Have I shared with you just what it is I do for a living? I’m a freelance journalist and sub-editor, and spend my weeks flitting from pillar to post - mostly between pillars at high-profile celebrity weeklies and posts at top-selling TV magazines. Which is all well and good. But every so often I have a random week that I have to fill at short notice… and I end up working somewhere less, erm, desirable. Which is where I find myself this week.
I’m currently cooped up at a weekly trade magazine… which is like the land that time forgot. Working in an office that’s like the seventh-and-a-half floor in ‘Being John Malkovich’ - the floor has been raised for some inexplicable reason and the ceiling is lower than on any other floor in this building - I find myself with a random, although sweet, bunch of people. There is even one lady who has worked at this magazine for longer than I’ve been alive (hint: I’m getting on for 30), and she claims to remember the days when Tony Hadley - before he was in Spandau Ballet - worked in the postroom downstairs.
But what strikes me most about this bizarre brown office is the level of tedium I’m experiencing. While the people are undisputedly friendly and nice, the silence is deafening - and the click-click-click of the dirt-ingrained keyboard I’m using is overwhelming as I fail to hide the fact I’m spending my day on Hotmail rather than subbing their pages. Yesterday, for instance, I got so bored I found myself wondering who the most famous person I’d ever met was. Unable to decide whether it was Al Pacino or David Hasselhoff, I set about Googling them both (while the Hoff may not have won any Oscars he is the most searched person on Google, so I thought it might be close). Fact fans will be interested, if not surprised, to learn that Al won out - by a staggering 4 million pages.
Friday can’t come round fast enough. My spirit may have been well and truly crushed beyond all recognition by then.
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