»3rd March 2009

T&A II: Contempt of Court



The second day of work experience at the Telegraph & Argus. Another 6:30am wake-up though I had to start at 9am today. Not as much happened today. An early crisis was averted, I arrived at the T&A office only to find reception didn't open until nine thirty and I didn't have a card to let myself in at the back door. Fortunately I walked around to the back and managed to sneak in behind someone else, it probably helped here that I didn't decide to wear the V for Vendetta mask.

The main activity was going with Jenny to the Crown Court for the start of a murder trial. This was pretty hardcore, the court room was a lot more formal this time with the judge, lawyers and court staff all wearing formal robes and wigs. For the best part of three hours with a twenty minute or so break in the middle I had to sit in the press box with Jenny whilst she took notes. This was okay at first as it was quite interesting seeing how the court worked and hearing about the case, but soon things took a turn for the worse and the pace at which one of prosecuting QCs spoke ground to a halt and I became immensely tired and had to struggle to stay awake.


Power wolves beset your door, hear them snoring.

After this endurance test I returned to the office to have lunch as I was absolutely starving which only made staying awake harder. After sitting around for a while half trying to look busy, half trying to look for something to do, I got handed another short 'N.I.B.' (News In Brief, sadly not a Black Sabbath reference) about some computer classes held at a community centre. This involved taking details down from a woman over the phone who was frustrated having been passed around a lot. After firing this off I once again resumed looking busy/looking for things to do and ended up browsing Slashdot heavily.

At three Martin, seemingly to Jenny's chagrin, said she should go back to the Court to check in on the trial. A lot was covered in the first trip and all this time I'd been eating sandwiches/writing highly significant and hard hitting pieces about beginners computer lessons/reading Slashdot, she had been working on her piece for the trial.

The main witness to the murder, and the witness most interesting to the story wasn't set to appear today anyway because of delays and so we just sat in on the case for a while whilst one of the defending QCs cross-examined a witness. This was pretty interesting.

The QC was just what you'd expect, he spoke like some sort of fifties school headmaster and used words like 'chum' and 'pal' when talking about the witness' friends, and made a habit of awkwardly--and with a certain amount of distaste--quoting the witness on certain slang usage, as in 'you said your uncle was attacked or 'jumped' by the group of men...' The witness himself hardly came off as articulate or particularly intelligent and the QC was quite sarcastic. Strangely, one of the other defence QCs who was seated seemed to be smirking a lot when the witness made yet another monosyllabic reply to the other QC's questions.

After about forty five minutes we went back to the office and I tried once more to appear enthusiastic and asked Jenny if there was anything I could help out on like... more NIBs. Jenny said that there should be plenty of that sort of thing for me to do and seemed quite frustrated that I hadn't been given a load of that to do already seeing as she seemed to be pretty snowed under with more serious work.


The ultimate in vanity! Exploiting their supremacy-ay!

So back at the office I asked around again for any NIBs to do. Martin said he'd get something for me to do but he seemed pretty busy as well and I didn't want to appear to be hanging around asking for stuff and seeming impatient. So I sat around reading articles from Slashdot for a while longer until quarter to five when Martin said I could leave whenever I'd cleared up whatever I was doing. This worried me as I hadn't been doing anything since I came back from the court. Martin had shown me earlier how to use the article submission system on the computers so I wondered if he had sent me something to do remotely. I didn't particularly want to find out if this was the case or not and decided the best thing would be to make a prompt exit seeing as I'd spent virtually all day in a state of exhaustion again.

I didn't have to wait around in the bus station very long for a bus to appear again which was good. I got on the 268 and promptly fell asleep listening to And All That Could Have Been. I woke up sometime around Wish or Suck, at around the fifty minute mark. I expected to be around Cleckheaton or so and had been worried about missing my stop. I looked out of the steamed up window and couldn't figure out where we were, but wherever it was we were only moving very slowly. It soon became clear we hadn't even made it to Odsal Top yet and so had barely left the centre of Bradford in over fifty minutes. Considering it takes about forty five minutes to get from Heckmondwike right into Bradford Bus Station 'interchange' in the morning this was quite surprising. I finally got home after walking up from the Swan traffic lights at twenty past six, over an hour and a half from actually leaving the T&A office.


Extar, over, out.

TCP/IP, it's fucking me off. Other protocols doing little more. Definitely got worse. Now making me curse. Removing IPX. Will it ever work? Never!