Permission to go back to work, Mr Chairman...

Working at the museum is becoming annoying now. With the deadline for MLA accreditation coming up in mid-September, they're hectically doing everything they should have been doing for the last 6 months. This means lots of meetings. I don't like meetings. They're designed solely to make everyone in the room feel important and productive, when they are in fact neither. The whole way through todays meeting (which lasted 3 hours, an hour past its scheduled finish) I was thinking about all the useful stuff I should really have been doing rather than be sitting in a stuffy town hall conference room.

"Archives 7001-7801 could do with being sorted"
"I could really do with getting on with the A-M village cataloguing"
"We still don't have any labels for the Monmouth Room or Blake Room, and I need to re-arrange their walkthroughs since the last reshuffle"
"I need to configure the network sometime soon, otherwise the whole record database might crash"

And by the end of those 180 minutes of discussion, all I could see that we'd accomplished was: last years budget has been authorised, minutes for a meeting in March have been signed and stored, and general back-slapping for doing nothing particularly difficult was prevalent throughout.

One of the things I hate about meetings is the use of language people automatically assume when they enter the room. They start talking about themselves in the third person (and others as "Mr." or some title which holds no power outside those walls), meaningless congratulations are offered whenever possible, and people ask permissions that they don't need.
"Permission to respond to Mr. Woolrichs query, Chairman"
Of course you've got permission you slimy little reptile, he was addressing you!

The main thing I don't like about them though, is the time they take up, and the fact that they are seen as so important that they can't possibly be missed. It was for this reason that instead of going to Bristol today for a birthday, I was listening to a budget report for floor maintenance that happened about 8 months before I started working there. Its also quite likely that instead of partying it up in Newquay this summer, I'll be trapped in Bridgy, as they've managed to schedule at least a meeting a week up until the MLA deadline. This means I've not been able to book off a decent run of days, so I'll either miss a chunk of the holiday, or have to skip it completely.

Bored

Well, I've been working at the museum for nigh on a month now, and still have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I have an office though, which is nice. And a work experience assistant, who is also nice. I've been mostly working on the archaic database they use for recording the archive (I'm told there are about 16000 items, but the database files tend to have been corrupted, so I can only get at 10000), but this week I've been coding the website. HTML/CSS coding is not an exciting thing to spend hours trawling through, looking for a misplaced tag. It is for this reason that I complied a list of things to do rather than do more coding for a website no-one will ever look at anyway.

Things I considered doing to battle boredom:

1) Rearranging my office so that everything points towards magnetic north*
2) Sorting my Skittles by colour*
3) Juggling with Skittles*
4) Going over to Asda to buy more Skittles*
5) Drawing a moustache on the woman in the portrait hanging in the corner of the room
6) Visiting the archaelogy department on my swivel chair, while negotiating sets of steps*
7) Placing my mp3 player in the Victorian Life exhibit*
8) Wearing a replica Civil War battle tunic on the coffee run
9) Using redundant phrases, such as "I'm mentally thinking in my head", and "I'll have it finished by 1300 hours pm in the afternoon"*
10) Using RJ45 ethernet cables to abseil out of the window
11) Replacing the ships in the Battle of Lowestoft display with rubber ducks
12) Putting a "Where's The Beef?" label by the buffalo skeleton
13) Answering the phone in a range of accents*
14) Practicing keep ups with my frankly vast rubber band ball*
15) Engaging in a duel with a rogue bluebottle*
16) Arranging the museums entire supply of pins on the notice board in a smiley face*
17) Going busking with a lute

* : Denotes an activity carried out, which may or may not lead to my time at the museum coming to a premature end

Spotify The Dog

In response to Youtube having to block all music videos for the UK, although I am yet to find a song without a video up there, I downloaded Spotify a few days ago. There was a lot of hype about it essentially making iPods obsolete, but at the moment it doesn't have a big enough library to be worrying Apple. Theres a distinct lack of Oasis albums, but I suspect thats more down to the Gallaghers demanding more royalties.

A lot was made about the adverts that pop up to keep the whole thing free, and how that would "detract from the listening experience". First of all, I don't know anybody who listens to music for an experience anymore. And secondly, so far the only adverts I've heard are a nice lady talking for about 10 seconds every half hour about how if I paid for the premium package I wouldn't have to hear her go on at me. So since the Youtube music that this is filling in for was only ever used as something to listen to while we're playing FIFA round Claytons house, or as background noise while I'm cruising though Wikipedia, I have nothing against these little interludes. Its certainly not enough to make me go across to Last.FM, where all the listeners feel they have to make their opinions of the song known to everyone else.

This is all a moot point though, since I've downloaded all the songs I like to listen to on Media Player anyway.

"Its Been A Long Time...

...Since I Rock And Rolled"

It hasn't, but I needed a song lyric that suitably described my blogging absence, and Rock & Roll by Led Zep did quite nicely.

In fact, I've recently enhanced my Rock and Rolling capabilities by restringing my acoustic, bringing the total number of playable guitars sat in my bedroom up to 4 (plus one ukulele). Its got the finest Martin strings I could get for under £3, and they've taken a bit of breaking in, but at least now it doesn't sound like its being played inside a tin bucket. Need to get some replacements for the nylon strings on the uke next, which cost more despite being shorter, and having two fewer strings. Its like a little bass. Apart from it takes talent to play it.

Although if I've learnt anything from venturing onto the Bass mode on Guitar Hero for the first time last night, its that playing bass is more difficult than it looks. Its incredibly hard to keep your concentration when the guitarist is playing his complicated solo, plus you have to deal with the loss of self-respect that comes with the crowd cheering more for the monkey sat behind the drums than for you. And those root notes won't pluck themselves people...