A new definition of telecommuting
So... Apparently there is a chance of coordinating from bed. In fact, it's what I'm doing right now. I have two phones laying beside me, and the laptop, as its name befits, on my lap.
It seems this kind of work is the only choice left, when:
a) the Internet is STILL not working at my workplace, and hasn't been since Thursday
b) the festival started today
c) A few minutes after the first workshop started, I came closest in my life to fainting.
Since then I have been unceremoniously packed away to my apartment by my co-workers and two of my bosses ("She's green! What on earth is she still doing here? Send her home!"). If the flu wasn't enough, other more disabling health problems chose the perfect moment to kick in.
So here I am, typing away and trying to remember where I saved which file and put each document, as one of the two phones is constantly ringing.
Keep your fingers crossed, and pray for me, because this day hasn't been fun at all.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Isn't it ironic?
The sleepless nights and working overtime have done their job - a day before the whole festival is supposed to start, I am in bed with a nasty cold, and no perspective of either getting well quickly or taking time off from work (as my job title states, I'm supposed to be there coordinating).
I guess no chance of coordinating from my bed, is there?
And the most amusing thing is that I am well on the way to losing my voice at the beginning of an international mime festival.
Get it?
The sleepless nights and working overtime have done their job - a day before the whole festival is supposed to start, I am in bed with a nasty cold, and no perspective of either getting well quickly or taking time off from work (as my job title states, I'm supposed to be there coordinating).
I guess no chance of coordinating from my bed, is there?
And the most amusing thing is that I am well on the way to losing my voice at the beginning of an international mime festival.
Get it?
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The festival is on its merry way!
This last week has been very, very hectic for me. Being the coordinator of an international mime festival and having to juggle between afore-mentioned bureaucratic procedures resulting from the fact that I work in a regional self-government-financed institution and the demands of my three bosses has basically taken over all of my time and most of my thoughts.
My bosses are, respectively:
a) the Artistic Director (henceforth referred to as AD). A well-known mime artist, actor, stage director. He spends his time between attempting to oversee all the technical details of the festival (which should be left to the coordinator and organizational director, methinks). He manifests his supervision by inquiring one week before the festival if the invited artists have a hotel reserved and airplane tickets bought, and oh my goodness, what about transportation?
He also is known for insinuating that the Organizational Director and Coordinator (my humble self) are scheming against him. His latest accomplishment was a long sermon in which he expressed his worry at the 'negative energy' he felt emanating from Coordinator., which negative energy was no doubt no way related to the fact that the said Coordinator has spent the last three weeks working overtime and hence has had her personal and emotional life reduced to a bare minimum.
AD is frequently accompanied by his stage designer, an elderly lady who is known to add on her insightful comments to contracts she signs, comments in which she stipulates amendments which are simply re-wordings of conditions already set forth in the said contract. She also occasionally doesn't realize she didn't hang up her cell phone while perorating about the deficiencies of the Coordinator to the AD, who is her bosom friend, and then is guilt-stricken. Her guilt lasts only long enough for her to induce her to limit her stormy visits to Coordinator's office to one a week, not three a day.
AD also has parented multiple artistic offspring. The students of AD are class unto themselves. They have inherited all the 'artistic' behavior of AD with only a fraction of his talent. Their unannounced visits to Coordinator's office are always badly-timed, and frequently also stormy. Not content to have their names alongside great mime artists, they blame Coordinator for not having 10 tickets each to give away to their adopted daughter's ex-boyfriend's mother's Hawaiian yoga instructor. AD's students are oblivious to the fact that the reason there are no tickets or places in the audience results from their beloved AD's artistic vision, which limits seating to 80 places. They are known to call three times a day with the same question and then visit Coordinator's office in the hope that they will receive a different answer.
My other bosses are slightly easier to handle, but also very characteristic, and their portraits will no doubt appear in my next posts.
I am completely saturated with pantomime these last few weeks, which is somewhat surprising in the sense that I have, as of yet, never witnessed a 'true' pantomime performance (which, as they tell me, is something very different from the gold-ensconced motionless figures standing on street corners in all European capitals and breaking their stillness at the drop of a coin).
My saturation level has reached the point where my boyfriend appears in my dreams only to argue with me... by pantomime. I wake up, paralyzed, begging - "Please, God, NO!"
But today I think that even if these nightmares are recurrent, in 10 days this will all be over.
This last week has been very, very hectic for me. Being the coordinator of an international mime festival and having to juggle between afore-mentioned bureaucratic procedures resulting from the fact that I work in a regional self-government-financed institution and the demands of my three bosses has basically taken over all of my time and most of my thoughts.
My bosses are, respectively:
a) the Artistic Director (henceforth referred to as AD). A well-known mime artist, actor, stage director. He spends his time between attempting to oversee all the technical details of the festival (which should be left to the coordinator and organizational director, methinks). He manifests his supervision by inquiring one week before the festival if the invited artists have a hotel reserved and airplane tickets bought, and oh my goodness, what about transportation?
He also is known for insinuating that the Organizational Director and Coordinator (my humble self) are scheming against him. His latest accomplishment was a long sermon in which he expressed his worry at the 'negative energy' he felt emanating from Coordinator., which negative energy was no doubt no way related to the fact that the said Coordinator has spent the last three weeks working overtime and hence has had her personal and emotional life reduced to a bare minimum.
AD is frequently accompanied by his stage designer, an elderly lady who is known to add on her insightful comments to contracts she signs, comments in which she stipulates amendments which are simply re-wordings of conditions already set forth in the said contract. She also occasionally doesn't realize she didn't hang up her cell phone while perorating about the deficiencies of the Coordinator to the AD, who is her bosom friend, and then is guilt-stricken. Her guilt lasts only long enough for her to induce her to limit her stormy visits to Coordinator's office to one a week, not three a day.
AD also has parented multiple artistic offspring. The students of AD are class unto themselves. They have inherited all the 'artistic' behavior of AD with only a fraction of his talent. Their unannounced visits to Coordinator's office are always badly-timed, and frequently also stormy. Not content to have their names alongside great mime artists, they blame Coordinator for not having 10 tickets each to give away to their adopted daughter's ex-boyfriend's mother's Hawaiian yoga instructor. AD's students are oblivious to the fact that the reason there are no tickets or places in the audience results from their beloved AD's artistic vision, which limits seating to 80 places. They are known to call three times a day with the same question and then visit Coordinator's office in the hope that they will receive a different answer.
My other bosses are slightly easier to handle, but also very characteristic, and their portraits will no doubt appear in my next posts.
I am completely saturated with pantomime these last few weeks, which is somewhat surprising in the sense that I have, as of yet, never witnessed a 'true' pantomime performance (which, as they tell me, is something very different from the gold-ensconced motionless figures standing on street corners in all European capitals and breaking their stillness at the drop of a coin).
My saturation level has reached the point where my boyfriend appears in my dreams only to argue with me... by pantomime. I wake up, paralyzed, begging - "Please, God, NO!"
But today I think that even if these nightmares are recurrent, in 10 days this will all be over.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Announcement!
Dear avid readers of my blog - I am sorry to announce that for reasons beyond my control (mainly a somewhat paranoid actor who happens to be my boss) I will, for the next few weeks, regularly fail to update this blog.
Do not worry - if I survive the onslaught of work and hosting the festival for which I am apparently responsible, I will let you know.
Meanwhile I shall be gathering material for my posts. Lots and lots of material. Whole scores of anecdotes about slightly nutty actors, bureaucratic procedures and the like.
Stay tuned.
Dear avid readers of my blog - I am sorry to announce that for reasons beyond my control (mainly a somewhat paranoid actor who happens to be my boss) I will, for the next few weeks, regularly fail to update this blog.
Do not worry - if I survive the onslaught of work and hosting the festival for which I am apparently responsible, I will let you know.
Meanwhile I shall be gathering material for my posts. Lots and lots of material. Whole scores of anecdotes about slightly nutty actors, bureaucratic procedures and the like.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Pollyanna would die a sudden death in Warsaw
One gray Monday morning, my co-worker and I spontaneously decided to change our approach to work. In order to do this, we held a 5-minute long pep talk during our short walk to the neo-classical building where we spend 40 hours a week, either attempting to dissuade Swiss performers from bringing 2-meter long branches by plane as props to their play and soothing the frayed nerves of artists (my job) to phoning the members of museum committees in Slovakia (her job). We enumerated the various positive aspects of our jobs, the enormous gain for humanity from the actions we undertake in the workplace, the feeling of satisfaction we have after having convinced the festival's artistic director not to have a heart attack from seeing his name spelled in yellow rather than gold (apparently, anything that appears in the color yellow has no relation whatsoever to art. Pity Van Gogh and the rest of the pack.). We delighted our eyes with the prospects which surrounded us and rejoiced over the fact that the electricity had decided to comply for once and we were no longer obliged to turn off computers in order to boil water in the electric kettle. (Neo-classical buildings have the slight disadvantage of being on the National Heritage list, which means even slight repairs must be approved by authorities, who have apparently better things to do than decided whether the building can have an extra electrical socket or not).
We continued in this vein for the better part of the day, never letting up even during our lunch break, when we expressed our admiration for shop-window displays and lauded the delicious taste of the donuts we had purchased.
The reaction we met with, as two, young, bright and cheerful girls fascinated by surrounding reality was remarkable. It was only the general apathy of autumn-fatigued, listless and morose Varsovians which prevented us from getting committed on the spot. Surprise, fear, uncertainty, disbelief and indignation encompassed the reactions we elicited from the Varsovian public.
Prim grandmothers with strollers, preoccupied businessmen yelling commands into their cell-phones, teenagers shuffling their feet in their apparent hurry to return to school after lunch break - each and everyone of the incongruous characters we met with during our 10-minute walk would have gladly banded together to remove our cheery and enthusiastic comments from their range of vision.
Even Pollyanna would have given up.
One gray Monday morning, my co-worker and I spontaneously decided to change our approach to work. In order to do this, we held a 5-minute long pep talk during our short walk to the neo-classical building where we spend 40 hours a week, either attempting to dissuade Swiss performers from bringing 2-meter long branches by plane as props to their play and soothing the frayed nerves of artists (my job) to phoning the members of museum committees in Slovakia (her job). We enumerated the various positive aspects of our jobs, the enormous gain for humanity from the actions we undertake in the workplace, the feeling of satisfaction we have after having convinced the festival's artistic director not to have a heart attack from seeing his name spelled in yellow rather than gold (apparently, anything that appears in the color yellow has no relation whatsoever to art. Pity Van Gogh and the rest of the pack.). We delighted our eyes with the prospects which surrounded us and rejoiced over the fact that the electricity had decided to comply for once and we were no longer obliged to turn off computers in order to boil water in the electric kettle. (Neo-classical buildings have the slight disadvantage of being on the National Heritage list, which means even slight repairs must be approved by authorities, who have apparently better things to do than decided whether the building can have an extra electrical socket or not).
We continued in this vein for the better part of the day, never letting up even during our lunch break, when we expressed our admiration for shop-window displays and lauded the delicious taste of the donuts we had purchased.
The reaction we met with, as two, young, bright and cheerful girls fascinated by surrounding reality was remarkable. It was only the general apathy of autumn-fatigued, listless and morose Varsovians which prevented us from getting committed on the spot. Surprise, fear, uncertainty, disbelief and indignation encompassed the reactions we elicited from the Varsovian public.
Prim grandmothers with strollers, preoccupied businessmen yelling commands into their cell-phones, teenagers shuffling their feet in their apparent hurry to return to school after lunch break - each and everyone of the incongruous characters we met with during our 10-minute walk would have gladly banded together to remove our cheery and enthusiastic comments from their range of vision.
Even Pollyanna would have given up.
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