almost witty

I’ve worked within new media companies for just over a decade, and no office I’ve been in has come close to having as much fun as the staff at Connected Ventures, according to this new video which has apparently sparked yet another entry to the trendy urban lexicon, lip dub.

Maybe it’s because UK new media is just too dour to do things as silly. Maybe it’s because all the new media companies I’ve worked for were based in either way-too-posh rented offices, or just run-of-the-mill offices. Maybe I’m just too old for the onset of true citizen-generated video content. Maybe it’s just me.

Stick with the clip, it does become one of the silliest, joyful and yet easy-to-do videos I’ve seen. Then again, I’m a huge fan of miming. Even has shades of Morecambe & Wise in it.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo

There’s another track I need to add to my iTunes…

It’s an oft-quoted cliche that one of the first things British people ask each other is what they do for a living. Which is a wee bit annoying when you work in weird non-descriptive roles in companies because it makes you sound extraordinarily weird or dull.

I remember one work outing to a comedy club, where Rich Hall (superlative American comedian with a sour face permanently based in the UK) asked our party of web geniuses what we did for a living. Dylan piped up that he was a website writer. The look on Hall’s face as he realised that he’d have to spin some kind of song or riff on a very dull-sounding job was just priceless - although he did manage it, something throwing in references to yarns of wool and sheep-rustling en route. (Don’t ask me how, I was very very drunk)

Fast forward to this morning, and I suddenly find myself on local radio station Coast FM identifying a Take That song for the chance to win some cinema tickets to go see Blades of Glory. Despite being sleep-befuddled, I do my best to sound lively and interesting, mostly because I’ve listened to independent radio enough to categorise the listeners into being either:

• dull and dull (”Hello… Ta for the tickets.”)
• lively but dull (”Gosh, I’m so wacky me, I’m a party girl. I love to party and I rilly rilly want to hear Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars!”)

(wait till I write the blog post about the inanity and stupidity of listeners to independent local radio!)

But then he asks what I do for a living - and it’s too early to think of a reasonable answer, so I reply project management. Somehow he mishears this as product management, and then somehow asks me about octopuses. And in my own imitable fashion, I talk about eating them or something like that - possibly not the best idea on a radio breakfast show.

Honestly, when I signed up for a stint as project management, I had visions of being snowed under with pie and GANTT charts, trying to co-ordinate teams from around the world - but all from the comfort of a nice comfy chair in a nice office next to a farm. This hasn’t quite turned out to be the case.

I share my basement office with a few developers, and a collection of old books, desks, bookshelves, office equipment, computer logs, dot matrix printers and magnetic computer tapes dating back to the 1970s. With the arrival of another employee, all this had to go. A task that fell on my shoulders.

So the logs got shredded. The books were recycled or given to the library. The desks went to the big depot in the sky, as did the bookshelves. We all cooed at the office equipment and dot matrix printers, before giving them back to systems. Which left the magnetic computer tapes. My boss told me to get rid of them - so I took the box down to the skip, and threw them in.

Whereupon a breathless analyst (who saw me at said skip - honestly, there’s no privacy when you step outside around here!) ran up to me and told me not to throw them in said skip, since they all contained data that needed to be magnetically erased before being disposed of in a proper recyclable manner. Who knew that magnetic computer tapes could be recycled? Who’d want to?

But this left us with a problem, of about 30 tapes inside a skip. Which would have to be retrieved somehow. My suggestion of simply clambering in was immediately nixed, since apparently the scientists in the office also used the skip to dispose of their test tubes and chemicals. So unless I was prepared to wear a chemical protection suit on a hot summers day, clambering into the skip was out. Thus, I found myself on a hot summers day running around trying to find any kind of rake or spade that might help in retrieving said items from the skip.

For comedy purposes, I would like to say that I eventually had to wear a rubbery yellow suit and dive into the skip to rescue these tapes from a landfilled-death, while sweating inside the suit and smelling nothing but the foul stench of the skip and my own body odour - but fortunately (or unfortunately), after an hour or so of skillful manipulation, the tapes were out. Phew.

Then a week later, I found myself on the roof of the building helping a colleague erect an aerial mast so we could detect signals 40 miles away.

I know the job description offered travel to unique locations, but I’m not sure a skip and a roof is what they had in mind.

My previous place of work was a £4 billion public sector organisation with staff on hand to clean telephones, so when I say that my current place of work has bureaucracy up the wazoo, it’s not an observation I make lightly.

The current office obsession is about moving desks and rearranging offices - more on that story tomorrow. But as part of that, I had to fill in a purchase order form for a new desk, and get that signed by the manager. Or so I thought.

Nope, it turns out that the form I filled in was not for a purchase order, but a request for a purchase order. Which still needed to be signed by the manager. And now there’s a purchase order form, but that also needs to be signed by the manager.

So in upshot, I’ve had to fill in a form and get it signed by my manager, so that I can get another form to get that signed by my manager.

And thus, I break my self-imposed rules about not blogging about work.

Ahhh, dear reader. I have a bit of a quandary - whether to run along the North Wales coast to see a big-screen screening of the premiere episode of new Doctor Who with David Tennant and Freema Agyeman seven hours before the rest of the UK - or to stay in bed and have a nice lie-in. I fear, I may choose the latter…

After all, around this time last year I was in Cardiff hob-nobbing with the press corps at the press preview of Doctor Who and writing Doctor Who preview-related gags for a newspaper. And now I’m not - and besides which, the press previews were in London yesterday.

Watching Doctor Who these days tends to bring up bitter-sweet memories and feelings these days. Whether it’s spotting old colleagues lurking in David Tennant’s fantastic video diaries, or just seeing a random Cardiff location masquerading as London or a foreign planet, it just keeps reminding me of my Cardiff and BBC days. Indeed, that’s partly the reason why I avoided Torchwood - in another universe, that could have been my web project, damn it!

But then I was never entirely happy there either, and a change in my life was well overdue. I think I’d have felt a lot better about it if I’d left by choice instead of having the decision thrust upon me. For the third time. Ah well…