Back in the shirt

Its been an odd eighteen months, redundancy, unemployment, volunteer work, crap job, unemployment and now pleasant temping.

I'm in an office, essentially pressing buttons until computer screens and printers go right, then putting bits of paper in order. I'm wearing a shirt and optionally a tie, and whilst this isn't quite the captain of industry role I thought I'd find in London, its all right.

The digital radio in the corner is telling me not to worry about a thing, cos every little thing is going to be all right.

The drive to work in the morning is averaging around 45 minutes, and to get home its around double that. To get trains and buses, it would be more expensive and an hour and a half either way.

The pay is a lot better than the sandwich factory, the hours are sociable and the work involves databases and makes London a better place.

Occasionally, I'm driven out to areas of wasteland to prod around with tape measures and count trees.

Its turned out nice again.

I'm wondering if I did something wrong eighteen months back and somehow I could have ended up in a nice job like this a lot sooner, did I just wander into the wrong agencies, fill in the forms wrong. Or was the credit crunch/recession as bad as I can blame it, things just turned out this way through no fault of my own.

Elsewhere on the internet Dirty Vicar uploaded some old photies of the last Bowie meetup from 2008, friends from a now closed down internet forum. There's still Facebook and Twitter, but the threads connecting us are frayed and stretched. Every so often I notice folk missing from my Facebook friendslist, acquaintances severed, no great loss, we were never that close, but still that old world becomes a little bit smaller.

Maybe its just me, getting further and further away from the man I used to be, Glasgow, Bowlie, popscene.

I went along to MJ Hibbett's Totally Acoustic thing at The Lamb on Conduit Street last night, I arrived in time to catch the last ten minutes of his latest Dinosaur Planet show. It was great, with rapid costume changes, new songs and jokes, it was like a Lew Stringer comic strip made flesh. Kind of sad that I missed most of it.

Then again, I've been to loads of the Totally Acoustic shows. Maybe that's not enough for gig-going and social, its a Red Queen kind of thing, you gotta run as fast as you can just to keep up. And I've been slacking.

Its been months, maybe years, since I went to HDIF, and I've never been to Crimes Against Pop, or dozens of the newer promotions that people I used to know have been putting on.

Must try harder.

Now the unemployment issue has been resolved, I can get out more.

Blogish juxtoposition 1

Compare this from Charles Crawford

And this from Burning Our Money

Me, I make sandwiches, I just worked 19 out of the last 27 hours because a colleague's gone on holiday and our shift covering process isn't very robust. And for little over minimum wage, in London.

The London thing completely unrelationed but important. A one-bedroom flat in London costs £120,000, in Hull it costs £20,000. The national minimum wage is the same across the UK. So 'oop nawth' a cheap flat is about 2X minimum wage and 'daan saaf' its about 10X minimum wage. The property ladder's first rung is five times as far away.

On the National Minimum Wage and the Living Wage

Elsewhere on the internet, Devil's Kitchen is having a go at so New Labour bint on the subject of the minimum wage, she wants the government to implement a Living Wage of £7 per hour rather than the NMW of £5.80 per hour.

I'm on the minimum wage right now, its pretty depressing. Rather than the £5.80 figure, I think of it as £4.90, as that's how much I take home, its how much I'm worth, the tax side of it and NI doesn't help pay my rent of credit card bills, only the £4.90 that I slave away for.

I work hard, I do a good job, I do a slightly better job than some of my peers cos I have some misguided deeply ingrained work ethic. I like to do a good job. But its still just for the minimum wage, they couldn't pay me any less if I did a crap job.

So when I see my peers taking it easy, I feel a little stupid. I'm wasting my efforts for the same money.

The fact there is a minimum wage is a disincentive for me to do a better job than the others on my team.

Anyhoo. This living wage thing, £7 an hour. I look around at the folk in my factory who earn £7 an hour, the team leaders and trainers and I think aw man, that would be a right pain if everyone was earning the same as them. There'd be no incentive to work at all.

I think its a bad bad idea. But, where there's a bad idea that people believe in, there are business opportunities.

Surely someone could set up an organision, like Investors In People or FairTrade, that certifies companies who pay the Living Wage, they companies get a wee logo to put on their website and products, and a wee plaque to put over their front desk.

LivingWage get to charge subscription fees and companies submit themselves to having their payrole verified a few times a year.

It could be a source of pride to be a LivingWage company.

It might also suggest that the company is making excessive profits, and wastes money, but that goes with the territory I guess.

Camels

Ma heid's no working. Read this:-

The word has its roots in The Three Princes of Serendip, a Persian story about three princes who had the knack of discovering things quite by chance. The British statesman Horace Walpole read the story as a child, and later coined the word serendipity in a letter in 1754. Walpole wrote about learning some news quite by chance, and stated that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word."

In one story, the Three Princes use trace clues to precisely identify a camel they have never seen: they conclude that the camel is lame; blind in one eye; missing a tooth; carrying a pregnant maiden; and bearing honey on one side and butter on the other. Because of their cleverness and sagacity, they are accused of stealing the camel and are about to be put to death by Bahram Gur. Suddenly, and without anyone seeking him out, a traveler steps forward to say that he has just seen the missing camel wandering in the desert. Bahram Gur spares the lives of the Three Princes, lavishes them with rich rewards and appoints them as his advisors.

Its from my pal Aref-Adib's website

I'm pretty sure it makes no sense at all.

It could be that English is no longer my first language or I missed a few chapters of the story, but either way, this makes no sense.

My stores video

The boss was saying we should have more work related videos on YouTube. So, I scratched my head, and all I could muster was my enthusiasm.

This is me raving about the new components stores system I've set up at Roksan Audio. The actual set up was inspired by how CDs are displayed in independent record shop, specifically Avalanch Records in Glasgow.

Soul

Have signed up to SoulMates on the Guardian websitey thing. Kind of like bowing to pressure, I have my doubts.

My profile is here

My cow orker suggested that getting to the top of the most popular profiles list is something to aim for, so feel free to have a look, call your collegues over and get them to have a look too.

I had to resist the urge to just write about killing people, killing lots of people, in the 'why shoul people get to know me' and 'perfect match' descriptions. I fear being arrested as a murder suspect.

Weak as a kitten

I love the phrase "weak as a kitten". There's this oanel at the end of the original four part Transformers comic where the Autobots have defeated the Decepticons, but they're run out of fuel, Optimus Prime is down on his knees, and Buster Witwicky is pleading with him on some plot point. But the Autobots are helpless cos they're so weak. Then Shockwave appears and kills them all.

Anyhow over here in reality, this one time I was helping frere insulate his loft. It was tiring work, all wrapping in moon monkey outfits and face masks. After a few hours we couldn't even stand up and I was resorting to rolling around in the insulation, moaning. As weak as a kitten.

So last night, finally all my CD making kit was working and I was ploughing through them. But after the day's excitement I was as weak as a kitten by the time I gave up at 1am.

Its a busy day at work, we started early 6:30am and right know I'm so knackered I can't stand. I tried to earlier, but ended up on the floor, so I did some floor work.

Its going to be a long long day, we've got a container to unload at lunch time and at some point I have to walk to the garage to pick up my car.

I need a wheelchair.

Sneaky

Eeep, I'm at work, and have my laptop with me so I can do things during my break. I feel like some kind of techno-ninja. The weirdest thing yesterday, as I was driving down, nine hours, I was surfing the internet in my head, reading threads and facebook. Its not healthy, but its kind of cool.

Okay lunchtime photie fans, here's a photie of where Nat's cat, Beau, bit me on Sunday morning, huge jaw on that guy.

5am

I'd been fine, until I awoke this morning at 04:53am with first day of work nerves. For more than four hours before I was going to head in, I dozed fitfully. Slipping in and out of dreams, apparitions of the first day floating through my head, turning up without any trousers, taking so many wrong turns on the drive in, my desk being out in the car park.

It too a while to calm down and relax, but now here I am, all dressed in my interview suit, poised to leave the house.

They never said what time to start at, just the date, today. So I'm aiming for about ten past nine to give them time to open mail and have a coffee.

Its jolly exciting.