...blast off?

Well the start to today didn't quite go as planned, with me slip sliding away this morning on the ice, which was presumably the reason behind my tres early start being thwarted when I reached Piccadilly. Plenty of time, I thought, to leisurely catch a train to East Didsbury. And so it seemed when I got to Piccadilly, with the departure boards all flashing brightly and gloriously at me that the trains were running on time. So I headed to my platform and settled down to finish reading my Metro. I finished my Metro. And my train was already 5 minutes late. Battling back "the fear" (something I experience a lot whilst waiting for trains, particularly when they fail to arrive on time), I headed back to the boards, only to discover that the two imminent trains to East Didsbury had disappeared. Cue panic. Eventually discovered that the next one would be arriving at 8:58 (bearing in mind I'd already been waiting half an hour), and hurried along to greet it with open arms, only to find it was delayed. Cue uber panic. Finally it arrived at 9:07, at which I hastily boarded and drummed my fingers in an irritated fashion until it began to move, my sigh of relief as it departed at 9:09 quickly turning to a gasp of horror as it stopped again just 500 yards out of the station at 9:10. After an agonising 2 minute wait (yes, agonising indeed) it continued on with its journey, stopping only once more on the way, but not stopping quite long enough for me to express my rage in a physical manner. At 9:25 it pulled into the station, and I hurtled off it straight to Sarah's car, at which point we sped like bats out of hell round the corner to TBWA, even making aggravated hand gestures and cursing old women crossing in our path, such was our urgency to be on time. Gathering our composure, our road rage abated, in we walked through the sturdy oak door of the church...

And here our TBWA story starts! We were instantly given the grand tour by Paul Burns before settling down to be briefed. We then headed off to our home for the next two weeks, a neat little cubby hole within the church walls, and set ourselves down to get cracking. We've just been given a simple Nissan brief to begin with, but we're looking forward to the other briefs we'll be thrown during our two weeks there, and hopefully working on some GHD just like the good old uni days. Today we were more getting our bearings than anything, as being at TBWA is a whole different ball game to our previous placements, particularly in terms of the size of the workforce. Unfortunately we haven't had much chance to get acquainted with everybody yet (and I'm sure we still won't have by the time we leave!), but luckily there was already a familiar face there - our Bex from UCLan. It's been really nice catching up with her and getting to see some of what her and her partner Adam have been working on since they settled there last July, their most recent success having been to grace the pages of Campaign with their new Tiger Balm idents just this week, so a big congratulations to them for that!

Our cubby hole

Hard at work of course

Can't wait to head in tomorrow (regardless of any train trouble!) and I'm sure there'll be more blogging to come over the next fortnight, so stay tuned folks!