ia play

RNIB training seems to include lots of gentle games and quizzes. Our sight loss training included a game that went as follows:

• Give participants the same information printed in different fonts sizes.
• Ask them to answer a question about the information
• Give the first person to answer correctly a metaphorical pat on the back (they need sweets here)

(it was more interesting than it sounds)

The idea being that you very quickly get what font sizes are easy to read. And therefore understand why all RNIB information is printed in 14 point and at first looks screamingly ‘loud’.

It is a little strange working for the same company as my big sister, Catherine.

The RNIB is a small enough organisation that,  in-spite of her working in a completely different part of the country, many of my colleagues in London know my sister. They say we look alike. They also say she’s told them all my secrets.

I’ve already had to go to the Leeds office for a meeting so got to stay with Cath and see her in her professional guise. All her colleagues said we look alike too.

I know we’re the same size but I’m not convinced we’re that identi-kit. She does like purple too though.

I had the second part of my RNIB induction last week. The first bit was  sight loss training whereas this part was more about corporate awareness.

As a result I now know that:

• the RNIB does not chug
• one of the bestselling RNIB products is a liquid level indicator which emits a tone when the cup is full
• three out of four blind and partially sighted people of working age are not in work
• nearly 30 per cent of RNIB’s income comes from legacies
• having the org structure explained doesn’t help understand it
• Sooty boxes raises over £850,000 each year
• the CEO knows about what I do

Guide dogs vomiting at work is not actually a new thing for me. That happened at the BBC too. The story became the stuff of office legend but at the RNIB it merits a pan-building email (admittedly to explain why the second floor had been without power):

“Dog of the Week - a new slot. So there’s Jimmy, lying under John’s desk, dreaming of chasing rabbits and sniffing “things” whilst John beavers away earning a crust. Sod this for a game of soldiers thinks Jimmy, I want to go home, and promptly throws up in the floor-box, thus short circuiting the electricity supply to the second floor. Nice one Jimmy - the lads in my Team only do that at Christmas.”

Lot’s of people are asking how the RNIB compares to the BBC.

My journey is much better for one thing, shorter and simpler. That has a surprisingly big impact on how happily the day goes. Judd Street is also a delight compared to White City- there’s coffee shops, restaurants, bookshops, and loads of parks. Favourite so far is St George’s Garden. Oh and the British Library and the Brunswick Centre are both just a stone’s throw away.

There’s something more office-y about the job. Office wear is smarter, people start and leave earlier, and weirdly quite a number of websites are blocked. That’s quite a change from having porn permissions at the BBC (to monitor the BBC’s websearch, of course).

I’m hands on again, in a very intense way at the moment. As the lone IA there’s lots to do. I thought I might miss the sense of community of a big UX team but the virtual community of other SharePoint and charity IAs has helped loads.

Pleasant surprises were the lack of locked down desktop and Firefox installed as standard.

Something I hadn’t thought about was the extent to which the BBC is a visual culture. At the RNIB  email is plain text as a matter of policy, sketching is rare in meetings and documents are printed in 14 point.

Which makes practicing IA a different kind of process and a topic I expect I’ll be returning to many times.

This is my last week at the BBC. Next week I’ll start my new job at the RNIB in Kings Cross.

I’ve seen lots of people quit the BBC for the wrong reasons. Or at least they don’t resolve those problems with their first new job (the spring board job). The only things you are guaranteed to get when you leave a job are the tangible things, the kind of stuff that is written in your contracts.  So I will definitely be getting:

• a much, much shorter commute
• less money, although pretty much the same benefits otherwise
• no working in the office over the weekends or late nights (they shut the place up)
• a greater variety of places to eat at lunchtime
• to be working for a charity, working for a goal worth getting out of bed for
• proximity to the British Library
• an office with purple floors

This really distills down to “closer to home, for a charity”.

Tangible sacrifices:

• I won’t have a community of IAs immediately around me (although I have high hopes for regular coffees with the lovely folks at the Wellcome Trust in Euston)
• I won’t be managing people (one of my favourite things about my BBC job)
• My projects will be lower profile
• I may end up less well-read (because of the shorter commute)

My intangible but realistic hopes:

• get some energy back. A shot in the arm
• to work with a lovely team of people
• re-apply stuff learnt at the BBC
• learn new things
• to unravel a new organisation and the way it works

I won’t be expecting to get unambiguous and stable strategy, respect that doesn’t have to be earned, and to get away from decision making I disagree with. But I think lots of people fall into that trap.

The RNIB is hiring a number of accessibility roles:
Web Access Centre Blog :: We’re recruiting

And a senior web developer:
Temporary Senior Web Developer