@bettakultcha @racinghippo follow @bdjesusman – cannot believe I only just found this and site! As a Bradfordian, get Mr Jesus or site ppl!

to which @bettakultcha later replied:

@bdjesusman would love you to come and present about bradfordjesusman at #bettakultcha #Bradford

A few things struck me from these and a few other messages that were sent:

1. Random people were starting to find my Bradford Jesus Man website which means word is getting around without me having to whore it on The Facebook or The Twitter so much.
2. People actually loved the idea of the site.
3. I was being complimented on the design and functionality of the site.
4. I had no idea what BettaKultcha was…

Now, I was in Chorley at a friends wedding at the time with limited mobile data so couldn’t really look up that much on BettaKultcha at the time but when the data signal came back for a short period I would get PUSH messages through from the awesome TweetBot so I could still see what people were saying. However, as I was Des that night I was able to look at it all with fresh eyes in the morning.

The whole idea of BettaKultcha is, quite simply, to learn about new stuff – to get betta kultcha’d (better cultured, in case you couldn’t work it out!). This is done by way of numerous presenters each doing a five minute presentation with a few simple rules. The most prominent rule, and the one in CAPITAL LETTERS, is that the presentation must not contain pitches. There’s nothing like going to a fun, social event and it turning into a business networking event… The other three rules are what make it fun. Actually, it’s one rule but I think they wanted to expand on it somewhat!

The rules are:

• ABSOLUTELY no sales pitches
• 20 slides must be used
• Each slide must last for 15 seconds exactly
• After 5 minutes, the presentation is over

So I, perhaps stupidly, said I would do a presentation. Now I have a few things to try and work out. Mainly why I agreed to do the talk – I hate public speaking, I’m not a public speaker. One of my lowest marks at uni was when I had to give a five minute talk in front of 6 fellow students. This doesn’t bode well for the same length talk but in front of 100 people…

For a bit of comfort I dug up a bunch of YouTube videos filmed at previous BettaKultcha events. The themes varied wildly; Why Manchester is Better Than Leeds (amusingly this was at a Leeds event!), Magic & Conspiracy Theories, How Star Wars is based on Mills and Boon, How to Get Thrown Out of University, Ghosts, Dementia; each carried out with varying degrees of ability from the presenters. This is a good thing. I will no doubt be considerably lower down on the ‘ability’ scale than some of the presenters but the reviews and blog posts I’ve read confirm that this is probably fine anyway as the people who attend are pretty friendly and unlikely to start heckling. If a presentation is really terrible then they can at least sit safe in the knowledge that it will be over within five minutes. It’s hardly worth getting worked up about!

So, now I need to sort out what I want to talk about. Usually people ask to be a presenter at the events but in my case I was basically nominated, for which I am truly flattered! I think I will talk about a few different aspects of the whole Bradford Jesus Man thing; why I made the website, what the website does and, perhaps most interesting, as much as possible about the legend that is Geoffrey Brindley – the Bradford Jesus Man.

If you want to come along either to see me battling my inner demons or to hear the (no doubt fascinating) other presentations then you need to book yourself a ticket via BettaKultcha’s EventBrite page – tickets cost £5 and the event takes place at the Midland Hotel in Bradford on Thursday 11th August 2011.

Well, as the title suggests, working at home this way has it’s pro’s and it’s con’s…

The Pro’s

Mrs-MaFt works shifts so child-care is relatively easy. If she’s working then I do the school/nursery runs and catch up on my work later in the evening once it’s passed bed o’clock for the kids.

If I’m not too well I can still get work done without worrying about infecting my fellow co-workers with the lergy. With an office job I would lose a whole day even if I would have been well enough to get some work done.

I could come to work hungover and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and hungover and no one would know.

If I lie in (unlikely, I have kids!) it takes me 12 seconds to commute down the stairs and open my laptop.

I can nip out to the local Farm Shop, Morrisons or Town during the day and miss the busy times.

I can listen to punk rock and metal all day long instead of the awful pop ‘music’ pumped out by Radio 1 and Galaxy (the requisite ‘entertainment’ in all the non-home jobs I’ve had)

Courier deliveries result in actually having your item when they deliver it rather than having until the weekend and then driving a 15 mile round trip to pick it up from the depot.

The Cons

It can be all too easy to waste too many hours dicking about on eBay or doing too much research on a gadget I simply can’t afford to buy.

People assume that, because you’re at home, you’re not busy and can jump to their every whim.

No ‘snow days’.

It can get quite lonely at times. A lazy, fluffy black cat and a handful of cyber-colleagues on instant messenger software just doesn’t match real, actual physical company.

On a morning if I have Mini-Mrs-MaFt then, generally, she will be watching CBeebies. That itself isn’t a bad thing – it keeps her entertained and she practises her dancing when there’s some music on. However, as pointed out by ‘Mrs TheBoyAndMe‘, it usually results in having “please tell me, please tell me, pleeeease teeeeell meeee your name” stuck in your head for too many hours.

It’s too easy to get lazy. Sometimes after Mrs-MaFt has taken Mini-Mrs-MaFt I can’t be bothered switching from CBeebies to Kerrang! Radio on the tellybox.

In Conclusion

Working at home has it’s pro’s and it has it’s cons. However, I wouldn’t change it for anything! Following various people on twitter and general day to day dealings with other real people it would seem I am in a minority – you see, I actually enjoy my job and the work I do. I work with some great people spread out about the world in various different time-zones yet still get time with my family. A lot of jobs can’t offer that flexibility – if I had to commute more than a staircase away then that would, straight away, remove 2 hours of available time from the day. And I’d like to keep those those 2 hours, thanks!

Postscript:

Well, in case you were wondering what brought this post about, it was the result of a brief conversation on twitter with @TheBoyAndMe. Click the image to the left to see the whole thing. It’s a quite tenuous link once you actually read it, but that’s what made me think of writing the post! Having CBeebies songs in your head is definitely a ‘con’ of working at home!

It’s one thing that has really bugged me on Facebook, the difficulty in finding someone, even someone you know! Numerous time I chatted to people via MSN Messenger or on the phone saying if they were on Facebook they could see the photo’s I just uploaded – it usually turns out they are and the conversation then resorts to discussing which keywords to use to try and find each other as more often than not there are 16,000 people with the same name and it’s hard to recognise someone on a tiny profile picture, that is assuming it’s even a picture of them!

So now, Facebook have finally caught up with the times and allow facebook.com/your.name style URL’s – only 3 years too late…! Maybe soon they will get rid of all the crap and it will just be Twitter with photo albums!