Sunday 29 July 2007

Do I do any work?

Yes, I do.

I was slightly distressed to hear that one of my many thousands (hem hem) of readers had commented that it looks like I don't do anything except blog all day. (Yes I am probably paraphrasing for dramatic effect).

I was a little put out by this but looking back I can see how you could think so.

For the record, nearly everything I write is done on a little Ipaq PDA while I am commuting. It gets posted at all sorts of odd times, true, but that's just because I have had a couple of minutes spare during a tea or lunch break so I have grabbed it off the docked PDA and blasted it up here. It is very rare for me to write new content from the office - the one the other day about the bloke nearly getting squished by a pallet truck was one such example, and it took me about two minutes to write. You can see that many of the longer pieces - Richmond, Cheltenham and others - are quite old, maybe a week or two or more out of date, and this is why. (And, sadly, that is as nothing compared to the backlog!)

Still for the record, I do actually work quite hard. I mean, yawn, yes we all do, I know ... modern life, an ting. The competitive market in which I operate. The thrill of a job well done. Yes indeedy.

Sorry to sound so defensive but I am quite sensitive about the question of my time at work: I am undoubtedly a rubbish employee in many ways but that's not one of them. I've always written a lot on the Tube and on the train home - accounts of holidays, stories, poems, other gibberish - and the only difference is that now some of it is reaching the web. No dig, by the way, is intended at the person who made the comment - on the contrary, she's performed a useful service by pointing out how it could look like that and making me think about it.

Vogel out.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I want to reply to this but I am not sure what to say! Except for thinking that it probably looks like I don't do any work judging by the amount of time I spend logged into myspace - but it's always under the GoodBooks moniker.....

Strawberryyog said...

aah well you see I would not even begin to perceive that as notwork - (a) because it blatantly is work, due to the ahem specialized nature of your profession, and (b) because of my near-senile approach to the wonderful world of The New InterWebNet, which means I have never really got to grips with MySpace etc. So I think you are in the clear there. :)

Strawberryyog said...

... Although I should add (I'm writing this on my own time, by the way) that I did in fact start a MySpace account for the sole purpose of saying thank you to a MySpace commenter (commentist? commentizer?) who had, bless'im, said something nice about the trumpets in the R4 broadcast. But I have no clue what on earth I would do with such a thing, other than send kindly and doddering messages to trumpet-appreciators.

And indeed the last time I looked a young lady called Jenna had written to say "I think we should be friends, cause you seem pretty fun, and possibly cute!" I am not, in fact, at all sure that we really should be friends and I am not sure what is so fun and/or cute about a photograph of a Selmer Paris piccolo trumpet, which is all she's seen of me. Young people today, eh? Cuh! She almost sounds like some sort of sad scammer rather than the sincere but rather forward young person her profile suggests ...