By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on January 22, 2009 at 12:43 pm
What a difference a decade has made to telephone bills. We realised it after a reply was left for us this week on an article written a few years ago for an American publisher, here. All good stuff too, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Back in 1990, when we got our first modem and thought faxes were a neat way to communicate, we needed four telephone lines. One each for conversation and one each for our fax machines. Sending and receiving files involved long distance telephone calls which only became local as the Internet took off. In those days Mistral our first ISP, was a back bedroom in Brighton, stuffed full of modems and a front garden with a permanent telecom trench for the ever-increasing number of cables.
It was not unusual to have a monthly telephone bill of £150 which grew to £300 when we bonded the two lines together to get BT’s ISDN. That must have been the worst value narrowband transmission going. At least it was quicker than modem alone. One Christmas Eve I transmitted an urgent file by Xmodem to the same ICL factory where a motorcycle courier was taking a delivery. He collected the package and drove the 150 miles, arriving quicker than the file, which was less than a couple of floppy disks in size.
When Mistral offered ADSL we were among their first customers. Our monthly phone bill shrank to £100 which was mainly for the ADSL line. We thought this quite reasonable at the time. Come forward to now and broadband and hosting is less than thirty quid a month, telephone bill less than twenty and cost of calls a couple of quid because we use the 18185 system. This brilliant service is free after a one-time web registration here and most calls and SMS texts, even international, cost zero pence. You pay for the connection only, five pence usually.
Forms become headaches
The recession has hit us severely, our US publishers haven’t ordered any books, UK publishers are laying off staff and no-one has work for us. After sitting-out too much of last year it is time to apply for jobs. This is not something we do with any enthusiasm after working from our own office for the last twenty years.
Consequently we have been completing a zillion forms, one over 28 pages long. Some have been created in Word which lets us type in the information but others are PDFs. Even though Adobe’s latest versions of Acrobat Pro include editable forms (with Acrobe Reader) none of the forms we’ve had to complete have this feature. Short of finding a typewriter or opening each page in Illustrator, the only way we could fill the forms in was by creating a document in inDesign or XPress with a PDF page on each document page. Then inserting text across the top of the blank spaces. That’s easy for a short form but longer ones can take ages to make.
In the end we wrote in block capitals in our best handwriting which is illegible even to us. So we hope no-one can read it enough to offer us a job meanwhile Obama wields his mighty axe and kills the recession.
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