Hot and Spicys has a new home!

Hi!

I am very proud and excited to announce that Hot and Spicys now has its own domain and it is beautiful!

Please change any bookmarks you may have and, for everyone who has blogrolled me, please change the link to reflect the new site.

Bear with me in the beginning stages while I tweak the design and make the minor changes! The posts will go up as normal, but don’t be surprised if the look and feel changes slightly from day to day! A new post will go up later today, so make sure to bookmark it or subscribe!

So the home of Hot and Spicys is now www.hotandspicys. com

I look forward to welcoming you!

C

xxx

 

Treatment Phase 1

I have just returned home from the appointment with the Doc. The outlook is good, but I have come home without a prescription for required medication in my pocket, and about this, I feel a bit odd. The bottom line is that the Doc feels that he doesn’t know enough about the condition and the thousand medicines available to treat it. He says that some medicines, if prescribed incorrectly, can actually just make the problem worse. So the solution here is that I get my head shrunk a little and see what the specialists say. I feel this is the part where I need to have a minor breakdown. I understand that whole “you need to see a specialist” rationale. But lets just look at this. I am in a state of panic and anxiety brought on / exacerbated by, among other things, my disastrous financial situation. I am not on a medical aid / help scheme, and I am a single parent of two children, only one of whom has a father who understands he needs to contribute a meagre amount to his child’s expenses. And the cost for the first visit is crazy expensive, AND I was informed by the specialist that he runs a CASH ONLY practice. You got me. CASH. No credit cards, no cheques… Cash. Only. And he can’t see me until the 19th July.

Thats great and all, but here I sit in the mean time, trying very hard to hold the pieces of my life together with hands that are too covered in cooking oil to get a grip. I just can’t seem to get a handle on anything. My girls are driving me to drink. I HATE my job with such a passion. And I am broke. Soon to be bankrupted by my medical expenses. I think its ironic that the one thing that can help me is going to be the thing that cracks me up.

And just to top it all today, my nanny is sick. She has got a case of this flu virus that’s going around that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. So I am at home today with my kids and will be again tomorrow. BM is away and BL is back at the office. I am not sure how she feels about me working from home, but really what options do I have? And this whole situation has made me realise, once again, that I don’t want to work for a boss in an office anymore. I want to be able to be here for my kids. I want to be flexible and available to them at all times. I want to be dependant on me and financially free.

Last week, one of my colleagues finished her time at the company I work for and she is off on a freelancing career as a web developer. I have another two friends who work together at one of my previous employers who were “retrenched” today, and they are both going out there to freelance before they make big decision about their lives. I have a laptop, an internet connection and 10 hours in a day that I spend communting to work and back, and at the office.

If I didn’t have to go to the office, and if I could spend those 10hours making my own money and being here for my kids, what would I do? How would that money come…

I just realised that these are two seperate posts actually, aren’t they? But I clearly need to vent this stuff, so deal with it. Do you have any suggestions? Any ideas on what I can do?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

C
xxx

 

My Sex and the City Friends

Hello. I sincerely hope your weekend is treating you better than mine is treating me. I have been promising to introduce to some of the mad and very special people I call my friends, and today is your lucky day. We spent a very interesting evening together last night and I thought it would be the perfect platform to let you take a peek at what my friends are like.

MS and UP have their birthdays 2 weeks apart, so it was decided that on the 7th June we would all go to a rather lush restaurant called Cape To Cuba. Its a great little place where everything you see is for sale and the food is great and the drinks are better. The company was pretty good too! Some of the people in our gathering last night included ITG, who is MS’s colleague, SD who is the best guy friend a girl could wish for, LF who is our lawyer friend (‘cos you always have to have one of those!) and UP who is a prude of note but so very very very funny!

MS and I go way back. We met at college, both studying a course in PC Engineering. We were top students in our classes and got away with pretty much everything. We’re also both very tough, hard arsed women and we get what we want when we want it. Where I bring the emotional, think with your heart side to our friendship, MS brings the cold hard logic. We have always said that this is what makes our friendship work. We compliment each other so well. And then of course there’s the fact that when one of us gets a hair-brained idea and can’t see the wood for the trees, the other one is usually standing beside her friend, saying “This is a BAD idea and here’s why.” Our friendship is full of honesty and we’re not afraid to tell each other exactly what we think. We also not afraid to say “I told you so” when a brilliant plan fails colossally. Many of the friends we have have never seen the two of us in action when we’re out… And so last night I think we may have intimidated a lot of people. We were both on top form and the comments coming out of our mouths rendered many people speechless on numerous occasions.

There was the shooter line-up, starring MS and me (this is following on a tradition from college where every round of drinks was accompanied by 5 shooters all containing tequila with the last one being a Flaming Lamborghini). Last night we decided to tone it down a bit, as we’re older now and probably notable to handle the college-style abuse to our livers and other vital organs anymore, so we started with a Blowjob, then a B52, a Suitcase, a Springbok and ending with a tequila, straight. Every single person around that table thought that that was going to be the end of us for the evening and that either we would be sick, or we were simply going to pass out. Neither of the above happened. In fact all the alcohol successfully managed to do was sharpen our tongues a little more, and numb our “do I care” meters a little further.

Then of course there was my challenge for the evening. MS has been talking about the hats that the waiters at CTC wear and she told me she wanted someone around the table to buy her a hat for her birthday. In all my confidence I told her not to worry. That I would unashamedly flirt my way into the waiter taking his hat off for her. And I succeeded! By the end of the evening MS was going home with a hand crafted Cuban hat, GRATIS!

Then there was the independent opinion poll that I ran with the male members of our party in a bid to establish what the honest opinion is amongst men when it comes to pubic hair on a woman. The boys unanimously voted for the clean shaven woman. This of course led to much heated debate between the girls and the guys about why women should have to go through all the pain and suffering of regular Brazilian waxes when guys don’t feel that they need to get rid of their fluff. The grand conclusion to this one was that if any of them ever wanted oral sex again, they need to clean up!

This wonderful conversation led into the “To Spit or Swallow” debate, and again much heat was being distributed around the table (but that may have been the shooters! ) I won’t go into this one too much, other than LH and I agreeing, and informing the other ladies of our party that if you aim his penis at the top of your mouth, and knock it back like we had knocked down the shots, you aren’t going to taste anything and you’re going to have a happy man. The other girls weren’t convinced but the guys were speechless. They didn’t know how to handle this little titbit of information. Should they be clambering over themselves for our attention, or should they just run away?

Many fantastic debates and conversations were had last night, and we certainly enjoyed the experience! Pity though that we came home sans any specimens of the male species to practice some of the many conversation points on, but hey, life goes on. I realised when we got home that I had come home sans cellphone too, and then the cold realisation hit me that someone had removed my phone from the table while I was settling our bill. Great. Not only were there still people sitting at our table, but we were the only people left in the restaurant aside from 2 or 3 waiters.

I am so furious. That such a wonderful evening could be overshadowed so sadly by an incident such as this. And its not like I was being particularly careless with my stuff either. MS left her R3000 Chanel handbag in plain site of everyone and she still has all her belongings. I think it is truly reflective of the society you live in when you dine out with a group of friends at a pricey establishment (our bill came to R2740.45 – That works out to a price per head of around R450), and still you are in a situation where your personal items can disappear so quickly. And like I said the restaurant wasn’t busy. We were the only people left when the incident happened, and there were still members of our party sitting at the table. My phone was lifted right under their noses.

I only realised what had happened when we got home and then it was too late. I am going to end this report of my evening here, and am going to continue with another very interesting aspect of the evening and give you more on my friendship with SD later, as it lends another aspect to the evening that is pivotal to my story. Till later…

TBC…

 

Feedback…

I am going to stray away from the pattern I have been following. But just for today. I have to vent about the absolute disaster that was the presentation of my marketing strategy today.

Never in my entire life have two people managed to make me feel so stupid. I have been here for two months and during that time I have gone back into the PPC ccampaigns that have been run by this company. I have looked at the click to enquiry ratio, I have analysed the enquiry to sale ratios, I have calculated the ROI on thousands of campaigns and adgroups, I have identified successful and unsuccessful keywords, and I have built proposals with budget indicators, and estimated ROI and projected sales attached. I have done extensive research into our competitors and what their daily spends are on PPC, how many clicks they get etc. I have looked at our reach vs their’s on alexa.com. I have laboured over excel spreadsheets for 1000’s of hours. I have even gone as far as to include elements that are not part of my brief, such as Social Media Marketing and the 4 R’s of marketing (evolved from the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) it is basically Recognise (or Reveal), Respect, Reward, and Retain) and all that jazz.

So I walk in to the meeting room, after fighting with the binding machine for almost half an hour, with three beautiful presentations. I struggle a bit with the projector and my laptop’s internet connection, but eventually I get it sorted… And then I wait. And wait. And wait.

Eventually, I get up and I have to go and find BL and BM and remind them (because their Outlook Calendars have clearly failed to do so) that we have a meeting now. “Oh!” is one response. “Where are we doing this?” is the other. This is not boding well for me.

So with everyone herded in, I start my presentation. I swear, I was about 30 seconds into it when BM starts lambasting me. Telling me quite clearly I have missed the mark with my strategy, and BL is asking if I even bothered to speak to anybody in the company about anything. She doesn’t feel that I have a good grasp of what this company is about. Apparently, the historical data in their DB’s is wrong. Some of it only started tracking at a later stage, and some of it is optional for the customer to complete, so all my stats are skewed, hence my ROI figures are out, leading to my projections being wrong, and basically all my campaign proposals and demographic data being completely wrong.

And then, as if the verbal crushing and the emotional shattering weren’t bad enough (I was sitting there listening to these two people killing my entire proposal OK. Cut me some slack. It was emotional), they both left when I was half way through my presentation. Then BM got a phone call and said he had to leave and he was gone.. And BL had another meeting. HOW RUDE!!!!!!!! I hadn’t even got to the affiliate marketing plans, or my input on Social Media. AND THEY WERE LATE!

And I was being told it was back to the drawing board for me. That’s great, except that this strategy was part of my first set of 60 day objectives for this company and I haven’t met them, which is NOT good.

All I can say is thank God it is Friday and that I have the whole weekend to try and put something together to redeem myself. Thank you for reading this far, and even if you didn’t, at least I have ranted and raved and got it off my chest. Good weekend all.

C

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