After a typical student weekend that included political meetings, football, beer, partying and lots of vodka I found myself trying to write shorthand at 4pm on Sunday. Think maybe I need to get my head round this out-of-hours studying lark. Never been much good at it previously. Then again some would say that is why I am where I am, but I’ll leave it to my mother to lead the prosecution’s case on that one!
Two weeks gone (or 10% if you prefer) already and quite scarily the shorthand teacher announced today that “we’ve covered all the basic theory”. Finished the book in other words. To be honest I’d almost lost the will to live at that point – studying anything in two and a half hour blocks is taxing at the best of times, never mind on a Monday morning. Then again one half an hour break in an 8 hour day could surely give the EU Work Time Directive a run for its money. No wonder one of the guys is on two cans of Relentless a day – I kid you not!
Prior to all this I had my first day on placement last Friday. I took the initiation test which involves being told “there are no jobs. And don’t believe those people who say the job market is on the way back up. It isn’t. For those jobs that are there, there are far too many qualified people. So don’t think you’re getting one. And just in case you somehow pull it off, don’t forget, the money’s rubbish. So don’t expect to live. Well, you can live. But you can’t visit Australia.” I batted this off with my usual “Yes, I know. And yes, it’s still what I want to do” He finished his cigarette went inside and ordered fish and chips. I followed suit (minus the fag) and figured I’d passed. Either that, or convinced him I was crazy enough to keep on until the end of January.
It would be so ironic if I was to find a job wouldn’t it. Personally I thought that’s why I was doing this!
It would be so ironic if I was to find a job wouldn’t it. Personally I thought that’s why I was doing this!
Need to crack on writing some articles for my portfolio this week. Got one in the pipeline now regarding the selection of the candidate to fight the local elections for the Labour party in Dewsbury West. Not that there’s any potential clash between my politics and my career. Not even now I’ve been elected as Constituency Press Officer, although that happened on Friday before the weekend’s beer kicked in.
IN OTHER NEWS...
Not been selected to attend the Labour Party Conference, which is a bit gutting; thinking of going to some of the fringe meetings around the city to dig out a story or two though.
Talking of which, I’ve yet to root out a Tory in the class – sure there must be one somewhere. There’s a surprising number of ‘socialists’ actually.
Got a log-in for the NCTJ website last night, logged in and promptly logged back out again; it has my abysmal scores on there from when I took the exams at uni. Not something to dwell on. Although the one I passed, they’re still making me re-take, despite telling me in interview I wouldn’t have to. But then again, that was the same interview where they said there’d be 20 people in the class. Maybe I was actually interviewed by a figment of someone else’s imagination and it didn’t really happen?
After lectures tomorrow we're having a quiz and drinks ‘in the building’ – hmm, watch out for drunken Facebook status updates somewhere around 8pm. And not just mine.
Oh, and I found the cool spot in the room. Suprisingly, it’s near a window. Only downside? The dreadlocked guy who decided to piss against the parked car at approximately 4pm. Some of the girls were a bit shocked when he turned back round, I didn’t dare ask why!!
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