almost witty

Well, it’s taken two months but I’ve finally managed to get to grips with one of the most important things when starting a new job - where you get your pens, paper, staples, stapler, hole puncher and lever arch files. More importantly, who the administration assistant is - because until you find this diva of information, you’re swimming in treacle.

On my first day here, after a dreary two-hour induction which mostly involved being told how to lift boxes properly, I was sent to my office. Which meant sharing with three developers and a designer in a basement with no mobile phone access, or webmail. So far so good - except there was unaccountably a huge partition separating me from them. Since then, I’ve been languishing somewhat not knowing how to get basic information about how the company works, mostly because the developers are really the types to hunker down until something gets done, darnit.

But now I’ve found the admin assistant, I’m surrounded by all the stationary paraphenalia a project manager needs, I’ve managed to get the partition removed and I can now carry a proper notebook to meetings instead of scraps of paper. Now all I need is a laptop instead of this Celeron machine…

I’ve been watching a lot of Comic Relief programming this week. Forgive me if this sounds as if I’m sat on my sofa with a blanket wrapped around my lap smoking a pipe and shaking my cane at the teen tearaways across the road - but it all seems a bit too slick these days. And (whisper) not actually that funny.

When the only comedy moment out of the incredibly unfunny and dull Comic Relief single, Comic Relief does the Apprentice and Comic Relief does Fame Academy is musing on what Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was on when she was sweating profusely, one has to realise someone’s taken the comedy out of Comic Relief. Which rather defeats the “unique” spin on what is essentially a telethon. Shame, really.

Still, I’ll be tuning in tonight, making the odd donation, looking at pictures of a man who painted himself red and buying Shaggy Blog Stories, essentially a book collection of 100 funny stories from around the UK blogosphere with proceeds going to Comic Relief. I really should have offered one of my oh-so-hilarious anecdotes but I’ve only just noticed.

Shame the-powers-that-be behind Comic Relief haven’t tried to capture the UK blogosphere in the same way - there’s not even a banner you can splash on your webpage.

Why do I have a particular interest in this? It was central to one of my favourite nights at work some eight years ago, when I was behind the scenes on the web coverage for Comic Relief:

- “blogging” from behind the scenes via live web updates, in the days when blogging and broadband barely crossed the lips of even a savvy web developer (whither blog this year, web chaps?)
- encoding and uploading Doctor Who videos in full Quicktime quality live as soon as they’d been transmitted
- hanging out in the infamous BBC canteen and marvelling at how big Dawn French actually is (the camera took away pounds with her then!)
- helping out on the Comic Relief webchats
- watching the frantic goings-on behind the scenes, and realising they weren’t that frantic
- marvelling at my boss’s then new-fangled hands-free thing for his mobile phone, thinking what a prat he looked in them, and how they’d never ever catch on
- being so tired and irritated (at what, I have no idea now!) at the end I didn’t go to the wrap-up party. One of those decisions I shall regret forever.

I really wish I’d done some screencaps.

When I applied for my current / new job, they said international air travel would be required on occasion. And after less than a week of being in my basement cubicle-esque environment (no more open-plan offices for me where I can talk to colleagues face-to-face, oh no sirrree) they’ve been good to their word.

So I have to be awake by 4am tomorrow morning to get the early morning flight to Aberdeen, where I shall spend the next two/three days learning about the systems there, and then probably trudging back in the snow to the hotel.

Be careful of what you wish for …

Picture the scene. You’ve been told that a video crew are going to be coming in to film your demonstration of how to lift boxes and reposition your VDU correctly for a corporate Health and Safety video.

Do you therefore think it would be an opportune moment to show off those snazzy white socks, alongside your shiny black shoes? I’m no style guru as everyone knows, but even I know that this - you just don’t do…
It was the only moment that livened up a ninety minute corporate induction video that I had to sit through today…

Having spent the last three months on enforced leisure time (which isn’t quite as fun as it sounds), I’ve decided that I need to wire up my brain to a big huge electrical generator and kick some smarts into it. And since playing Rocket Mania ad-infinitum isn’t going to do it, I might just enrol at a part-time masters course at university, so I can at least equip myself with new new-media skillz in the meantime.

But as usual, I just can’t decide - and it seems to have come down to two choices:

The MA in Creative Technology which sounds vaguely interesting in a creative endeavour, but the course description is remarkably lacking in specifics, and I’m not sure whether it would better equip me for a job afterwards. The course seems to aim to:

“explore the dissolving boundaries between industry, design, visual arts, and computer and communication technologies”

The alternative is an MSc in Web Computing which is much more technical in nature - with computing, Java and database lessons, which should lead to better job prospects. But then I’m worried about ending up as a pure technical person when my strength (as I see it) is that I can do a bit of everything. I can develop, I can write, I can project-manage etc. - but enhancing my developer skills at the expense of the others may not be a brilliant idea. Plus, it has to be said, I could probably just set up a web 2.0-y project and swallow a few O’Reilly books to get me going.

It doesn’t help that at this point, my career goals are somewhat fluid - I’d ideally want to work within new media content, but jobs like that are few and vanishing these days. Oh I could get a journalism qualification, but the salaries within that field are ludicrously low. Plus the terror of the blank page doesn’t help, nor that i’d be competing with my Eeyore-esque persona against a bunch of doey foolishly-optimistic graduates.