If you see someone being arrested in Philadelphia, don’t photograph it. This guy did, and got arrested for “impeding an investigation”. Not quite sure how snapping a pic with a mobile phone impeded the police, when they were in the street, and he was in the driveway of his own home. The ACLU aren’t too impressed.

Andrew says RSS is doomed. He’s probably right. It’s a great thing, and it’s much better than not having RSS, but it really is starting to seem a bit limiting these days. The stupidity of just shoving your site’s entire recent content in a slightly repackaged form every time someone wants to check if there’s anything new really doesn’t make much sense.

When Andrew Kantor gets a voice mail that makes no sense, he strikes back. Very funny.

I once got a phone call on my mobile, which went very oddly…

Me: Hello?
Them: Hi Martin. How’s it going?
Me: I’m not Martin. I think you’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Oh, have I?
Me: Yes.
Them: Oh. Right. So. How’s it going, Martin?
Me: I’m not Martin. You’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Heh heh. Yeah. So. Y’alright?
Me: Er? You’ve got the wrong number.
Them: Yeah, right. That’s just the sort of trick you’d play, Martin. Very funny.
Me: No, really, I’m not Martin.
Them: Oh, right. Heh heh. You’re funny, Martin.
Me: No. I’m not martin.
Them: Heh heh. OK. So, y’alright, then?
Me: …hangs up.

This Martin must be one really funny guy.

In my previous posting “How To Temp and Keep Your Sanity”, I wrote about the usefulness of taking your own stuff with you to temp bookings. I thought I’d share the contents of my own Temping Kit, to perhaps inspire you to put together your own or to prove that the baggage I lug around every day ain’t just emotional…

Pens and Pencils

I carry a black pencil case in which I keep a selection from PigPog’s pretty massive pen and pencil collection, along with a few other essentials.

• A large twin-tip Sharpie
• A medium tip Sharpie
• Faber-Castell Grip Plus 0.7 automatic pencil (thanks Simon)
• A Rotring Xonox .3mm
• A couple of elastic bands
• Uniball Vision Elite in red, blue and black.
• Pentel GraphGear 1000 Pencil – Pinched from Michael while he’s busy lovin’ the Lamy
• A couple of Staedtler erasers.
• My Sheaffer Prelude Fountain Pen – review coming soon.
• 3 single-serve packs of demerara sugar. In case they have coffee but no sugar!

Filofax

Once again, Michael’s fickle ditherings over personal organisers has worked to my advantage, as I’ve managed to get my mitts on his cherished-for-about-five-minutes black leather A5 “Identity” filofax.

It’s organised into four sections:

• Work – Where I make/keep notes about wherever I’m working at the time.

• 2006 – Diary etc.

• Art – Space for PigPog scribblings, other writing, drawing etc.

• Archive – Old notes.

I’ve got a few DIY Planner forms in there, but I tend to rely on plain or lined paper. I haven’t got to the stage of organising my thoughts well enough to figure out what form to write them down on yet. I also have in there timesheets and other bumpf from whichever agency I’m working for at the time, and a picture to remind me that “It’s not a problem you can stop, it’s rock n’ roll”

This is all lugged around in my ever faithful Flapdoozy bag. Ph34r teh r00my ones.

So there you are, that’s what I lug around with me when I’m doing the temp thing. If I ever get a chance to do the permanent thing, I’ll let you know how it changes my ‘luggage’.

Dear Blog, You may recall some posts back that I was offered a permanent job. You may recall how surprisingly happy I was about it all. Despite the reams of forms I had to fill in for various checks and clearances, I was hoping to be starting work within a couple of weeks.

Nope.

Things haven’t quite gone according to plan. However, there may still be an opportunity for me to work there, so fingers crossed, just not in the job I wanted.

I’ve lost 3 weeks’ wages hanging around waiting for something to happen. It’s been driving me bonkers not knowing whether I’d be working again Monday, in a week, or in a month. I’ll find out about the other job in a couple of weeks, and hopefully starting in September. Hopefully. For now I’m temping once again, and joining the staff at a property company next week as an audio typist. It’ll do. As usual, I have to put up with “it’ll do” rather than “Wow! That’s exactly what I want!”.

If I get any more disappointed and angsty about all of this, I’m going to have to ditch this blog in favour of a LiveJournal.