My Girlfriend and I are now well settled in our new flat in West London. It’s a cozy little pad and now that my Hi-Fi is set up, there are a few familiar pictures on the walls and plenty of our clutter about the place it feels like home. There is one thing missing though. I am a bit of an Internet o’ holick so broadband is one of my home comforts. I actually don’t know how I managed to cope with the old dial up Internet we had when I was at school, let alone the complete lack of online entertainment when I go out to Auskerry.
The annoying thing is, that we actually signed up for Broadband with o2 at the end of January, only to be told they wouldn’t be able to connect it up until the 3rd of March! I don’t remember it taking anything like that long to get our broadband connected in Kirkwall back in 2008 or whenever it was. It seems bizarre that in London, the UK’s capital and centre of business, it takes over four weeks to get connected. I’ve been told that the reason for this waiting list is due to the fact that most broadband providers have to rely on BT Openreach engineers to actually do the connecting on the street and they are totally over booked.
As you don’t start paying until you actually get connected, providers such as o2 must be loosing a lot of money as a result of the delay. I would have thought that with such obvious demand, BT would have made more effort to employ more engineers to help cut the waiting times. Luckily we have been able to get online to via a USB dongle, which uses the 3G mobile phone network, but its very slow and only really any use for things like booking train tickets and checking e-mails. For someone who’s quite reliant on the internet for entertainment and social reasons, it’s been quite interesting for me to have had to adapt to cope without it.
However, the last month has been so busy at work, that I suppose I haven’t had as much spare time to miss the internet as I would normally. This is because I have finally moved over from the World Service in central London to working at Radio 5 Live in Television Centre. As regular readers will know, when I took this job back in November 2009, the plan was for me to work for 5 Live. However, as part of our training we were initially posted to Bush House, the current home of the World Service, to learn the ropes as a Studio Manager. With 5 Live scheduled to move to the new Media City site in Salford later this year, our bosses have moved us over to TVC so that we can learn the skills and tasks specific to 5 Live programmes prior to the move North.
It’s sad to have said goodbye to my colleagues at the World Service, many who have become good friends. However, it’s very exciting to be starting this new chapter of my SM’ing career at the BBC’s home of live news and sport on the radio.
As you can imagine, learning the ropes in a new building, which incidentally is huge and like a maze is quite a challenge in its self. Imagine your first week at Kirkwall Grammar School, but it has about 5 more floors and half of it a big circle, so you can just keep walking round and round for ages with no idea where you are.
The other aspect of working at Television Centre that I hadn’t really considered is that fact that I keep coming face to face with celebrity TV presenters that you don’t expect to see while you’re walking around work, or making a cup of tea. Presenters like Sian Williams from BBC Breakfast, Kate Silverton and George Alagiah from the News Channel and Mark Lawrenson from Match Of The Day work in this building along with people like me every day. I’m just not used to it so I’m trying to learn to be nonchalant and cool about it and not draw too much attention to the fact that I might be just a little star struck.
