Slow, boring-ass day.

I arrived slightly after 9:30 to find that Martin wasn’t in yet and so I couldn’t do anything, so I spent the 45 minutes until he finally arrived jumping between IGN Boards and the newly-discovered (by me, at least) but excellent NTSC-uk forums. My hopes that Martin would have something for me to do were dashed when we found out that there wasn’t actually anything to do on the new issue, so since the old phone that was used to receive text messages from readers was broken I was left to make some up. I tried to be interesting and witty with some of them (my favourite was when I criticised their negative editorial stance on Crazy Frog Racer) but that couldn’t stop the job feeling empty and even misleading. I was, after all, basically making up reader correspondence.

That was it until lunchtime, and after lunch I was back to forum-hopping until Jon, the staff writer, came to see what I was up to and found me bored out of my mind. He went off to find me something and came back with the task of finding the day’s biggest story and writing it into a 150-word story for the website. I went for the announcement of the games list for TGS 2005, knocked out the story in about ten minutes, dug out a nice MGS3 shot from one of the screenshot databases, and dropped it onto the team server.

Not long after that Ryan King from Cube Magazine came over because he’d heard that I was a journalism student at the Southampton Institute, the same course he’d graduated from the year before. We shared some stories about tutors and the Institute which was amusing (my News Practice tutor was an idiot when he was there, too), and he confirmed that shorthand is completely useless. In fact he went as far as to say that he’s only seen one person use it in a press conference and that guy was treated with disdain for being an ostentatious prick. There goes any plans that I might have had to take it seriously – my iHP-120 works as a dictaphone so I’m never using the scribbles.

And that was it. Nearly nine hours spent there and I did about 30 minutes of work and all I got to show for it was the memory of various obscene cake designs, but that’s another story. I should get my work experience appraisal back tomorrow so I’ll make sure to let you know what they think of me.