I've been reflecting these last few weeks on how far I've come in this online industry I work in - and not just me: but the companies I've worked with and for.

Back in the day - Rachelle and Rosie'll remember these days - we used to work long hours as deadlines loomed large, our instructions were often verbally communicated, sometimes by managers calling out changes as they viewed work for the first time, no sense of organised tested, communication or feedback. In short - back in the day - working at delivering online content under managers who used to be Primary School teachers was murder on the multimedia team.

We had so much pain with the lack of project processes that we developed survival strategies that eventually cut the management out of the process altogether: developed communication strategies such as storyboards and project processes such as listening to what the client needed and communicating our solutions so as to make sure we had enough time to do our work, were on target with our client's expectations and were able to nail that deadline while still getting home for tea. We managed and wrangled and adjusted and over the years we smoothed that process into this amazing, scalable, successful way of working that brought the joy of just how lucky we were to work in this exciting industry back into our lives.

Passion - not pain - that's what those strategies and processes brought back into my life.

So much so that I had actually forgotten that there are still people out there who are not organised, not knowledgable and still in charge of major online projects when they can't even find their way around a server or how to work their work email client.

This has been brought into sharp focus after being plunged back into that turn-of-the-century online chaos that so many of us have lived and grown through by two n00b-managers who seem to have only discovered the Internets in the last few months. sprat to catch a mackeral