I seem to take my habits I develop in one job to the next. After I was in Asia, I came back using lots of exclamation marks, which is the done thing there, but it a bit of a faux pas in the UK. They're loolked on with such disdain, in fact, that they're commonly known as 'screamers' or worse still 'dogs' cocks'. I managed to get out of that habit, thank God.

In the UK, I was mostly working on the Halifax, which is a big bank over there. Coming from Yorkshire and making the fatal mistake of assuming their customers are stupid, they're not too hot on punctuation. So they insisted on having no stops at the end of their headlines. IBM Europe, on the other hand, have stops at the end of every headline - so I have to get back into that habit or risk looking careless.

But that's not the worst of it. As I've mentioned before, my UK agency was a bit of a sweatshop - and its USP wasn't quality, but cost. Which meant that you didn't argue with the client, you just made the changes and sent the stuff off. And there was a very strange system whereby the account team didn't sell the creative to the client, they second-guessed the client before the work was presented. So there was an extra barrier to get over before the work got as far as the people who were paying for it.

The problem was that quite often the account handlers didn't really understand what makes copy and artwork sell, and they'd quite often make the work worse. Which doesn't really help anyone - and was reflected in the fact that out of 14 submissions to a DM awards in the UK, they didn't manage to get a single nomination.

It's different here - which means that if I'm not careful people will think I'm a pushover. So I have to make sure I'm prepared to defend my work. I'm not the kind of person that throws creative hissy fits, but one or two may be in order to esablish my reputation! (oops - screamer)