HOW IS YOUR MEAL?!?!?!?!?

Well, here we are six weeks into parenthood and it's really going rather well. Oh sure, we're up every three hours without fail, I've lost over half a stone thanks to simply not eating properly, and we've a new found hatred for any parent who tells us that their darling child is 'already sleeping through the night'. Oh how blessed and lucky they are - the bastards.

Well as luck would have it, 'er indoors and I decided to take ourselves out for a nice, and what we hoped would be, romantic meal. We'd got ourselves one of those lovely vouchers and decided that would leave our three year old son Felix at home with the keys to the toolshed and liqueur cabinet, and simply take Tami with us in the pram. She sleeps soundly in public places and clearly has not yet developed a sense of shame. I wonder at what age we get that? I'm still waiting for mine.

Well the first thing we did was to make sure that the restaurant had baby changing facilities. Trust me, no amount of fine dining can make up for having to lay a changing mat on the floor of a public toilet and pray that there are no nasty surprises.

As luck would have it, they said that they did, so we were all set. Now the restaurant is in Chelsea, and whilst that it is only 16 miles away and should therefore take around 40 minutes according to my ridiculously optimistic sat nav system, the drive took close to an hour and a half. That, however, was not the problem...

The problem was that, as we entered, we were greeted with the sounds of lots of people talking. In and of itself that really doesn't seem so bad. What I failed to mention is that these people were attempting to have a conversation over music being played so loud, it was a wonder that they were not pouring into the streets with blood spouting from their eardrums.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not some 40 year old prude who doesn't appreciate a bangin' tune, but this place was louder than the runway of a major international airport. Oh sure, Tami stayed asleep for the 4 minutes that we were in there, but at what cost to her health?

Naturally, we left, but it did get me to thinking - why would anyone create a restaurant where people could not talk over dinner? Surely any dining experience is about more than just the food. If I have to destroy my vocal chords just to speak with someone sat 3 feet away from me then I just can't see the value in that.

Clubs are loud, pubs are sometimes loud too, but does all of our modern technology mean that the only way I can ask my wife if she's enjoying her meal is to send her a text message? It seems that in every decade, something new is blamed for killing the art of conversation. I never thought a meal out would be one of them.

Welcome to the world

Well usually I like to use this platform as a means to share my views on all things stupid with anyone who can be bothered to read them. It's a fun and cathartic process for me. My wife asks me where I come up with my ideas and I point out that it really doesn't take very long for someone to annoy me, and then I get to vent on line.

However this week, I am all mushy and nice - a lot like peas, if you will. The reason should be fairly obvious from the picture above. My wife and I are celebrating the birth of our daughter, Tami Erin Rose.

One month after successfully getting our son out of nappies, and the cycle begins once again. The 4am wake up calls, the ridiculous price of formula, wondering how long it will be before she can crawl over to the DVD player and destroy it. For all these reasons and more, I am actually very happy.

And so I would love to report that in my euphoric state that nothing has annoyed me and that everyone the world is actually marvellous. I would love to, but I can't. However I will save my rant for the next blog, just to keep it fresh. I will give you a spoiler alert though - I win this one, and the big company that annoyed me have their tail between their legs, so HAH!

Until next time.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Game of Buying and Selling

Hello my blog loving friends (both of you). As I pour out my soul in a desperate attempt to amuse, inspire and above all, improve Google page rankings, I find myself thinking about the way people shop.

‘Why Paul?’ I hear you cry. OK, to be fair I didn’t actually hear anything just then but how cool would that have been if you’d actually responded vocally? Pretty cool. No really, it would.

I actually think about the way people shop all of the time. A 25 year long career in selling stuff will tend to do that for you. I’d love to say that I’m a student of the human condition, but that’s just a pretentious way of saying that I think about people, and surely we all do that from time to time.

Most recently I had taken a large amount of my ‘no longer required items’ or to use a professional term – junk – to a car boot sale. My wife Shelly despairs at the 5am start, the hallway covered in boxes and the fact that I may well come home with barely enough money to take the whole family out for a Happy Meal, but none the less away I go.

Now what has made this particular sale interesting is one of the items that I have on my table. It’s a little USB device with a small hot plate that you use to keep your tea or coffee warm. It’s quirky and fun but because I now drink espresso, it’s kind of useless for me.

And so it sits on the table and loads of people pick it up and ask me how much I want for it. I tell them they can make me an offer, at which point they then ask me what the item actually is.

Let’s go over that again – just to make things clear. They want to know how much it is BEFORE they know what it is. To make matters more interesting, there are those who will ask for a price, attempt to negotiate and THEN ask what it is.

This is the car boot mentality; people are more interested in the game of negotiation than they are in actually acquiring the items. I guess that’s OK, but some people are just plain unreasonable. They pick up something which, when it was new cost £20. Second hand you’re happy to take a pound for it and then they STILL ask if you’ll do it for 50p.

Trouble is, if you tell them it’s £2 to start with, they won’t knock you down to what you wanted in the first place – they’ll just put it down and walk away. Once again, the discount is more valuable than the item.

It’s no different in any other marketplace – it’s the buyer that determines the price. Oh sure, the seller may set a price, but if nobody buys it, the price will start to come down until they do. The buyer is in control, but does this mean that, as a service provider, I should drop my prices every time someone tells me that they think I am too expensive? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

If I record a radio commercial for a client and they pay my regular rate, and then another client comes along and wants, lets say, a voice over for a corporate video, then my regular rates will still apply. A reasonable company will accept my rates and we’ll get on with the job. Why? Well I’d like to think they hired me because of the quality of my work, and not the figure on the invoice.

Now if client number three comes along, also wants a voice for a radio commercial and instantly tells me that I am too expensive, well that’s unfortunate, but what does it say about the value I place on myself if I start offering discounts just because people say so? Other respected companies were happy with my rates, so I know that there’s nothing wrong with them.

I don’t want you to think I’m inflexible, but you don’t get the bill at a Michelin Star restaurant and then tell the waiter that you could have picked up a burger down the road for £2.99 do you?

There are voice over artists who are just starting out – happy to take whatever work they can in order to build a portfolio. There are those who are veterans of the industry, represented by the best agents and demanding top dollar for their services.

And then there’s me. If the former is a cheeseburger and the latter Filet Mignon, then I’d like to think of myself as a good Sirloin – reliable, satisfying, and great with a good peppercorn sauce. OK, that last one was a bit weird, but good lists come in threes.

So please audition me first and talk rates second, because if you don’t feel I’ve got the voice you’re looking for, even doing it for free would not make any difference.

Blimey I fancy a steak now…probably should not have written this just before bed. Goodnight. 

What is happening to my language?

Well yes, it has been a while hasn't it my friends? Of course I say that, but then if you're just reading this blog for the first time then it's only been about 12 seconds. In which case welcome, thanks for stopping by, and please feel free to leave a nice warm and fluffy comment before you go - and watch out for the wet paint - thanks.

As I write this, the streets of Britain are teeming with civil unrest. People in London are angry at the police, people in the Midlands are angry at each other, and people in the North are just plain 'Mad fer it'. I myself started a fire yesterday, but only because it was quite a nice evening and I fancied a bit of a barbecue. Thanks for asking - the sausages turned out lovely.

But I get angry too you know, and allow my rage a more peaceful outlet by way of this blog. One of my biggest hates is the apparent death of our language, left in the mouths of these hooded morons who speak with an accent that belongs nowhere on this planet, and with a lacklustre approach to decent grammar and diction that makes me feel like an English teacher from some time around the 1850s.

In no particular order, let me first point out that the G in words that end in 'ing' is NOT, nor has it ever been, silent.  For some reason however, there seems to be an entire generation of people who think that it is. You know who I'm talking about. You call up a company with a solid reputation and some hooped earring Chavette who is more interested in the X Factor than her job shrieks down the phone at you with a voice so shrill that all the dogs in the neighbourhood start howling.

"Good mornin'" they cry. You respond in a professional tone "Good morninG, may I please speak with so and so? "E's in a meetin' right now, who's callin'"

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!! Die Die Die you horrible little person! You're killing the English language. You're the icon of everything I hate about the world. 

Have you been there? I bet you have. Now I don't mind so much when I'm phoning to order a pizza from Domino's but these are people answering the phones in City firms - the sorts of places where a certain standard is expected and yet is clearly being overlooked.

Then there's my other favourite - the expression "Is it", used almost completely without any sense at all. I was delayed in a restaurant recently. I won't name names but suffice is to say that thanking the lord that it was Friday was not going to make any real difference.

He asked me if I was going anywhere after the meal. I told him that I was supposed to be somewhere 20 minutes ago but their errors were holding me up, to which he responds "Is it?" 

IS WHAT MORON? You've actually asked me nothing at all, but in that slow drawn out way that is supposed to relay empathy but actually just makes me want to reach for the nearest bottle of ketchup and throw it at your head!

And last but by no means least, the use of OMG. Seriously, how much of a rush do you need to be in to abbreviate words with one syllable. More importantly, if the person you're speaking with doesn't know what OMG means (there are some who still don't - don't be angry with them, they're just better than you) and so you're going to have to explain it, thus making your abbreviation UTTERLY REDUNDANT.

Language evolves, I get that. I mean why do you think Shakespeare is so bloody difficult? But it seems to be happening at an incredible rate. These days, describing something as 'sick' is a compliment. Well when did that happen? Did I miss a meeting?

As a voice artist, I'm happy to speak in character and mash up this beautiful language with all the enthusiasm as a nerd at a Star Trek convention, but every once in a while, it is just so lovely to speak The Queen's English.

Laters.

There's no such thing as a courtesy call

You know, the world of voice over is a joy for me. I get to ‘become’ a vast spectrum of people - from the simple narration of a radio commercial about a local garage to the voice of a talking carpet, my days can get pretty interesting.

One thing my skills as a talker has helped me with is a career in sales. To be fair, really good sales people listen much more than they talk, but when the chance to speak does present itself, it’s important that they think just as much about what they say, as how they’re saying it. The problem I find with a lot of telesales people is that they don’t possess this skill - they’re usually reading from a script and are poised for one of the two responses that you can give them - either that you are interested, or some reason that you’re not. Either way, if there’s one thing that aggravates more even more than having my evening kebab interrupted, it’s people that flat out LIE.

Best example? “Good evening Mr Rose, I’m calling from insert faceless call centre here and it’s just a quick courtesy call to...........” Now the dots aren’t there to act as an ‘etc’ or an ‘and so on’, no, they’re there because once I hear the words ‘courtesy call’ then all I hear after that is white noise. Give me an extra couple of seconds and my brain will actually start playing reruns of iconic TV shows from the eighties just to stop me lapsing into a coma. It’s sad really, because on reflection, Knight Rider really was rather weak.

Let’s take a look at why this happens, ideally without the use of an MRI to understand my brain. It happens because I don’t understand how any company with whom I have never done business would want to call me simply out of courtesy. It would make a nice world wouldn’t it? “Good afternoon Mr Rose, just calling to say hello and see how you are, no other agenda whatsoever”. Wake up genius, it’s not going to happen.

Courtesy calls are only real when you’ve recently given someone some business and they’re calling to thank you and ask you how you rated the service. Even then, they’re not so much courtesy calls as they are survey calls, but we let them slide because if we were happy, then we’ve no reason to shut them out and if we weren’t, well we all love a good moan don’t we?

All these other courtesy calls are sales calls, so why not just be honest about it? Don’t call to tell me I’ve won a prize in a competition I didn’t even enter. Don’t tell me that my home has been selected for a free conservatory before you’ve established that I live in a flat on the first floor (I don’t any more, that that actually happened), and don’t tell me that you’ve got ‘people in my area’ when we both know that they’ll be in my area just as soon as I agree to an appointment.

What I just don’t get is why all these telesales people are trained in believing that their target customers are all complete idiots. It’s like they just don’t even want to try any more - a cheery disposition and a slick script is only going to work on the thinnest slice of the population, so why bother using it?

Just level with people - “Good evening Mr Rose, I’m calling on behalf of XYZ and I wanted to take a few moments of your time to see if we can be of any help to you with regard to life insurance”. Crisp, polite and to the point, that person will not get the phone slammed down. They will get told that I already have an insurance broker, but I will not feel as though my time was robbed from me by some liar in a call centre.

If you don’t think that the truth works, then I encourage you to watch the Dudley Moore film ‘Crazy People’. Yes it is a work of fiction, but it’s always touched a nerve with me, and if you know the film, I’m sure by now you will be able to see why.

Have a good and honest day.

I Don't Know the Answer

Well as the year draws to a close I thought I would throw one last blog on the fire (see what I did there - clever wasn't it? Well, I say clever, essentially it was just a bit of wit, and I don't suspect I'll be nominated for any awards for it. Still, it brought a smile to my face, so that's nice).

I want to talk about something interesting that happened to me in Tesco the other night. To be fair, most things that happen in Tesco are not interesting. Last week I found myself asking what would happen if Tesco asked a random group of 100 people if they found the whole experience of going there to be anything less than hellish.  I suspect the results would bother them.

The thing is,  I’ve discovered the joy of Lidl shopping, and it really can be a joy. The quality there is superb, the prices are fantastic and what’s more, it can be an adventure comparing European brand foods with the more recognised UK stuff and realising that, more often than not, it tastes exactly the same and in many cases – a lot better.

However, they don’t stock everything and I needed to pick up some chestnut puree so that Shelly could make her chestnut stuffing. It was her mother’s recipe and she really does do it proud, so darling, if you’re reading this – here’s to another great stuffing!

So back to Tesco, where it’s late at night, snowing and altogether unpleasant (OK, about as unpleasant as usual, but if unpleasant had a dial, it would been cranked up to 11). After roaming the aisles of where logic dictated I would find the chestnuts, I was still sporting an empty basket. At that point I decided to ask for help, and I use the word ‘help’ in its broadest sense here.

“Excuse me”, say I, “can you tell me where I might find the chestnut puree and also the whole chestnuts – you usually sell them in vacuum packs?”

“Well you’ll find loose chestnuts in the whole foods section but I haven’t really seen any other chestnuts come in so I expect that we’re not doing them.”

STOP!!!!!! A GIANT LOGIC BOMB HAS JUST BEEN LEFT ON AISLE 16, PLEASE CAN SOMEONE GO AND CLEAR IT UP????

So you’re one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country, and my local has expanded to such a ridiculous size that you can now by light aircraft in Aisle 37, next to the beans, but you’ve not seen chestnuts A WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS!!!???!!!

Obviously my real response was a little more reserved but it did get me thinking about something. Why didn’t she just tell me that she didn’t know?

Seriously, the lady is working in a shop that sells literally thousands of products. If she had the mental capacity to remember all of them, along with their location, then one would argue that she is woefully over qualified to be stacking shelves in the middle of the night in Tesco wouldn’t they?

I am perfectly happy for people to not know the answer, just as long as they take a moment to tell me where I might be able to get the help that I need. What would happen if someone asked me if I could do a particular accent and I just shrugged my shoulders and said "probably"? They'd book a session with me, and then waste time and money finding out that I am not the man for the job. The correct response (and the one I use) is to offer to audition, that way I am only cutting in to my own time, which is fine.

We’re told of all of the truly powerful words in sales like YES and THANKS, but I’d like to add another phrase to that list – the phrase I DON’T KNOW. Go the extra mile and find out what help you genuinely can offer. It can be as simple as asking a colleague if they know the answer, and then everybody wins.

I'm looking forward to 2011. The voicemonkey site is up and running and I have clients asking me to voice animations, commercials, documentaries, phone systems and heaps more. 

To all my fellow artistes in the funny world that we call voice, I wish you all the best of the festive season and may we all enjoy a most prosperous new year.

Ask me a question

Last week, I launched my new VoiceMonkey web site. Please do check it out at www.voicemonkey.co.uk

As a brand new concept, I asked a number of friends and associates what they thought of the idea. Now it's not like I was pitching to Dragon's Den here, but the general opinion of everyone I spoke with was that it is a good idea and is bound to be very popular.

For those of you who have not yet checked it out (and what's the matter with you anyway) The VoiceMonkey is an opportunity for people to download personalised celebrity impressions to use on their phone, be it for ringtonesor my personal favourite, voice mail greetings.

You see, when I was a youngster back in the eighties, my parents bought the house an answering machine and it was clearly a vision of the future. Being tape based, it was only a matter of time before comedy messages became available in the shops and these guys did pretty good business with them.

Fast forward some 25 years and it seems that the same product is not yet available for the ubiquitous mobile, which clearly needs to change. Feel free to join the revolution and visit the site. You can also follow it on Twitter and Facebook. See? I really am trying to cover my bases here.

To launch, I took a small promotional stand at a shopping centre in Harlow in Essex for a long weekend of Friday to Sunday. In a word, fail, but not for the reason that the idea isn't any good, because it is, so there.

What was strange was how many people would walk up to or near the stand, ask in a rhetorical, yet out loud manner, "what's Voice Monkey?" and then walk straight off!

I just don't get it. You find yourself curious about something. You vocalise that curiosity and better yet, you are standing opposite someone who can clearly answer your questions but what do you do? You walk away!

I would really like to think that I am not like that. I have a healthy thirst for knowledge and if the opportunity to get my questions answered are there, then I am asking my questions.

So what do you want to know about me? Are you wondering if I can do a particular voice or if I can sing a certain way? Are you wondering if I represent other voice artists? Well stop wondering, pick up the phone and call me. My web site does not feature an FAQ because the beauty of the world of voice over is that the questions are just about as random as anyone could hope for!

Ultimately, don't be afraid to ask. No one in business has ever been bothered about answering questions. I don't want to suggest that there is no such thing as a stupid question because there is. There are tons of them, but isn't it better to just ask it and get it answered than spending your time simply not knowing?

That last one...was rhetorical.