Hey, we can get a mortgage! So we’re going to get a house. In Ann Arbor. That’s fantastic. That’s one big step forward, I’m thinking. Also extremely pleasing is the fact that I now have enough cool movies for a ninety-minute Cinema Slam–the short film program I’m running at the Michigan Theatre on February 3rd.
American Short Film, the 15 minute comedy I’ve been working on, needs to be finished by Monday to be included. I’ve got one more sound tape to transfer, sound rushes to sync up, audio to mix, titles to prepare and a little grading to do, but it’s going to get done. Oh, yes–it will be done. And that’s three steps forward.
Step four was the meeting with Jim, our new accountant today. I can see the whole Ascalon Films thing working having spoken to him. It was all very positive.
Now, of course, you’re all reading this wondering if there could possibly perhaps be a fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works, or even perchance a step back. Four steps forward and one step back? Well, yes. Yes there is. The shipping company have emailed me. They can’t find my paintings. Four pieces of art plus one large framed photograph which they were supposed to crate up and ship from St Albans, UK, to Ann Arbor, US. They’ve lost them.
Yes, the only irreplaceable objects in the whole consignment from England and the incompetent morons at Dolphin Movers aka Aero Frieght have lost them. I should have guessed they were a bunch of complete tools when the guy turned up to collect them without the blankets they had promised they were going to wrap them on the way to be crated. I highly recommend NOT using these people for your shipping needs.
Now I have to file an insurance claim but England is closed after 5pm because everyone only works an eight hour day there, including an hour for lunch (paid), so it will have to wait. Bastards. I’m not amused. I expect you can tell.
I am writing this at 9pm in my office on a Saturday night, having just finished my second 12 hour shift in two days. Maybe you only worked an eight hour day on your tinpot Dingford rag but many other people sign up for the full corporate shafting over here. It is my dream to work for 24 hours just so my bosses can get a bonus for my productivity and the shareholders can an extra .0001pence dividend every six months. I envy the unqualified teenage mums (my babysitter) who get to work six and seven days a week in shitty jobs just so they can afford to stay in their shitty housing association hovels and support their lazy petty criminal boyfriends. She could always emigrate to somewhere that would appreciate her work ethic I suppose… oh no, sorry, that’s a privileged middle class escape route.
No one is forcing you to work in local newspapers where you will indeed be earning considerably less than your counterparts in other areas of journalism. I’ve worked both the full-on 16-hour/day for seven days a week and the slacker-extraordinaire 16-hour/week for a full week’s pay. Neither were particularly satisfying and the hours were never really the point.
No one forced your babysitter to leave school without qualifications or to become pregnant. No one is stopping her getting qualifications now. Britain doesn’t shove kids up chimneys, make them weave rugs or employ them in factories glueing together footballs. Instead, the powers that be provide an education. Whether individuals choose to use that education and work hard to achieve something or piss their futures up against a wall is a personal choice.
The “shitty housing association hovel” is something that only exists in the wildest fantasies of the average people in most countries.
Heh heh,
“It doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist…” if you keep saying it you’ll convince yourself it is true. Never figured you for a neocon mate but at least you’re easy to please (and so we all cut taxes, thanked the corporations for their selfless and generous influence on our lives and everyone worked happily ever after…)
For your edification, because I cannot bear to see someone I like make an arsehole of himself as an apologist for the cream-off culture – the shitty housing estate hovels do exist, run down classrooms with demoralised teachers giving losers just enough information to hold a crayon the right way up do exist, when I worked for the Daily Mail I got all the information about corporate slavery that I needed, when I worked as a stringer for the nationals I got all the experience I needed about how information is selected and agendas set…
Open your eyes, free market economies need poor people to function properly, there always needs to be a section of society that is poorly educated and poorly housed.
By the way, I didn’t complain about my pay and actually, as an editor/columnist, my hours are mostly self-imposed, I merely objected to you characterising the Brits as layabout fuckwits.
This ‘no-one forced people to be poor’ argument is ill informed and not worthy of you…
A ‘neocon’? That’s nice. If you can label something or someone, neatly pigeonhole them or their argument, then you don’t need to understand. It’s not worthy of you, Steve.
What you refer to as ‘shitty housing estate hovels’ are the result of many factors. Whatever you say, no one is washing their clothes in the river, throwing slops out of the window or sewing Nike trainers by candlelight because they don’t have plumbing, sewage or electricity. Things improve but it takes effort. What I was saying is that people have a choice in how they respond to their living conditions. Whinging about it is one response. Doing something practical is another.
The Daily Mail–as any fule kno–is a very nasty piece of well-marketed fascism trading off the gullibility of Joe Average, a hunger for gossip and the rare injection of genuine human interest. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least that their offices and the inhabitants of those offices reflect the philosophy of the paper.
National newspapers in the UK are, in general, not worth the paper they’re printed on. Smeagol Press and Gollum Press. There are interesting, informative and useful things in the papers but too often they’re just spouting rubbish. It saddens me that any agendas are set by them, although I don’t disagree that they are.
Britain *is* full of layabout fuckwits, my friend. I’m not saying that everyone in Britain is one of them, but there are a significant number, just as there are a significant number of rational yet gullible voters here in North America.
It’s not all “grass is greener” in the USA, by any stretch. I can’t afford to get sick here without a job/insurance (which usually means the same) and if I don’t work, I’m generally fucked. Not everyone loves their job and skips to the office with a spring in their step. Holiday entitlement for the average US worker is two weeks and sick leave is usually unpaid. Don’t even get me started on civil liberties ‘guaranteed under a constitution’. Bwahahahaha!
There are some legitimate concerns about living conditions and work in the UK but one problem I see in Britain, and with the British press in particular, is that they take every grumble, groan and gripe, whether reasonable or not, and hold a magnifying glass over it until something ignites. That’s not healthy.
Fair point well made. And I guess you didn’t have room to put all that in the original blog. I’ll call off the Hassle Hamsters.