![]() And here I was, being pushed off that abyss before I could jump. As a journalist, to work for Teletext is to choke on the cashews during 'and-what-do-you-do?' party small talk, to peer over the abyss of a career in freefall. Bleeding without permission was added to a catalogue of earlier outrages against corporate discipline, and I was ordered to leave the premises forthwith. It's difficult to imagine how I could have prepared better for my martyrdom. Limping into reception, I was summoned into the assistant editor's office. Within weeks a commuter's familiarity with my route had begun to breed contempt for its hazards, and on that bright July morning I spectacularly overcooked it coming into the Old Ship chicane. Stung into action by an in-law's comment on my budding scotch-egg man breasts, I'd begun cycling to work in the summer of 1996, a pleasant (if largely illegal) roll along the towpaths of Hammersmith and Chiswick. Owing to the recent implementation of a scorched-earth policy on my correspondence, I'm no longer able to supply the precise date of my expulsion. I wasn't surprised when 15-year-olds wrote to us saying we had the best job in the world, and nor was my wife when I inadvertently referred to Teletext as 'school'. ![]() Then we strolled back to the office and were handed £20 from petty cash to take to the Trocadero for 'arcade research'. For almost three years my colleague, Paul, and I lived out a shamelessly infantilised existence in a distant corner of the open-plan editorial sprawl, playing Micro Machines 2 on an enormous telly, eating scotch eggs and throwing Pentel lids at each other.Įvery Friday lunchtime we lugged all the games we'd reviewed that week to a pawnbroker, and covertly flogged them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |