deconstructing mark
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Wednesday 4.8.04 | AM I the only one to find yesterday's Tube failure both alarming and amusing at the same time? The latter stems from the simple fact that a minor storm put vast swathes of the network out of action for hours. I mean, rain isn't really that unheard of in Britain, now is it? Come on people, really. What really unsettled me about the whole thing was the general chaos of it all. I mean, yesterday's collapse of the tube services was a clear message to any potential terrorist that (a) there's no need to put bombs on tube trains, because we're quite capable of fucking up our own network very well thank you very much, but (b) when you, Mr. Terrorist, do decide to attack, yes, be assured, you are going to cause bewildering and awful bedlam without too much effort. Not good. Sunday 22.8.04 GOODNESS, what a few weeks it has been. I am in the middle of two weeks covering for a colleague at work, which means working full time on the one of the temps desk rather than being a humble administrator. Something tells me that I'm not doing this job particularly well - in one sense, this is hardly my fault given that I have receieved precisely five minutes' training for the position, but in another, I it's hardly difficult work and I seem to be making fuckups too often for my own liking, as well as my colleagues', I'm sure. Still, I'm doing the best I can; I start interviewing next week, which should prove interesting. SO aside from a mildly stressful work-life, all is well. I managed to spend £25 on books yesterday then leave my new purchases on a tube train, which I wasn't very pleased about, but these things happen: I just hope they're found and returned to me. I did notify someone as soon as I possibly could, lest they were taken to be an incendiary device, but I don't think I did it particularly effectively, given I had had a glass and a half of champagne on a near-empty stomach (slurring my way through 'I've left some books on a Metropolitan Line train' at St. John's Wood station left the supervisor looking at me as though I couldn't read, let alone have the capacity to buy the damn things in the first place.) LIFE chuggers on as normal otherwise - the weeks are flying by, but the weekends whoosh past even more quickly. I like my job, but I have begun to understand the incomparable bliss of that first taste of red wine on a Friday evening. Wednesday 25.8.04 COUPLE of gripes, OK? So would you, discerning reader, turn up at a job interview over an hour late, chewing a sweetie and then get help from your friend/partner and cheat on the tests you were given? Didn't think so, but I interviewed a candidate today who did just that. Needless to say, I'll never call her for anything at all; she was just embarrassingly bad. Next gripe won't mean much to those who live outside of London and/or don't use the tube, but here it is anyway: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, we currently have delays on the Piccadilly, Metropolitan, District, Circle, Hammersmith and City, Victoria, Northern and Central lines. However, all other lines are operating a good service and all stations are open.' Few problems with this. Firstly, let's tackle this 'good' service they purport to offer - it would be good if the tube cost half of what it does, but the reality is that, for what Londoners pay for their travel, it's pretty shoddy. Moot point perhaps. But what really irks me, what really gets up my nose more than a wearisome fly with no sense of direction, is the linguistics of the thing - this however implies that despite the crap service on parts of the network, they still think everything's hunky-dory, which it patently isn't. More to the point, I've noticed that the people who use the tube are often referred to as 'customers' which they also are emphatically not: we are passengers. The difference is important: I have no choice in the matter - if I want to get to work and back again every day, I have to use the tube if I don't want it to take seven hours each day on the bus. I am, at best, a forced customer. So that's all distinctly exasperating, but what makes me leap gaily across the line between merely being mildly bothered and having kittens with rage are when they make an annoucement purely to tell you that this 'good' service is operating, which, incidentally, is played at every LU station on a loop of about 20 seconds. We shouldn't need to be told that - it should be the norm. This all points to the tube being sold to London as a commercial entity, which, sure, it is to a certain extent: any publicly-funded enterprise should do its best to make money. But since private money has started to float through the rat-infested tunnels of the London Underground, it seems we're trying to be sold a service which has a virtual monopoly anyway, and that make me really very cross indeed. Monday 30.8.04 THERE's been this idea creeping up on me more and more recently, and the more I throw it around in my head, the more sirenesque (is that a word? It is now :-)) it becomes. Those who know me even half-well will be well aware that working in a recruitment consultancy isn't my ultimate work destination. I want to end up working in academic research and teaching. This, in and of itself, isn't anything new. The dimension is of both pratical and aesthetic nature. On the practical side, there just aren't any jobs within German academia in the UK - it's a rapidly shrinking field. I also am aware that staying in London too long will start to tip the balance between it being wonderful and it being a shithole. What I'm trying to say is that London will rapidly start to lose its shine in the next few years. So the plan is to move. And unless an enticing prospect rears its alluring head (relocation to somewhere like Leeds, Glasgow, Newcastle or Bristol - all of which are unlikely), the plan is to emigrate, almost certainly to the US. Where precisely, and the logistics of the thing I haven't even begun to consider, but the seed of the idea is there, and it's growing. | ||
