How I messed up my first job

This month marks 18 years since I started my first (proper) job, which means my career is the age of an entire human adult. It can now drink, vote and have sex. You could say it’s feeling pretty confident – it knows its way around the place, but it’s aware that there’s always more to learn.

The great thing is it never has to repeat the mistakes it made as a toddler…

“What might they have been?” I hear you ask.

Well, writing is obviously not brain surgery, so no lives were lost. But lives were definitely… affected.

Let’s take a look at a little story from my very fist role as a ‘listings sub editor’…

From little acorns to mighty oaks

The year is 1998. The city, London. I’m finally in my first proper job after leaving university and finishing a journalism post-grad. My hopelessly naive dream of strolling into a job at Vogue has long vanished, and been replaced by the cold realisation that I’ll be lucky to scrape editorial assistant at Wind Tunnel International magazine.

But it’s ok. I’m in the press! At least I must be since this job is at the Press Association, a ‘UK-wide news agency'.

I’m working three days a week in the listings department. But not the TV listings team, which sits opposite and seems glamorous by comparison (simply because it has ‘TV’ in the title I think). I’m in the ‘Arts and Ents’ team, which sounds like a piece of plastic cheese from the Trivial Pursuit board, but is in fact responsible for churning out times and dates for various newspapers and magazines so their readers know when to go to the cinema, theatre, night clubs etc.

My role is to input the weekly cinema times into a database, which looks like something Dr Who might have used. But first I have to wait for incoming faxes from the cinemas themselves. There’s a lot of sitting.

By Monday lunchtime we usually have a fax from ABC Streatham and Galashiels Pavilion, who kindly hand write theirs, which means it takes a bit longer to decipher and therefore feels a bit more of a challenge. Not quite what I trained for, but hey-ho.

After some more sitting and a bit of a rush towards the deadline (exciting!), all the data from around the country is in for that week and my job is done. Then it's over to my full-time colleagues run the information in the format their paper likes them in.

This is what they did

You might be aware that the way papers report their cinema times can differ ever so slightly. So The Mirror might say:

Babe: Pig in the City: 10:30, 14:15, 17:00 (not Mon-Thu)

Whereas The Metro on the other hand might put:

Babe: Pig in the City: 10.30am, 2.15pm, 5pm (Fri/Sat/Sun only)

You get the idea.

A promotion

It wasn’t long before I was also a full timer, not just inputting the data, but also editing it for the Scotsman and the Guardian’s G2 section. Check me!

Perhaps the rapid career progression went to my head, but something led to a fatal lack of concentration one morning that would go on to affect the Scotsman’s cinema listings and one Scotsman in particular.

If anyone other than Andrew Neil, then editor, had taken his young godchildren to see the Rugs Rats movie on the weekend when I’d said it was on (‘Sat/Sun only’) when it was in fact definitely not on (‘not Sat/Sun’) then I might never have learned from my mistake.

But following the listing advice in his own paper (loyal) he’d set out that Saturday morning with these two nippers, quite rightly expecting to enjoy the cartoon film at the aforementioned time. Sadly it wasn’t to be, and Andrew made a very heated complaint first thing on Monday morning.

I can’t remember the exact outcome – I didn’t get the sack or anything – but it got me thinking: how many other peoples’ Saturdays had I momentarily ruined in this way? How many other kids’ screams had I single handedly caused? What power I had! What responsibility!

The moral of the story is that even when you're in the weeds of something, and you feel as if you're a tiny cog in a big wheel, you're still contributing to a bigger picture. It's important to think of the end user and how they'll experience what you're doing. It's actually move motivating too - no matter how small you feel, what you do matters.

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