Treasure

Another one of those exciting treasure-hunty kind of days. Last week I spotted a job advert that looked up my street and so rather than just apply though the new-fangled job app thingy, I tracked down the company and phoned them to see if the vacancy had been filled. I was given an email address to which I should send my CV, covering letter and portfolio (!) Portfolio! I haven't had to show that to anyone for 15 years! Thankfully I did have the wit to leave an A3 hard copy with my mum before moving to Greece and I had retrieved it from the bottom of my brother's wardrobe shortly after I arrived back in UK. So when I nipped down to London last Friday I called in at mum's to pick up enough pages to hopefully impress but not bore anyone to tears. Next task was to convert it into a format I could email.

Saturday morning before the blipmeet saw me cycling round Oxford to find a print shop. The one in Holywell Street opened on time but their scanner was not speaking to their computer. The kindly chap in the shop looked up the number of the switchboard at Oxford Brookes University, also known for its print service, on my behalf. I phoned but the switchboard would not open until 9am on Monday. There was nothing more I could do.

This morning I cycled up the hill to Brookes where the print shop told me they could print from a scan but they could not scan from a print, perhaps I should try the library. The library told me that they could scan from a print but only to an email address, not a stick, and the email address would have to be an Oxford University email address. They could devise a workaround along the lines of scanning my stuff to one of their own email addresses and then forwarding it to mine but that would require a new protocol which would require a departmental meeting and perhaps I might prefer to try the print shop up at Headington shops.

So back on the bicycle and a bit farther up the Hill to Headington shops where there is a fabulous little print shop. They were able to carefully remove all the pages from a spiral-bound document, scan each page, and replace them all back in the spiral binding in their correct order. Some of the pages were extended A3 which had been folded to fit into the original A3 binding but even that wasn't too much trouble, each of those pages was scanned twice, once from each end. In all it amounted to 42 scans in two file formats for a paltry £12.25 I'm not arguing with that!

Back at my sister's house she kindly stitched the split pages back together again using Photoshop and the whole document was fired off to the people who last week had had a vacancy. Fingers crossed.

Then it was up into the attic to help progress the general clear-out. This magical lampshade was lurking up there and so I installed it on the fitting up the stairs. I have fallen in love with it.