Time for a quick post.

I am in the newsroom at the moment, feeling like a moron. The weekly lecture on Web Journalism has just ended, and I wasn't there. Why? Because I was convinced it was Thursdy and I should have a broadcast workshop. DUH!

Luckily it was a lecture that was handy rather than important.

Todays news - The Independants political poll ndicates that the Tories are 11 points ahead of Labour giving them a projected majority of 34 should there be an election tomorrow. Ooh er. A bit unnerving. If you aren't a Conservative that is.

I have noticed more and more recently that my political views are becoming more and more central and that the ideological view of the world that Mum and Dad assured me would dissapate, and that I assured them it wouldn't, is being slowly eroded.

Like everyone else, I now feel entirely free to poke fun at the Communist Student society and their ever futile attempts to get a student officer, ANY officer on the committee. Bless.

I always wonder just how communist these communist students are. As far as I can tell, their revolutionary agenda seems to consist of trying to make Uni education free and complaining about oil companies. Its good that they care, and that they are trying to do something, but... well it doesn't seem particularly likely does it?

Various student factions stand outside of the union all the time and ask me to sign petitions to the government that demand making education "free for everyone". Personally I don't have a problem with tuition fees. At the end of the day, it costs money to run a university. The money has to come from somewhere whether the student or the tax payer.At the moment it is a mix of both and the burden on the student is not particularly massive. Yes there is a loan to pay back, but its peanuts compared to gettign a mortgage or whatever. If you can afford to buy a new car (which I suspect may uni graduates will do at some point), I am sure you can afford to pay a minimum fee every month.

The Union have also decided to abolish the post of "Womens officer" and replace it with "Equality officer". Seems to make sense to me. Does the union need a full time salaried person [woman] to make sure women are represented? Personally, in 2008 I don't think so.

There isn't a whole lot left to reform to be honest. There is still a pay gap between men and women, but this is modtly due to women choosing to have a career gap to have children. Although it would be nice for there to be more stay-at-home dads, this is surely an individual choice and not some grave injustice of society.

The womens officer does provide a really handy Womens minibus for late night getting home. You just pay £1.50 and a nice man delivers you to your door and provides baby wipes for when the girl next to you throws up on your arm (as happened last year!). Poor blokes however have to walk home on their tod or pay £5 for a taxi. Statistically men are more likely to get attacked anyway! Inverse sexism anyone?

I think perhaps we need to stop worrying about having a neat cross section of the population in faculty of every organisation. Does it matter that most Phycisists are guys? Frankly, No.

I-art-mightyer-than-thou rant over.

In other news! Its the McDonalds christmas party tonight. Yes I know it is February but nobody wanted to go on a trip to Alton Towers so it had tobe cancelled. Crazy people! Instead we have a room booked at Varsity - a club on West Street. Apparently there will be free food and drinks and a kareoke. It could well be interesting...

Also, two fab bands are playing at Fuzz this Thursday. Hiem (a dance troupe not a million miles off being an electro Artic okeys), who I saw last year and really liked and 'extra special guests': "The Dead Eyed Bitches". Thnks to Uni being the gossip shop of the world, everyone knows that "The Dead Eyed Bitches" are actually Sheffields Indie super-group the Long Blondes. Although not that into Indie, songs by the Long Blondes are always played at union nights so the atmosphere is bound to be amazing! I wonder if the poor security guys will have to catch the crowd surfers thrown at them again...

Journo is stepping up again now it is getting towards the latter part of the year (in February! What ever happened to real hard work?). As all of my modules this year are coursework assessed (apart from French in which the exams are in lesson time anyway), I believe I finish on May 22nd. How wonderfully ridiculous. I guess I should sort out some work experience for the summer (and by Summer I mean late spring to mid autumn as Uni starts in October).

Things are looking good on the PR front. I talked to a man from the PR chartered thingummie at the Student employment fair and explaine my plan of action with work experience and Journo stuff. He said that I would be "well set up" for a career in PR. Yay! I also talked to the Local Government reps and they said that they emply graduates straight from Uni and training on the job. Yay! With so many local govs around the counrty things are looking good. : D

I guess the summer also lends itself to excessive McDonalds working. Kerching! I am not sure if I will be in Doncaster or Sheffield yet though... Also. Holiday!! I fancy going somwhere a bit further afield this time if possible. Even if it's just to spain or Germany or somewhere, I would really like to go somewhere new. AS most of my Journo friends are from far flung places, and I work with some many foreign nationals, I have felt a little cocooned recently... Ah well. One day I will get to Japan when I have a real job with real working hours...

This has been a bit of a rambly post today hasn't it?

I am at abit of a loose end to be honest. I do have a Web Journalism workshop in 30mins however. Hopefully when I have learne a little more HTML I can make this blog a little more fancy. Mmmm yes. Sounds fun : D

Well I think I will stop rambling now before I bore you to death.
Toodles : )

Must.......write................stuff.......

Hello again.

Sorry it took so long for me to actually get back into actually writing something but at first I had nothing to write about....then I had one or two boring things.....then I had LOADS but couldn't be bothered....then I had left it so long I felt I should have a reason for writing something and decided to wait for one....then I completely forgot about this blogs existence....

You know how it is. Maybe.

Anyhoo. I thought I would make a bit of an effort and have a bit of a clearout of the right hand bar of all the slightly-naff-but-was-once-amusing stuff. You now have the privilege of browsing a few tasty morsels of randomness and geekery hand picked from the dark murky underworld of nerds. I spoil you : )

So....
A lot has happened since my last proper posts in which I didn't really say that much about life in general at all so heres a superfast [ha as if I could do concise!] breeze over what has been going on:

• I finished finished the year and did my exams. Got a 2:1 overall woo! Even passed the NCTJ Politics tests : 0 No sign of a shorthand qualification yet though : (
• Moved out of Tapton back to sunny Donny with the intention of getting a job for the summer so I actually had money for this year.
• Nobody wanted a worker just for the summer. I was reduced to crawling back to the old dungeon of misery and torture but even they didn't want a summer worker. The cheek! I even passed Dean on the way in but strangely he had legged it by the time I turned around. I guess he is still a bit awkward about the shortlived datingness...
• Decided that as I had an empty house sat waiting in Le Sheff (a house! MY house! Ooooooooh!) I may as well make use of it and look for a job there. There had to be a job in an entire city. Surely....
• After the initial headache of sorting out bills and getting used to living on me lonesome I bombarded the place with CVs and applications.
• I even handed in a CV to the high Street McDonalds. Well I had to earn some pennies somewhere. What if nowhere else would have me?
• 15 mins later whilst I was just about to harass KFC I get a phone call...

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Man: "Hiya is that Charlotte?"

Me: "Yes..."

Man: "I'm Gavin from McDonalds High Street. I am VERY impressed. I just phoned up your old store and they said you were brilliant and I should definitely hire you. Where are you?"

Me: "Erm. Just down the road at KFC."

Man: "Fabulous! Do you fancy coming back for a chat?"

Me: "......Yeah sure I'll be there in 5 mins"

Man: "Fantastic! See you soon!"

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This guy was unbelievably enthusiastic and cheerful. How could I say no to a chat? More to the point, how did the place of hell get even more unrealistically pleasant about me than before? Oh well can't complain : ) Off I went...

5 minutes later I had a job with as many hours as I wanted for the hols and a job in term time to fit around my timetable. AND the people seemed really nice and mature, AND they all seemed to be enjoying what they were doing, AND everything looked in working order and in a reasonable state of cleanliness. Wow.

• Started work and things were just like I hoped. Everybody worked hard, the equipment was fab, there was no drivethrough (Woooo!) to stress about and I actually got the hours I requested and no random ones during days off. Dare I say it, I actually enjoyed work some days or at least didn't mind going in.
• It finally dawned on me that actually the company is a good one. Yeah so you get payed minimum wage but you do get flexible hours and good training if you actually work at a decent [i.e. not franchise as in place of hell] store. Turns out Gavin used to work at that place and the first thing he said was: "God that place is a shithole! It was the worst time of my life! Its full of twats and chavs!" So glad it wasn't just me then. I had also realised by this point that Gavin is genuinely a flamboyantly enthusiastic and happy person.

Example:

Scene: A quiet crew room with 5 staff members softly munching their burgers....

*BANG* - Door flies open

Gavin marches in, slaps Alan round the back of the head, grabs Azad's hat, throws it at the floor, stamps on it then charges into the boys staff toilet.

*pause*

Gavin: "FUCKING HELL! What have you been doing in here??"

Alan: (mumbling) dunno

Gavin: "You are dirty bastards aren't you. I don't know you are a bunch of scrubbers.... Fucking hell...."

Gavin makes for the door, turns

Gavin: "See you later darlings!!!!!"

*BANG*

Exits

Gavin is a dude.

• So I worked 5 or 6 shifts a week till term came around again earning plenty of wonga. Suddenly I had as much money as I had before I started Uni. Wooooo!
• Uni this year is pretty cool. So far its all been Law [101 ways to write things, be annoying to the judge and not get sued], broadcast [101 ways to get ignored by the general public in the street] and.... French.
• It is quite odd to be doing French again but it is quite satisfying. After all half of the people at work are overseas students or just full time workers from some exotic places [China, Zimbabwe, Ghana, India, Turkey, Iran, Yemen, Portugal and er, Ireland] and so speaking just one language makes you feel rather ignorant. All being well, by the end of the year I should be A level standard in French. Yay!

Well I think that about sums up what has been going on.

Right now things have just started to get up to speed in terms of actually having a reasonable amount of things to do. Tomorrow for example I have to go out at 9.30 with a marantz [groovy reporters mic and recording thingummie] and do a vox pop which basically is getting loads of peoples opinions on tape.

I was going to do that this morning but I felt a bit rough and so put it off till today. It took me ages to come up with a decent subject - "Halloween, frightfully dull or a bit of fun? Are you trick-or-treating tonight or are you hiding indoors?" Ad infinitum. Of course I realised on the way back from my lecture that tomorrow this is hardly current and worthy of comment. Hopefully I can ask the question in the past tense and edit it together as the present :s

I did try and do my voxpop at the beginning of last week however finding a place to grab people for a second was nigh on impossible. The shopping area was already dotted with preachers, salespeople, big issue sellers, buskers and the like so getting a decent spot that was a fair distance away from any of these people and not near a road or that bloody trumpet player was tricky. I eventually found the perfect spot only to see Brett and Lesley from Journo move into it.

I tried to grab a few people and got a handful although they didn't comment on anything. Apparently nobody is bothered (least of all the black lady I asked) that the police have been told to actively target young black boys to stop and search last week. Well I guess I got an answer to my question. Unfortunately apathy does not lend itself well to being edited into a 3 minute package for radio.

Such is the way of Journos I suppose....

I also got thinking yesterday that maybe I should quit my job. I am just bored of it to be honest. There are only so many times you can clean things in the same order between 4pm and 2am and not go insane. Also it does mean I get less time to study which actually seems to be a concern this year. I have so far been fairly successful in being proactive in studying (wow) and having 1 day a week in which you also have to revise for tomorrow's law test and do the washing hardly allows for quality study time.

On the other hand the hours are handy (although preposterously long) and I am earning a lot at the moment and not feeling really worn out or anything.

On a third (and genetically unlikely hand), If I could get a different job it would inevitably pay more per hour and probably offer normal length shifts and not 10 hour marathons of ajaxing and somehow transplanting all the grease off the machines onto myself.

But will I be able to find another job?

There are certainly a fair few vacancies but will they hire me? Hopefully I will find out. I have drafted my resignation letter and filled in a application form to work at the Union Studio Shop. If I somehow managed to get a job there I would get paid an hour more to serve a handful of customers and look at all the cool stuff for sale, occasionally unpacking a box or two. Sounds amazing.

Well I have enough money to last the year even if I can't find another job so I think I should take the risk. If I hand in my letter on Friday then I will leave on the 18th Nov which means I get my birthday off. Hooray! Done and Done.

Byebye McDonalds!!

Again...

Well I think I have waffled enough for today. Hopefully the next post will be a bit more exciting. I feel I should leave you non students with a fab example of what us yoofs call "randomness"....

Lottie is watching television

L:"Oh my god Patrick Stewart has a moustache!"

Megan: (from the kitchen) "Oh. Cool!"

L: "AND! He's playing a Nintendo DS!"

Megan: "What?!"

L: "WITH JULIE WALTERS!!!!!!!!"

Megan: "OH MY GOD!!!"

(Clattering of pots in the kitchen as Megan abandons the washing up)

L: "Hurry up this is a televisual event!!!"

M: "I'm coming!!....... OH DAMN!"

TV flicks from Patrick and Julie to an advert about tile cleaning

M: I can't believe I missed that! Oh I hope it comes on again...."

I spent 15 minutes this afternoon looking for that advert. I am nerd.