Bad stuff happened in London today, and as I attempted to impose some order on our office by finally, finally tidying up (shades of Withnail – “Don’t go in there!”). While I was tidying up I had News 24 on. I watched – and mainly listened – to it for about 4 hours straight. I learned the following:
- London is a very busy city.
- It’s busy at night as well as in the day.
- According to one expert they had on “there are more things we don’t know than we do know”. (He really earned his fee there. I hope MI5 have him on their books.)
- One woman was really pretty cheesed off her journey to work had been disrupted.
- At one point a presenter interrupted her own question with the words “sorry to interrupt my question, but we have some news just in”.
- Another newsreader described events as ‘fast-moving’. I’d been listening for a couple of hours at this point and – aside from the discovery of the first car bomb which had not exploded – nothing at all had actually happened.
- The first car bomb could have killed “hundreds if not thousands of people”.
- The real MI5 is not like the TV show Spooks.
- We should feel sorry for the “plight” of people living in Haymarket. Yes, let’s have a whip-round.
- If nothing has happened for 4 hours, your lead story can still be captioned BREAKING NEWS.
All this put me in such a bad mood that even after removing 5 cart loads of gear from our office and sorting all the cat 5 cables into different lengths and putting every different kind of serial and VGA lead in separate boxes, the office still looked messier when I went home than before I began.
You were in a bad mood anyway, don’t blame the poor fools at N24, they’re just earning a living, it’s not their fault.
Me? In a bad mood? :-)