Property gets me hot

One of the magazines I work on is a North London property showcase magazine, wrapped up in a pretty celebrity cover. I love working on the mag, don't get me wrong, but the fact that's it's a 164 pager with only 32 pages of editorial stands to show how sales reliant it is.

As it's a monthly, every month I have a pagination meeting that takes place 4 working days before we send the files to the printer, wherein we place the property pages in the magazine, giving certain pages certain placements due to varying factors. So while it's a mag that most people who see Charlize or Jennifer or George on the cover would drop after a quick page flick, everything about the less street-cred parts of the mag is actually carefully considered.

So, in the run-up to this meeting, I chase down property copy and get most of the 100-odd pages in the day before the meeting. It's been an effort to try and commit to memory the many ampersand-joined names of estate agents... who all sound the same... all starting with a G... yup, the Goldhott & Barrets, Gordon & Hollasts, Gargoyle & Hounds, and Gurgle & Splutters of this world all get in touch with me once a month. So once everything's in, I take down The List of Pages, and sit at a desk far far away from my incessantly ringing telephone, and compare the pages in my hands with said List. Now, being new to this whole system before my promotion about 5 months ago, I have stumbled and bumbled my way into getting it badly wrong sometimes, getting it perfectly right sometimes, and somewhere in-between the two extremes most times. And when it does go wrong, even for the slightest second, the weirdest thing happens to me.

My face goes HOT.

This is a completely new thing for me. To be 24 and have a brand new bodily experience is something very, very strange. I have handled far more stress and responsibility than this in the past but somehow, the combination of 100 estate agents' pages staring back at me, silently whispering "you're confused! you don't know which of us is which, do you?" and the distant sound of a deadline clock steadily increasing in tempo and volume as the time draws to a close, seems to throw up the switch that turns my face hot. Even sitting here now, thinking of this happening to my face today as I counted up (the figures eventually all worked out, thanks for asking), I can't actually recreate the feeling at will. But it ALWAYS happens at this particular time. Even when I come up with one page short when I expected to.

Freaky right?

The good news is, the intensity of the heat seems to be diminishing with every issue. While I can step back and tell myself, no-one is judging your capacity to handle responsibility by this, because you might have just not counted right, it could be a problem elsewhere, and hey, you're the only one who knows about this right now so you can remedy it quietly, this mechanism seems to have burrowed into the bit of my brain that deals with this activity every month.

I'm not cracking up, I promise! But if you feel like a small gift of chocolate would remedy the situation, by all means...