I congratulate myself once again for getting out of bed (reasonably) on time, and making it into London for my second day at NME. I collected my pass from the front desk, and the black guy greeted me with a hello as he let me through the gates. Maybe he wasn’t laughing at me after all, I’ve always wanted a black friend.
Up on the fourth floor, the day started in much the same way, except this time I had a keyboard and mouse, and people knew who I was. Tom (that other work experience guy with the good name, remember?) asked if I would help sort the post again, which I have come to accept as the menial, boring task that the work experience monkeys have to do because nobody with a salary actually wants to do it. It was done in a Jiffy® (excuse the pun…there were a lot of jiffy packs). I sat at my desk, and was soon greeted by Zoe who promised she had some slightly more exciting work to do than the post, album art and retyping articles.
She wasn’t wrong; it was slightly more exciting. I use the word “slightly” in its most literal form. My objective for the day was to research a variety of images of Muse – a band I am conveniently a fan of anyway – as NME are planning a big issue dedicated to the band. I was given some basic instructions on how I should name the files, to then organise them into some sort of chronological album order, and finally rustle up some contact sheets for each albums time span. At first I thought it would be a nice easy task to keep me occupied until lunchtime, but it actually took me all day. I was given a generous list of photo agencies with whom NME have accounts, including Getty Images, and allowed free reign over all the images I might choose to put in the magazine. There was a massive amount of stuff to look through, way more than I had expected, and needless to say I ended up with a lot of material. But that’s probably a good thing. I presented my work to Zoe at the end of the day and she said that tomorrow we will be having a look through them all together, which I am hoping means that I will get to help them edit down to a strong selection of images for the magazine. Since visual editing and sequencing is probably one of my most accomplished skills, I would very much like to be a part of it.
To summarise today, I definitely enjoyed it more than yesterday, but hopefully not as much as I’ll enjoy tomorrow (that vague sense of optimism is still loitering in the corners of my brain). One thing that did please me today was the severe lack of entertaining work the journalism students have to do – every time Zoe came to see how I was doing, one of them would ask “Do you have anything we could do?”, to which she would reply “No, sorry, not for the picture desk”. It makes me feel like I’m wanted, even slightly valuable.
Oh, and the taps in the kitchen switch from scorching-hot freshly boiled water to icy-cold refreshing liquid with one small movement. I want that in my house.
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