Wednesday, February 10, 2010

More adventures in bureaucracy



The folks above me in the food chain did a terrible thing to me -- they gave me something interesting to do.  I had been thinking it would be really easy to walk away from the job in a few months, that, (*sarcasm warning*) fascinating though it might be to edit articles about methicillin resistant staphylocoocus aureus or clostridium difficile, I would not particularly miss the work once I retired and left it behind.  Then my team lead did something sneaky:  she asked if I'd be willing to take on a collateral duty, writing scripts for podcasts.  I could not resist.  I don't get to do much actual writing as part of my regular duties.  I said yes.  

This is Not Good.  It means new challenges.  Which in turn means the job, at least for awhile, will no longer qualify as comfortably routine.  I've never had a problem walking away from a job once I thought I had it nailed -- I'm a sucker for novelty.  The podcasts assignment also holds the potential for being (gasp) fun because it will involve going over to the main campus to meet with people in the broadcast studios to collaborate with the voice talent and the subject matter experts. 

I have no clue how many people ever bother listening to the podcasts Large Nameless Agency produces, especially the podcasts that are based on articles that appear in the journal, although I imagine the ones that name health problems or diseases in the news at the moment might be popular.  As a person who owns neither an I-pod nor an MP3 player, I've never quite understood why anyone would bother to download what amounts to a radio broadcast to listen to later -- if something is only 5 minutes long, why not just listen to it immediately?-- but I know people do it.

3 comments:

  1. I did a podcast once but got my line and tackle all tangled in a metaphorical tree. Other than that, faceless, unknown people spouting off w/authority don't interest me.

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  2. The folks in the food chain above you, ha ha ha ha

    If I've ever listened to podcasts I didn't know that is what they are called, and I suppose I could care less.

    Are they something like a postscript?

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  3. Well, the format is more Q&A than didactic, but other than that I don't have any personal inclination to ever listen to one of the podcasts we produce, and do wonder why anyone else would. Not a question I'm going to ask out loud at work, though, as I'm the moment I'm just happy to have something different to do for awhile.

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