...partly in order to have something other than gloomy Proms news to look at...
Reading Paul Shoemaker's obituary made me think even more about the strangeness of working so intensively for a place which exists only in digital space, and with colleagues who one never meets. I know there are the annual dinners, but the costs of travel for us ex-pat or non-UK writers mean participation is always going to be unlikely. I've met Len, who made the long trip from Coventry to Shropshire while I was there on holiday a few years ago, taking me for a memorable lunch with Patrick Waller, but that's as far as my real human contact has gone with MWI.
Whenever crises arise, such as the need for new editors or whatever, it's all too easy to feel a sense of detachment. I can just feel Mary Portas on our backs saying 'you have to get your hands dirty... can't expect the organisation to run itself... everyone needs to carry their part of the load...' etc. etc., but after all, we're all volunteers - what is realistic?
It seems bizarre to inhabit such remote circumstances for those of us who grew up pre-internet but is of course very much a sign of these digital times.
Any thoughts? Suppose we just keep plugging on and wait for each other's obituarys...
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Yes, remote working is rather strange. I first started working from home in 1996, with a primitive dial-up connection to the mag's offices near Canary Wharf. When that ended a year later I edited and laid out a quarterly magazine for a disabled children's charity based in Coventry. I never met anyone there, communicating only via email. That, too, has come to and end, and now any writing I do is for MWI.
ReplyDeleteI am visually impaired - a degenerative condition known as retinitis pigmentosa - so my Mac represents an important link to the outside world. Yes, it's all virtual, but at least it's a connection, and that wouldn't be possible without the web.
One thing I don't miss about working in a roomful of people is the office politics. And in journalism there are deadlines to meet and egos to stroke as well. MWI may only exist in cyberspace, but it's a congenial place that's taken on a reassuring solidity in the years I've been here. Long may it continue!
This is very true, though I'm lucky with my colleagues at 'work'. Come to think about it, in the days before computers I used to work just as much on a remote basis - slaving monkishly for hours at home writing instrumental parts from scores which were sent in from and posted back to Donemus in Amsterdam. Many of those composers have now passed on as well. Nothing new under the sun.
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