The giddy feeling from that first published article

It's still early in the day and the turnkey has only just padlocked me to my workstation, but I've done all the work required of me today and the office is almost completely deserted, so let the blogging begin. My other motivation for goofing off today is that these zlate casy will soon be coming to an end. I didn't get the environment job, but another interview went really well at another department and they were desperate enough to call up the next day and ask me to undertake their standard psychometric testing regime to ascertain whether I am truly barking mad or is it just an act. If they're satisfied that it's only a mild case of frothing at the mouth then I'll be a shoo-in and it's goodbye Slackerdom. Not only that, but I won't be able to blog from that new employer's workplace because the role is related to (sotto voce) "security matters" and it probably wouldn't be good form to take the piss in an ostensibly public forum. Plus I'd have my security clearance and 00 license revoked.

But until then, party on. And what's the point of this post by the way? Well, since I was riffing on a couple posts ago about publications, I thought it would be amusing to dredge up the very first newspaper article I ever wrote that got published. I was acutely embarrassed about it at the time, but with the passage of 17 years (published in the Timaru Herald 11 April 1990) I can see the funny side to it; I think it's the first time I've actually read it in it's published form. 'SC' by the way, stands for South Canterbury, i.e. the place where the subject of the article comes from.

This was published while I was still doing my Diploma in Journalism, so I wasn't a "real" hack by that stage, and as a very callow and self-conscious 22-year-old I wanted to curl up into a ball and hide in a cave for the rest of my life after my name was splashed across what was the front page of the local rag. It was after this that I started using my middle name instead, which resulted in being labelled a schizophrenic and losing out on a number of promising newspaper jobs before I reverted back again to my first name. As it turned out, this was the first of only three stories that ever made the front page because I ended up stringing in a real bumfuck buranska vesnice called Alexandra with a population of about 5,000. The local pubs were affectionately known as The Bottom, The Middle and The Top. It was in the latter that I was accused of being a "professor" because I was wearing glasses. I asked my witty interlocutors whether Pol Pot was with them and could I buy him a beer, or were they perhaps in town for an Oscar Wilde Appreciation Society convention. I think I only just escaped receiving a broken nose for my troubles. This was my last port of call in NZ before eventually washing up on the coasts of Bohemia and that bustling cultural highwater of Jablonec nad Nisou.