to ask you what you do 'in the office'?

[Crevix]

i was reading cosmo and realised i have no idea what happens 'in the office'.

why do you need special clothes? do people really have 'office romances'? and 'office parties'?

and what sort of work is done 'in the office'?

haha, no i just dress in a way that makes me feel beautiful! im not indian either! i also dont wear shoes!

make lots of calls to customers trying to get them to buy our products and snigger at people wearing designer clothes

Crevix - a consultancy is a company that you would get in to help you do something you don't have the skills to do or don't want to do, so in the case of my client they didn't want to do certain IT functions in-house any more, including the sort of IT support that I do.
So they pay my company piles of money in the belief that what they save in salaries etc saves them money overall and gives them someone to blame, when in reality outsourcing is a false economy.
Obv some consultancies are great...just not mine...

btw I would love to be midwife...

Crevix consultancy is lending out your time in a particular niche, specialised field. Normally consisting of very very high pay rates and hired for short periods of time (perhaps rolling).

E.g. my brother has his own IT firm. he basically works as an IT consultant, he used to be employed as a programmer but moved away from that hands on stuff. he's normally hired to train up in-house staff at companies in his specialised field, or troubleshoot problems on a project basis for them.

Basically he consults with the stakeholders of various companies for a day or monthly-set-rate and provides advice, training and knowledge to them that they couldn't (or wouldn't want to/have a need of) hiring someone permanently on.

E.g. if he is hired to fix something then he might get paid £750 a day (well his company would, he wouldn't personally) and be hired for 5 days. and i know he has a lot of clients on a 2 day a month contract. this is when a company wouldn't want to hire someone on £100k to do the job fulltime, or wouldn't need to (not enough of the work).

i only know this much because i worked there as an admin assistant part time a few years ago to help out still don't know much about what he is trained in, but i do understand the business concept - hope i've explained it well enough here!

p.s or if i haven't explained it well enough, maybe my nickname for my brother's company will help: "rent a smart arse agency" says it all really

it's not really called that (not gonna give it away but it's something like blah blah agency) but did give me a giggle or two to rib him with!

My office is rather relaxed but very busy at the same time. We are 'art' based and therefore if we look too 'professional' our clients often think we are not who they think!

Today I got in at 9.30 as I had already been to the printers, have finalised a contract with a new client and had a coffee and gossip with my business partner. Now im on mums net and about to put on some make up before my 2pm meeting.

I wear anything from a dress and cardi to linen trousers and a top. If we have no meetings planned then no make up is required as we do not have drop in clients.

Why would having drop in clients require you to wear make up? Is it your preference or do you HAVE to?

We have a communal office where we eat toast, slag the boss off, laugh a lot and occasionally do some work. Very boring financial related work. I am leaving in two weeks to go to an office where I will have infinitely more work to do but nicer boss and company to work for :)

ha ha reminds me of when my dad said that the TV series The Office was nothing like an office. It so is, except he of course never experienced as he was the boss so when he walked through all was well.....
My friend who is a teacher says 'Teachers' was also bang on.... (pray for our kids)

oh and people often dont bother with deoderant, wearing shoes when at their desk (despite there feet stinking) or freshning their breath (despite smoking, drinking coffee and eating smelly sandwiches).
And the worse job ever is actually having to tell one of your colleagues that they are in the above category and could they do something about it.....

I work in an office and spend most of my time trying to negotiate various vanilla corporate systems and get them to do something appropriate to the business I'm in. I also fiddle around with spreadsheets a lot and write procedures.

I need a new job :(

Hmmm, open the post, check the answerphone, try to deduce which emails are relevant, chat to colleagues. Then look sadly at heap of work. Do some. Look around office - if boss is in, do more, if not then look out of the window/check emails/go to someone else's office to do some trivial task and have a chat. Then more work. Lots of gossiping about work (interesting), our colleagues etc. Lots of office romance about too, mainly because everyone who works here has to be a huge geek and so we they have a lot in common.

And yes, office dinners/parties/drinking sessions. Which tend to be great fun unless someone's boss decides to come along at which point everyone starts to be very polite.

Big Hairy Legged Spider, I wear it because I want to and as there is only me, my business partner, one designer and a secretary, who have worked for us for a few years I have been giving my hormonal pregnant face a bit of time off. Normaly I dont leve the house without it on!

In my office I have meetings with lots of business people to find out what they want the computer systems to do. Then I write it all down in a way that the IT geeks can understand. It's not the most exciting job in the world but it's not difficult and I get paid quite a lot of money for doing it.

As for office romances... I'm sure they happen but the people I work with are too jaded and cynical to care what everyone else is doing

We throw paper and paperclips at each other, complain, moan about the coffee, count down to public holidays, read the paper and swivel on our chairs.

Lots of fun

i lost my job piece by piece until there was nothing of it left and I got made redundant because another woman wanted it and she had started sleeping with the chairman. She had no skills or experience in my area so she used me for her training.

We mainly attempt to find enough chairs to sit on in my office because it is very tiny. So we use it as a base to have meetings and transfer files to the server and stuff. Not to sit around in bitching or photocopying our fannies. There's no dress code. Or rather no conventional dress code.

ggirl you will probably find that most social networking and webmail sites are not available on your office computer to ensure that staff actually do the work they are supposed to, or that the origanisation's network/ IT infrastructure does not go belly up due to someone opening a private e-mail containing a virus.

I work in an office. It's a not-for-profit environmental NGO. I wear jeans and t-shirt - I used to wear something vaguely smarter but got in the one pair of comfy trousers habit when I was pregnant, and shopping for office clothes is not a priority. My boss occasionally wears a shirt and tie, usually in violently clashing colours and patterns.

There are no real office romances - one of the guys usually has a thing about one of the female volunteers, but at the moment he is spoken for. There is very little office gossip - we're too small a team really, and too committed to our work! We love nothing better than a bit of gossip about organisations that we deal with tho'.

If you walked in you would see people staring at computers, occasional rummaging in filing cabinets, the phone (shared between us all) doesn't go very often. Ocasionally a bit of chat, but that is often about the latest butterfly or dragonfly someone has seen or the arcane workings of the main database. Me and boss compare notes on small daughters sometimes. You need fairly minimal social skills to work here!

I get you. I always wondered too on the occasion I browsed a 'Women's' magazine.

I work in a lab though so can't really comment.

I work in a repairs department for social housing. Basically I spend the day organising to get stuff fixed. We're always understaffed and an emergency will always come in when it's most busy so it is always manic and fairly stressful. I get abuse from tenants, sometimes they are just at the end of their tether but a lot of people are just rude because they can be. Contractors miss appointments and management are always harping on about targets but never address the underlying issue of lack of staff.Very few people who start last that long. I've been there 4 years and am on maternity leave now and think it'll be time to look for something else.

I used to work in the office of a glossy magazine which may or may not have been Cosmo.

Topics of conversation would be:

Diets.
The acquisition of free expensive beauty products.
Exercise - particularly fads like PowerPlate.
Madonna's arms.
Upmarket female celebrities between 18 and 35; usually US-based.
Fashion.
Models.
The acquisition of free designer clothes.
The acquisition of free designer accessories.
Diets.
Jennifer Lopez's bum.
The acquisition of free travel trips esp those to 5 star spa resorts preferably in the Indian Ocean.
Detoxing.
Competitive water consumption. Most desks had at least one 2litre bottle of Evian.
Whether or not Kate Winslet was fat.
Diets.
Cosmetic surgery.
The acquisition of free expensive beauty treatments up to and including surgery.
Hair. Preferably on head.
Launches for upmarket beauty products/bars/hotels esp if abroad and with upmarket celebrities in attendance.
The situation in the Middle East.

Spot the deliberate mistake.

My most memorable conversation was the one with someone who volunteered the tip that eating tissues really helped if you wanted to avoid food.

limitedperiodonly-sounds fabulous!!!

Absolutely ggirl

PS I forgot Kate Moss