Bringin' home the bacon

Last week I started doing trial shifts at a community newspaper group as a sub. They have two offices, one in the city and one in a suburb about 30 miles from here. I started in the office in the city on Wednesday, and everyone was very nice and helpful. I was very nervous going in, and the person I was there to see (the publisher) was not in, he was at the other office. This turned out to be a stroke of luck, because since he wasn't there to have a preliminary chat with me about what was expected of me and where this might go, I was put straight onto a computer and given copy to edit. Once I had things to do, I was no longer nervous.

They use a text-based programme for the initial word-subbing, and then the copy goes to the designers, who lay it out in InDesign and return it to the subs for a second edit. I am familiar with InDesign, and the whole thing felt like a college excercise. DCU prepared me very well for this kind of work, because it's exactly what we did in class for a year. My internship at Newsday involved a different kind of programme and a different kind of editing, so I was unsure if I was really up to the task. Once there, though, I realised that I am prepared for this and I do know how to do it, and I have no call to be nervous. I may not be a great sub, but I know the basics.

I was there on Thursday as well, and on Friday I went to their suburban office. It is not as attractive for many reasons. The commute (bike to train to bike) is an hour and 45 minutes. The city centre office is on the 8th floor of a building with lots of light and a great view of Melbourne harbour. The suburban office is in a low, squat warehouse by the side of a highway with all the blinds shut and no natural light. They work 4-day weeks, which sounds good until you realise that means two 11-hour days. When you add almost four hours of commuting onto that, it makes for very long days indeed.

But while the aesthetics and shifts are better at the city office, both would be great places to work, and the suburban office is the most pressed for help. They are using a lot of casuals there at the moment, and I would be very happy to do casual shifts at both offices. I'm going back to the suburban office tomorrow and the city office on Monday, Thursday and Friday. Maybe at the end of this week I'll have a better sense of how many shifts I might get from this and what it's going to entail. For now, to use an old newspaper cliche to be avoided in headlines, the future is uncertain.

Last weekend was full of comedy festival stuff. On Thursday night we went to see Ardal O'Hanlon do stand-up. He referenced his "Father Ted" days a few times, and told jokes with the kind of wide-eyed dopiness that makes him such a funny comedian. It was an excellent show.

Friday we went to see PuppetUp!, an improv show using puppets. The show's creative director is Brian Henson, Jim's son, and while the Muppets we all know and love are all licensed to Disney and weren't in the show, these puppets were good too. It worked like a standard intro show - the MC would ask the audience for a situation, a place, a job, a fairy tale, whatever, and the actors would play the scene. Except that the actors were puppeteers who held their puppets above their heads to a video camera, which broadcast the puppets' movements onto two big screens. It was a very strange, and funny, show.

On Saturday night we went to a pub in our neighbourhood with some friends to see a comic we'd seen a teaser for a few nights before. His style wasn't so much belly-laughs as story-telling, but it was a good show and everyone had a good time.

There aren't any pictures with this blog entry with the exception of this spider, sorry. The spider was on the wall above one of the windows in our hallway. The picture isn't taken with a zoom lens - this is how big the spider was. I think it was almost as big as my hand. It's our first encounter with the giant spiders of Astralia, and I'm told they get way bigger than this.