They say a picture tells a thousand words. Do you know what else tells a thousand words? People who work in communications. The ones with a tendency to be overly verbose. The ones who sit in the loud corner of the office (or, more correctly, the ones who are the loud corner of the office). Those who list The Chicago Manual of Style and The Oxford Guide to English Usage among their favourite books. People like me.
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| Linguistic utopia |
After miraculously completing a BCom at Otago, despite changing my major every semester, I ended up in marketing and communications – ironically, just about the only two subjects I never took a single paper in at uni. I’d tried my hand at everything from bio, chem, and physics, to economics, stats, German, Asia-Pacific studies, and Chinese business management. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up running a 24-hour takeaway joint after that last one...
In fact, bar a brief sojourn in Europe in 2008, I've spent the best part of the past five years telling stories about other people's day-to-day lives and trying to talk journalists into printing press releases about big corporates’ new products. Back in the early days of PR agency work (when I wasn’t on the eternal hunt for Wellington’s moistest date scone or rehearsing for yet another mesmerising performance of The Final Countdown with the Capital’s most celebrated air-band), I honed my craft writing about young apprentice builders at the top of their game, architecturally-designed, award-winning homes, the latest and greatest MP3 players and plasma TVs, opera singers who received laureates, innovative new fuels, and everything you never wanted to know about cement and concrete. I even learnt how to spell Feilding (not a case of ‘i before e’) and Taumarunui – thanks, Pete. It was then on to the bright lights of marketing building qualifications (riveting, really), designing cool websites for school kids interested in the trades, and learning how to say Proprietary Plaster Cladding Systems without getting tongue-tied.
These days, it’s heart-warming tales of bankers who went above and beyond in Christchurch, and the gentleman who spent 54 years and 8 months working for the same company before retirement. There’s always a story to be told, from new customer offers and systems outages to the occasional excitement of a temporary store closure due to maggots falling from dead pigeons in the ceiling. True story.
As thrilling as these largely Wellington-based stories have been thus far, it’s high time I ventured further afield for some new material and pictures to tell another thousand words (alright, several thousand, if I’m being realistic). And so, I’m ditching my desk with a harbour view in the loud corner of the office for two whole months in search of the same - but different. I'll be on the hunt for fascinating people to talk to and to talk about. Enter: Miss Communicate – the home of short stories and tall tales of misadventure and miscommunication on the Subcontintent. More specifically, I'll be traversing India and trekking to Everest Base Camp in Nepal. But not before I've made it through a week over New Year on Koh Samui in Thailand, with more than 20 friends and friends-of-friends. And 30,000 strangers covered in fluorescent body paint. Ladies and gentlemen, let the games begin
