off against poorly utilised Xenomorphs. Rating: 4.9/10

So, I felt like this collection was a little bit of a mixed bag, but overall, I was pretty happy with it. I think most fans of the DC Universe will like it (even with only a cursory understanding of the Alien films) and most fans of the Alien franchise will like it (even with only a cursory understanding of the DC Universe), but if you don’t know much about either, I would not recommend this.

Average rating: 7.4/10

Buy it here.

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Job Interview Questions and Answers

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Adam Randall

I quite like job interviews. I know some people find them stressful, but I see them as a nice chance to get out of the house and to visit an office where you get to talk about how good you are. I guess I just like interacting with people – especially when there’s the promise of a new job. The trouble is, that sometimes the questions are a bit tricky and it’s hard to know what to say. Here’s a few of my impromptu interview answers from over the years

What would you say are five of your best features?
Well, I suppose I’m creative, friendly, optimistic, fairly positive and very good at finding different ways to say the word “optimistic.”

What would your current manager say is your biggest flaw?
Well, she’d probably say time keeping, if she had to say anything. But let’s turn that around. What would your current receptionist say is the biggest downside of working here?

What is it that gets you up in the morning?
I don’t hate my life or anything, so I’ve never really struggled to get up in the morning.

What about you makes you a good choice for the role?
Communication. Well, communication skills. Verbal communication skills. Basically, I mean to say that I am good at verbally communicating with others in a clear and easy to understand way… Which is ironic, considering that I stumbled over almost every word there!

What makes you think you can do this job?
Well, at the risk of sounding enormously arrogant, it seems incredibly easy. I’m sure pretty much anybody could do it, really.

Where’s your accent from?
Funnily enough, I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview where I wasn’t asked that.

Can I get you a glass of water?
No, thank you. I always have my own supply here in this Trusty Water Bottle.

I can’t really tell if I’m good at interviews or bad at them. I’ve had quite a lot of jobs over the years, and some of the questions and answers above were taken from interviews where I was successful. In reality, I think you probably need a different approach for every different job. It’s true that there are certain hoops you’re always going to need to jump through to get jobs, but at the same time, “employers” are not one big, connected group – what may come across as good to one, may be unimpressive to another. There’s not ‘a’ way to do well in interviews, there are lots of different ways to approach them and no matter what you do, there might always be a more suitable candidate than you. There will always be a strong element of luck. Don’t let yourself be disheartened by an unsuccessful interview.

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Mistaken for an Authority

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Adam Randall

I like to wear a blazer most of the time. I find them very comfortable, they have conveniently positioned pockets, they’re appropriate for most social contexts and I think I look good in them. I’ve got a small collection of them, which I mostly just pick up in charity shops for under £10 when I can find them.

Wearing them so often, I’ve noticed a strange power that they seem to have: making people think that you have some level of authority. Which is quite amusing. Let me give you some examples:

  • When I was in the third year of university, a first year student mistook me for a lecturer.
  • When I went to an ice skating rink, a couple of peopled asked me for the rules about skating, assuming I worked there.
  • When I accompanied a friend of mine as they went to a doctor’s appointment, they mistook us for inspectors (we were both wearing blazers.)
  • Once when a friend of mine and I wanted to explore the private parts of a fancy building we were in, we just went there and got away with it by acting like we belonged there (again, I was with another blazer wearer.)

I suppose, to be fair, I am being a bit presumptuous. It could be a string of coincidences and, in each of those instances, a person wearing different clothes would have been mistaken in much the same way, but it seems unlikely. It’s the sort of thing that happens fairly regularly. It’s also worth considering that being a white male with a “well spoken” voice may also be contributing factors. Which would be unfortunate.

It makes me think, it must be quite easy to be a con artist. If a certain type of jacket instills in people some level of trust without you having to do anything, it must be really easy to take advantage of that by consciously playing up the notion that you are a trustworthy authority. Someone once told me that it’s just as easy to do with a hi-vis jacket too. It’s interesting, and disappointing, to think about how much importance people place on these surface level things.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

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Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Adam Randall

Designing homes has always been a big part of the Animal Crossing series. You catch bugs and fish, sell fruit, do chores for people and all to make some money to expand the size of your house and to get new pieces of furniture. With Happy Home Designer, they decided to make designing homes the central theme of the game, making it very different to previous titles.

At the start of the game, your villager gets a new job working for Nook’s Homes, a home design business run by Tom Nook. What’s quite nice this time, is that you are put in complete control of what your  character looks like right from the start: you can choose skin colour, hair colour, hair style, the shape of their face and what their eyes look like. It’s a nice feature which I am surprised wasn’t implemented earlier, so the game gets off to a good start.

You get shown around the Nook’s Homes office and are introduced to your colleagues. You work alongside Lottie (an otter, related to Lyle from previous games), Lyle (who’s slowly become a lot more legit as the series has gone on, which I like), Digby (Isabelle’s brother) and Tom Nook himself. All the characters can be spoken to in order to answer questions and tell you what to do.

Once that’s all done, you move onto the main body of the game: building homes for people. You go out onto the street and you speak to passing villagers who will tell you what they’re looking for in a home. They usually will give you some sort of instructions (but not always) and then you’re just given free reign to make the home as you please. You choose the best sort of location for the house (for example, in the woods, near the beach etc.) and then design the outside of the house and the garden, then you start placing furniture and designing the inside.

What’s quite nice about designing the homes, is that it gives you the opportunity to be quite creative. In past instalments, it was hard to make a really special home, because you needed to have a lot of money, but this time money doesn’t factor in at all. You have a large selection of furniture to select and each time you take on a new client, you unlock more pieces of furniture to unlock. It must have more furniture options than any previous game in the series.

As well as designing homes, Isabelle will occasionally come in and ask you to help with public buildings. For example, she might ask you to design a restaurant, a school, an office or a shopping centre. These tasks always took longer than designing homes, but I always enjoyed doing them more. After doing them, you can also see animals using them as they were supposed to be used, which I always quite liked and found quite satisfying.

To help make the designer aspect more user-friendly, furniture can now easily be placed using the touch screen. It makes moving and rearranging furniture so much easier and I hope that this is a feature we’ll see back in future games. You’re also given more freedom in regards to where furniture is placed. In the past, it used a kind of grid system, where furniture took up certain squares, but you can now place things, for example, so that they’re half in one square and half in another, if that makes sense.

But, speaking of easiness, the game is definitely too easy. The villagers may give you a rough outline of what sort of home they want, but if you can fail to satisfy them, it never happened to me.  At times, it started to feel a bit monotonous and I just started to think “What’s the point?” so I definitely recommend playing this in small doses. This applies more to the home designs, rather than Isabelle’s tasks. It’s sad that, for example, you can’t even build friendships with the villagers like you do in previous games. Or that you can’t save money to do things.

I guess I do quite like being able to design things, I just wish that more purpose was given to your creations. You can share them online, but that was never all that appealing to me. But if you don’t think that will bother you, the game has a lot of content: all of the hundreds of Animal Crossing Amiibo cards can be scanned and they’ll all bring in new villagers with new tasks and furniture. It’s just a shame that the Amiibo cards were distributed randomly in packets – I wasn’t actually able to find the cards of a lot of my favourite animals, such as Julian the unicorn.

Overall, I wouldn’t want to say that this was a bad game… It’s just very basic. It’s nice to dip into it every now and then when you’re bored, but it never really captivated me. I can imagine that there are some people who would get really, really into it and get hundreds of hours of fun out of it… but I don’t think that that will be the case for most people. The game is very similar to Animal Crossing: New Leaf in terms of interface, graphics and soundtrack and I couldn’t help but think that it should have just been DLC for that game, rather than an individual release.

Rating: 7.2/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

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Censorship

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Adam Randall

Censorship is a subject which concerns me quite a lot and a subject which is in the media at the moment, for various reasons. However, my concerns about censorship tend to be quite different to those of the majority (or, at least, what appears to be the majority from my perspective.)

A lot of people get upset when people with racially controversial opinions have their platforms taken away or their books cancelled. People feel similarly about the critics of the transgender community who are not given the chance to say what they want to say. People claim that some of those with left wing ideologies have gone so far as to be threatening people’s freedom of speech.

I do agree that this is an issue – to an extent. On the one hand, there are people who are keen to be offended on behalf of a minority and so then call something offensive and harmful, even though it might actually be quite positive. A good example of this would be the recent censorship of To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favourite books.) And examples like these need to be stopped. On the other hand, refusing to give a platform to speakers who directly attack individuals in the audience (on personal grounds) seems quite fair. Then there are complicated middle grounds, such as what to do with statues of famous figures of US history who were slave owners. Removing them would be to forget and deny the tragedies of the past, whereas keeping them in place would be to honour negative figures who may not deserve to be honoured.

But, while these are all issues which need to be thought about and discussed, I think the biggest censorship threats are actually much larger. In America, for example, there’s the risk to net neutrality and, the rumblings of government censorship in the UK which have been on and off for a few years.  Without net neutrality, what is seen on the internet will be decided by those with the most money (which is very alarming) and the idea of the UK government enforcing internet censorship seems like a slippery slope towards the kinds of things they have in certain parts of Asia. People need to be able to share their ideas and it worries me that the voices of the rich and powerful could one day drown out all other perspectives entirely. I hope it will never happen.

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Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Adam Randall

When Doctor Who was cancelled on television, it came back in the form of a series of novels, the first four of which made up the Timewyrm series. What’s quite exciting about this one is that it was written by Terrance Dicks, who is one of the best known and highly regarded of the writers who worked on the show during it’s original run (and beyond.)

I do think that the series was off to a good start with the previous book Timewyrm: Geneysis, but this book really managed to blow it out of the water. The first book had a lot of sex and violence, things which I am not necessarily opposed to being used in Doctor Who but which were handled in a somewhat immature manner and in a way that didn’t feel quite true to the show.

Nothing in Timewyrm: Exodus felt as if it wasn’t true to the show. Having said that, I also wouldn’t like to say it was just like something that could have happened in the series. The book does contain some very adult themes, but they’re mixed perfectly with the Doctor Who ethos, creating an impressive ambience between the two.

So what’s the storyline? Well, the Doctor and Ace arrive in London in 1951, but small things alert them to the fact that something is not right. They soon realise that history has now been changed so that the Nazis won World War 2 and conquered the UK. The Doctor then starts to investigate where exactly the timeline diverged and then set about trying to get it back on track – using time travel, of course.

Something that I appreciated was the attention to historical detail. All of the references to real life happenings (and the ways that they were changed in the new timeline) were really interesting. Alternative History is a genre I’m very fond of and though “What if the Nazis won the Second World War?” is a commonly asked question, the answer that this book provides is very enjoyable and thought-provoking.

What makes the book even better (for big fans of the show) is that it has strong ties to some of the earlier mythos of the show. I’d hate to say what happens, because I was very pleasantly surprised when I came across it naturally and I’d not want to rob anyone of that experience, but it was very cool. Although it might be lost on more casual fans of the show.

Overall, I kind of feel that Timewyrm: Exodus should have been the first book in the series, because it’s a really interesting and exciting story. I found myself reading multiple chapters at a time because it was, as they say, hard to put down. Even if you’ve not read the first book, the connections to it are relatively small, so you might want to give this a read. I’d say that it is one of the best Doctor Who novels I’ve ever read, fans should definitely give it a try, if they can find a copy.

Rating: 9.2/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

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Feeding Creativity with Emotional Energy

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Adam Randall

I remember when I wrote as a teenager, it was usually something I did when I was feeling sad. The negative energy fed into my creativity and provided me with a nice escape from whatever it was that made me unhappy. It was good, in a way, because it meant that if I was feeling unhappy, the upside was that I’d be productive with my writing. I guess the downside was that it meant that I was more inclined to write stories with unhappy endings or a darker tone.

At some point (I’m not sure when) there was a shift within me. Rather than drawing creative energy from negative emotions, I started drawing it from positive emotions. I think it might have coincided with writing becoming a communal activity for me, as opposed to a solitary one.

When I started university, most stories that I wrote were going to be read but a lot of people. There were close friends in particular who I always enjoyed sharing things with too. Often I was driven by my desire to share my work with others and I’d look forward to seeing their reactions to my work. It was around that same time that I also started keeping this blog, which further helped to make my writing more of a communal activity.

I think that my writing turns out better when it’s driven by positive emotions, but that does also mean that I need to be in a good mood in order to get some writing done. It’s also possible that it isn’t the shift in my mood that’s created the increase in quality, but rather the fact that I’ve learned more about writing in those years.

Nonetheless, I do think that my writing has benefited from approaching it with a more positive mind-frame. If you’re a writer, I think it’s definitely worth taking this into consideration to see how much it affects the quality of your own work.

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Not Wanting to Be Friends

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Adam Randall

There was a time when I had completely run out of friends to spend time with. It was quite an unhappy time, because spending time with my friends is my favourite thing to do. Naturally, my solution to this problem was to try and make new friends. Not having much money to spare, I signed up to a website which is designed for people who want to make friends.

Someone added me who was similar in age, lived in the nearby area and had several common interests. That sounds ideal, right? So we chatted for a while online and then agreed to meet up for lunch a little later. I was quite excited and then, when we finally met, I found that they were easy to talk to and that they were perfectly pleasant.

The problem was, that I just didn’t care. It was quite an anomalous thing for me, but I actually had no interest in developing a friendship and cultivating a bond with this person. The whole time I wished I was at home reading or playing games. Even though I had no one else to meet up with and the addition of this one friend would have been a huge addition to my social life, meeting with them did nothing for me. I never communicated with them again and they never communicated with me either. I wouldn’t be surprised if they came away with a similar feeling of disinterestedness.

It was an unusual experience. At fist I thought that, perhaps, I’d just lost my ability to properly bond and socialise with others. This was a concerning thought. Then I thought that I might have been a little too depressed at the time to become enthusiastic about making new friends. Then I concluded, that some people just don’t have the right chemistry. You can like and be respectful of just about anyone, but to form a meaningful friendship, that chemistry needs to be there.

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