On the ball

Yes yes, everybody point and stare at the bad blogger. Yes I’m back. Is it permanent? I’d like it to be. However, the only access to the Internet I have is at work.

 

Yes – work. I managed to get myself one time bona fide, relatively well-paying job. A-booyah.

 

I’m currently working at Primedia Online, but the plot thickens… Not for Primedia or iafrica.com or whatever, but for FoxSoccer. As in the American network’s soccer website. How cool (and random) is that?

 

Now I’ve always had very basic football knowledge. Like, I can follow the rules and know my Beckhams from my Steven Gerrard, and of course I know the bigger teams, but that was pretty much where it stopped. Until very, very recently.

 

Working with purely soccer-related stories is not as dull as one might think – if you approach it in a different way. Soccer fans are an entirely separate culture, complete with jargon, nicknames and a whole secret code they’ve developed to make sure nobody else can understand what they’re saying. It’s diabolical. And I had no idea who any of the managers where, except for Sir Alex Ferguson and Luiz Filipe Scolari. So I did what a recently-employed graduate would do: I made crib notes! A list of team names, their nicknames, their stadiums (and the stadiums’ nicknames) as well as the managers and captains. Hah. Then colour-coded it. Then took out the colour-coding because I thought that was going too far.

 

It’s fascinating. On the site we have soccer fans who appear to wake up randomly in the middle of the night to comment on the latest stories. It’s fantastic to work on a site where you get feedback, where you don’t put stuff out there and hear crickets chirping.

 

So far, it’s been a lot of sub-editing, headline writing, picture-editing and basic site management – what goes where etc. But soon I get to move around iafrica.com and do other cool things, apparently. So yay for that!

 

And it’s bizarre to work on an American site. When we did photographs for online, we got them as low-res and as small as we could while still being able to see what was in the photo. Americans want it bigger! Better! Brighter! Bolder! So all high-res (maximum, actually) images. They have videos scattered all over the site, good quality videos. My god, I’m glad I don’t have to pay for the bandwidth. That’s all I’m saying!

 

It’s been wicked, moving to Cape Town. New clothes, new hair, new life, as far as I’m concerned. And we’ll see how it goes from here.

 

And now, I’m off. Did you hear that Pompey signed a new Algerian defender? Probably not, I wouldn’t have heard it either.