emotionalmarkup

Since I’ve worked as a frontender/web dude in a few countries now in the last few years I thought I’d impart my, albeit limited, knowledge on the current state of the market for us webbies in the cities I know more or less something about. As you are probably aware, things are better in some places than in others and I’m not just talking about the remuneration: the cost of living and the environment are all factors that will determine where you end up.

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You know the situation: you begin to make furtive glances over your shoulder because you think they are near, you wonder if they actually understand what it is you do at all, and the dread moments before the monotonous weekly meeting surpasses what even coffee can placate. They are the project managers - the very whisper of which can incite fear in the most hardy of web veterans.

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Q: How does a spectacularly immense organisation go from tables and HTML 4 to web standards and XHTML strict without breaking a sweat?
A: They don’t.

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The Número de Identidad/Identificación de Extranjero (NIE) is a necessity in all fiscal or legal matters in Spain and pretty much anything else. It’s not difficult to get, if you know what you’re doing.

Unfortunately I didn’t.

But after listening to many variations on the correct procedure, shipping myself around the city in a sweat of panic and waiting in impossibly long queues, I finally cracked it. Now I pass this information on to you, oh brave traveller. For those who are interested, this is how I got my NIE in Barcelona – the quick way.

For a couple of years now when job hunting, in lieu of emailing around my CV as horrible Microsoft word documents, or that most frightening of modern digital afflictions being cast upon unsuspecting web users - the PDF - I’ve used a plain old HTML document. It works because unlike Word or a PDF viewer, everyone has a browser and after all, we are supposed to be web people, no?

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Let me say upfront that I’m not an expert communicator. I am easily startled by articulate, witty people, particularly if they’re holding a martini or capsicum spray. And meeting people in large groups, such as parties, when you only know one person or a few people remotely, absolutely scares the shit of me. But like it or not we humans are social animals and sooner or later I knew a time would come when I was forced out of the cradle of my inner social circle into the jungle of crazy-eyed sociopaths.

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