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| Thank god they put up this sign; Cornmarket used to be crawling with people walking five or more dogs. |
So, I’m now doing an official 9 to 5. Well, an 8.30 to 4.30, but that’s less catchy. I’ve told you about the 6 till 8.30 and 4.30 till 6 part, but what about the big long gap in the middle? What do you do, anonymous blogger? Make the tea? Do the photocopying? Sit at a desk idly making mobius strips out of bits of printer paper for seven hours?
In a way, sometimes, I wish. I thought that was what I had to look forward to; graduate entry-level jobs have a reputation for being a selection of the most menial, pointless tasks assembled into a day’s work which is then labelled a ‘scheme’ or ‘development programme’ or such like to make the poor graduate feel like they’re ‘making it in the real world’. I’ve done jobs like this before. I once worked briefly in an HR office where the real employees had so little to do that they were reluctant to give me anything for fear of fatal boredom, and where the most frequent task (which, give it its due, involved teamwork and problem solving) was to play Jenga with everyone else.
The first day started exactly as you might expect. I was ushered into an HR office where I was shown a number of videos promoting the company and featuring lots of floating graphics and words like ‘synergy’ and ‘innovation’ and ‘globalisatular feedback targeting’. Around me sat a bunch of glazed-eyed graduate interns who had already been there a week and seemed slightly peeved at having to be inducted a week after they had actually started. We then had the health-and-safety chat from a man who was identical to the man you imagine in your head when I say ‘health and safety man’, right down to the moustache. There was a shorter version of the planned tour because a great deal of the premises was being immersed in a deluge of rain, and then I was shown my desk and given my plan for the week. Then my boss and I found out that my email hadn’t been set up yet and neither had my company network ID and as such I was essentially useless for the rest of the day. And much of the week, as it was to turn out – apparently to make an employee log-in you literally have to grow a tree from seed, cut it down, and slice off a nice chunky log to make it out of.
The second day I was inducted into the project I would be working on. I am working on a computerised German learning system for kids at secondary school, a project which was done about two-thirds of the way before being abruptly abandoned for a French textbook (sssssssss….). Well, in actual fact, when I say I’m ‘working on it’, I gradually came to understand that I am in fact the only one working on it and am therefore sort of a bit in charge of the whole thing, as I like to tell myself. It is a vast sprawling LAGOON of a project, involving hundreds of tiny manuscripts which need multiple edits, many freelancers each of whom is only available in brief snippets of time, programming which is picky like a four-year-old girl and hundreds of floating loose ends still left untied since it was put on hiatus. Without a log-in or email access, I couldn’t do nice things like set up my profile and so I simply dove straight into editing the mini-uscripts on my second day and by the third day I was basically a full-blown and inducted editor; I even knew where to make tea.
Since then, The Project (as it shall from now on be called in the interests of anonymity and pathos) has grown and grown in volume like bread dough in the airing cupboard. Simple formatting issues demand that I check through all of the mini-uscripts I have just checked through all over again; freelancers have buggered off on holiday for what seems like an unreasonable amount of time; the second recruit who was going to come and share this project with me is now not coming any more, doubling my workload and meaning that when things go wrong there is nowhere to hide – they will hunt me down and they will make me pay.
The complexity of a digital publication is so vast and swirling it is, like the universe, impossible to visualise or comprehend. Microscopic issues can cause such enormous trouble that typos have become a sweet little joke, an endearing smear of chocolate that you wipe off your child’s face while ignoring the fox excrement they have collected all over their clothes and hair. I spend my days debating pixels, ultra-laser-precise filenaming and something troubling called ‘metadata’. This is not publishing as we know it, this is something from space which has come down to teach your kids Deutsch. It’s almost a joy to see the moments where the traditional German teaching format I know and love so well has persisted: it is European law, apparently, that every language course for secondary school has topics on drugs (‘hey kids, don’t do drugs – Xavier says it’s bad for your health (vrai ou faux?)’), the environment (‘I never used to recycle, but then I read something in Encore Tricolore which blew my mind’) and healthy eating (tackling the obesity crisis with fill-in-the-blank passages).
But despite this verbose rant, I love having My Project. Despite its foibles, it is going to be a terrific tool – an incredible, co-operative, reflexive way for kids to learn a new language and for teachers to help them do their homework in a way that is as non-boring as possible. The Project kicks those crackly and broken cassette tapes out of the language lab and sets fire to crumpled bits of lined paper with vocab listed on them. Kids do need to be using computers to learn as they are going to be glued to them for the rest of their lives, and teachers need to help them do more of that, and they need help to make that happen without constantly asking the students to create more and more agonisingly garish powerpoint presentations about Hamburg or the U-Bahn.
And as The Project, it’s a hell of a thing to be doing as a fresh and squidgy graduate. This company trusts me to be clever and reliable, organised and efficient, multi-taskerrific and responsible like a veteran babysitter. I attend meetings and liaise things not like a trainee but like a real and valued worker who they believe can do a proper job of things. There is a lot to do, but there’s nothing more appetising than a loaded dinner plate, and it’s my job to get my teeth in. Let’s hope I can stomach it all the way to pudding.
