Today I received the second business cards I have ever had in my life. The first lot of business cards I had were organised for me when I became art director of the magazine I worked at; they had 500 cards printed and I think I managed to hand out three of them in all the years I worked there. Assuming I go through these ones at the same rate, I will need to stay with this company for the next three hundred and forty years to get rid of the whole box.

It's a very enjoyable job and I still am at the stage of looking forward to going in every morning. It's a five-room office suite and there's only one other person working in it, so I have my own room and am left entirely to my own devices. This is ideal. I love jobs where I'm given a list of things that need to be produced, and then left to get on with producing them in whatever way I like. So far I have designed and had printed the aforementioned business cards, some letterhead and memo blocks, fixed up the company logo and some other miscellaneous small things that needed redesigning, and am now working on a brochure, an eight-foot-long vinyl banner for trade shows, and trying to arrange getting 1000 plastic bags printed for advertising purposes. Next week we're going to be interviewing for a summer intern, and then once that hapless individual starts, I will be helping him/her research and produce a set of educational posters. At least, that's what the ad SAID the intern would be doing. For their first month, they're likely to be spending all their time sticking little tiny correction stickers onto each and every one of the roughly four hundred billion OLD posters which now have an incorrect fact printed at the bottom but must still be sent out. Mua ha ha.

So far the only tiny problem with the job is that there is a woman in the other office suite on our floor of the building who sings opera all day long in a voice that, by about ten o'clock, starts to have much the same effect as fingernails on a blackboard. So I started bringing my CD collection to work. I once had great success in getting some neighbours to turn down their 3 a.m. bassfest by retaliating with classical music played at about 400 decibels with all the windows open, but since there are other building tenants who might be inconvenienced in this case, I just concentrate on drowning out the screeching hag next door rather than actively setting out for her destruction.

So far I have not had to bring out the big guns, ie Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor followed by Metallica, but the Pogues did a pretty good job of it today. Man, I LOVE being alone in an office all day.