Cyberspace is a thrilling dimension where we all wear clothing embedded with computer screens, silicon chip implants in our brains and have virtual sex with movie stars while wearing sensor-studded body suits. We upload our minds onto the Internet, become gods in a suspended world of voltage and pump our bodies full of smart drugs. Well, that’s what I thought when I took the job as features editor at .net magazine. I moved to Bath, on the west coast of England, three hours’ drive from London.
The only qualifications demanded at my job interview were the ability to last through Future Publishing’s marathonic all-night Summer and Christmas parties, and to survive an £8,000 pay cut. Also, there is a strong work ethos: you have to like loud music, drinking, wearing grungy clothes and eating fried sausages and chips for lunch. The atmosphere is like an informal university, with everyone wearing campus clothes. I’m 30-plus, and feel ancient among the slim, midriff-topped gingham-clad twenty-something girls. They despondently eye up computer geeks who’ve only ever lost their virginity to Virtual Valerie. The blokes see no further than Lara Croft’s wobble-free triangular tits and are addicted to Quake and ring 24-hr hotlines and print out walkthroughs if they get stuck on a level. The only movie they’d ever ask you out to would be the re-released director’s cut of a sci-fi movie that features an extra three seconds of scenery. They all read the FT – which I’d mistakenly thought was an abbreviation for the Financial Times – but is actually the Fortean Times, a mag dedicated to crazy conspiracy theories and alien abductions. The guys are also into mountain biking, but don’t like cycling with girls, because they “stop every five minutes to hold a picnic and look at the flowers”.
Future’s the biggest employer in Bath. The pay’s shit, but everyone gets a twice-yearly profit share bonus. Just after I joined, a larger company bought out Future and we stopped getting Christmas hampers, started having to produce 13 issues every year and had to sign for everything we took from the stationery cupboard. It didn’t really make much difference, though, because the ear-lip-nose-bellybutton-pierced clerk was too busy turning septic to notice how much we staggered out with.
To keep in touch with the employees, management runs a “Virtual Forum” via anonymous email, so we can say whatever we want to the Big Boss. It’s usually filled with personal animus about the annual awards for Best Editor/Story/Ad Rep of the Year.
There are seven full-time staff at .net, but only two of us are writers. We’re supposed to write 19 pages a month – one page per day 0f 750 wds, 3500 words a week.
I [used to have] a Web site at Futurenet.com. It’s part of a massive site with more than 2,000,000 readers weekly. My page has a glamour shot of me sitting in a bubblebath while reading a job hunting book and using my mobile phone. The story was about finding employment via the Internet. The photos were taken by a Greek bloke who’d been raised in Denmark. I used car shampoo to generate enough industrial-strength froth, as conventional bubbles quickly burst under the hot lighting, and I emerged feeling like I’d been caught in an oil slick.
[from the webpage]
Hi! How are you? Me? I’m sparkling thank you. That is, when I’m not cavorting in a bubblebath for photo-shoots. Which, of course, is one of my favourite pasttimes! Hasselblads, Nikons, Konicas – hell, I’ll even pose for Instamatics. Oh, what I’d give to have skyscraper cheekbones and rollercoaster curves! Truly I’m an Anna-Nicole Smith trapped in the body of Emma Thompson and topped off with Winon Ryder’s bra measurement.
What’s your background – humble or haute?
I began my adventurous life with a glorious head of curls and a beaming, friendly personality. “I don’t know what went wrong,” my dearest Mum, an ex-scripture teacher/door-to-door Avon lady/librarian/computer graduate/high-school teacher said recently, cursed with a dour, snarling spinster she couldn’t foist off on the RSPCA. Incidentally, I have two other sisters and two brothers, who’ve turned out to be upstanding paragons of good citizenship and decency.
Please share your philosophical outlook on life with us.
The epigram which has majorly influenced me is “Take your passion – and make it happen” (Flashdance 1983). The incessant drumbeat helped solder it into my brain. Nothing much has happened, though.
Tell us about your hobbies.
I have a wide spectrum of musical tastes, mostly ’70s kitsch and indy and a bit of kd Lang and Deborah Conway. Gigs I’ve been to include Iggy Pop, Buzzcocks, The Sweet, Ramones, Butthole Surfers, Guns ’n’ Roses, Skid Row, ABBA, John Denver, Richard Clayderman, TISM and Billy Bragg. Groupie-wise, I managed to gatecrash my way towards Axl Rose’s bedroom (stopped by six henchmen outside the door, but, hey, I got Slash’s autograph!) and Bjorn Again’s backstage party.
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Within the next week I’d scored a rating on Robert Toup’s famous Babes on the Web site. This sent my page hits soaring. I also received dozens of complimentary emails, too, which were all shared an identical theme:
Nice photo. Are you single?
Mark
I’m 40, 5-8, and 160. How about you?
Jack
Hey, I’ve got a Nikon and I’m always looking for subjects!
Dave
The award for attracting the most Over-The-Top gushing, though, has to go to one of .net’s freelance writers, whose prose inspired an admiring fan, who eked out a living at McDonald’s, to send him £15 *cash* (probably his whole week’s wages) so he could buy some beers.
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On Mondays the .net team often goes to the nearby Jazz Café for breakfast.
I only live 10 minutes away from the office, so by the time I stumble in, the sleep creases haven’t had time to fade. Every five weeks we have to move into a new office because the computer division is constantly launching and closing mags. This means we throw out cratefuls of unsolicited boxes of techie books, like Visual Basic 5.0 Programmer’s Guide to WIN32 API. I tried ringing and writing to the distributor to stop the onslaught, but 14 cases of manuals still arrive monthly. They’re out of date by the time they arrive, and we donate them to our local university.
During the last move, I was off sick, so someone else packed all of my stuff, and most of it went missing so I had to reorder my chair, footstool, speakers and copyholder. Whenever we shift, it takes a week to get the phones hooked up and two weeks for our Internet connection to work. We introduce ourselves to the new security guards – they’re all doddery blokes who couldn’t spot five people hauling out a load of Pentiums, much less stop them.
The office we’re currently in overlooks tables outside the Garrick’s Head pub, a gay bar where the “Fruit of the Week” is usually one of the waiters. It’s an ideal location during summer because we’re on the second floor and can anonymously throw water out at unsuspecting colleagues.
Otherwise, we stay at our workstations while one team member plays The Smiths and Radiohead loudly and I keep asking him to turn it down. He buys the latest CDs as soon as they’re released, so we end up listening to a lot of duds.
When we lunch, we go to the Trinity hotel and usually bump into a crowd of Future jukebox trivia addicts who end up £5 in front after a one-hour sesh. They always get knocked out during the £1000 jackpot, though, when you have to get all three questions right.
The best prank I ever played was when I wrote a story about how to forge emails, and sent one to a colleague from “Geri” of the Spice Girls:
Subject: your mag
From: Geri Spice
Hi! We’ve just got on to the internet and we want to say how much we *LURVE* reading .net. It’s really, really useful for finding our way around. We’ve found lots of groovy Web pages dedicated to us, too! Keep up the great work!
Girl power!
lots of LURVE,
Geri, Emma, Victoria, Mel B, Mel C.
I told everyone else and we cakked ourselves stupid all day.
Apart from lame pranks, we’ve had a few shady activities, too. Our incredibly successful international sales rep was arrested on suspicion of money-laundering! He’d quadrupled the sales of overseas licensees. Unfortunately, Customs officers at New York’s JFK Airport found $130,000 in cash strapped to his body. They raided his modest London flat and found £60,000 worth of cocaine.
A minor scandal on the domestic homefront involved a reporter who’d been giving competition prizes away to friends or keeping them for himself. He was given five minutes to clear his desk, frogmarched out and the door code was changed the next day. The security guards stuck up “Wanted” posters so they would recognise him and keep him out of the building. Pilfering prizes was a common practice, and a lot of goodies were returned to our locked storage cabinet during the next couple of paranoia-ridden weeks.
A great idea: one of our games mags had a top PC to give away and readers had to send in the most delicious choccies for a chance to win. They were swamped with every type of erotic, liqueur and handmade chocs and had so many they begged everyone to visit and help devour them.
When not indulging in freebies, I try to get some work done while coping with one of the vile aspects – talking to embittered ex-journalists who now have well-paid PR jobs, and resent having to beg for media coverage.
BRIIINNG! I sent you a press release and I’d like to know what you think of it? Can I ring you back when you’ve read it? Can you ring me and tell me if it’s in the issue? I need it; I do the clippings.
BRIIINNG! Hi. I just want to know if you got our press release. About Virtual City. It’s an online community. Can you use it? When will that be? We’d like to invite you to London so we can show you the site. I’ll ring back and check in a few weeks.
Completely pointless, since I review about 120 sites a month, and could never keep track of all of them. The corporate PR breed usually do everything to be accommodating and genial, but music company PRs are from an entirely different lineage. They’re always stoned and barely manage to return calls three weeks later. Once I was organising an interview with a one-hit wonder band that hadn’t had a hit in two years, and was liaising with their ditsy personal assistant.
“What’s the name of your magazine again? Dot dot?,” she cluelessly inquired.
“No, dot net,” I replied.
“I told the guys dot dot. Our Web site’s on a server called – a gigabop? I’m not sure – what is it?”
“A gigabyte?,” I suggested.
“No, I know enough about the Internet to know it’s not that. You should know these things, working for an Internet magazine. It’s a great server with hundreds of sites. We’re also doing work with Bepabops and Flippyflights.”
“I don’t know those bands,” I conceded.
“They’re not bands – they’re technical terms,” she claimed. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about and are going to be that superficial, I’ve got to go and do other things.”
She hung up.
The best PR spinoffs involve going to London to attend lavish corporate PR launches for Web sites. At the Virgin Net launch I interviewed Richard Branson after he jumped from a forklift and got caught in a “Web” while wearing a silver “cybersuit”. At these types of functions the journalists are fed by joining an enormous queue for a buffet that always features smoked salmon with a sprig of dill as an entree. I usually slip outside and find a deli where I can get a microwaved hot curry. This means that after lunch my nose never stops running during question time.
In contrast, the arty farty Web site launches always feature `smart drinks’ with L phenylalanine and melanonin and walls decorated with computer-generated fractal posters. In this instance, the PR people always look askance at their clients, who are reminiscent of those dreamers who walk around in a daze looking for Pink Floyd memorabilia at record fairs. Multimedia artists inevitably harbour visions of turning aimless community groups into Europe’s leading online centres, which they grandly nickname “Silicon Alleys”. After the official spiel, they know how to party and kick off by serving “Virtual Reality” cocktails, concocted mainly of green and blue liquids, and featuring generous measures of Smirnoff, Absolut vodka, curacao and melon liqueur.
Occasionally I get an invitation to something interesting, such as when La Plante Productions rang to say they were writing a four-hour “whodunnit drama” for Channel 4, entitled Killer Net, to be filmed in two weeks’ time. The researcher wanted to know if they could use the dialogue: “According to .net magazine, 70 per cent of the Internet is used for pornography. I’m just seeing what the fuss is about.” I tell her the figure we’ve published is 90 per cent. “We’d also like to use a copy of .net as a background object lying on the desk in the main character’s bedroom,” she says. Great! Maybe we’ll see a shot of the mag during a steamy sex scene with a serial killer! I sent off trillions of copies and enclosed a request to turn up on the set to do a story about the filming, which arrived a couple of months later.
I spend half of every month collating all the material about the latest Web sites, which usually adds up to about 20,000 words. [This was before Google!] Then I spend two days choosing the best 120. My favourite one was a police Web site asking for sightings of a super-snitch Mafia crim, Gravano, who put 37 gangsters behind bars, but only ended up doing five years in the pen for 19 murders. US Combined Police County president John Flood told me he didn’t think Gravano has been punished enough. “I’d like to meet him on Las Vegas Strip – he could have his .357 Magnum and I’d have my weapon. In about five mintues, Gravano would be history.”
It’s fantastic being paid to find out all about weird, extreme sites. I find the anonymity of the Net means I venture into areas I’d never dream of investigating in person. Hacking, shooting, fraud, racial supremacists, harsh prison life, and other macho endeavours. I’ve interviewed a Satanist, jailed hacker, paedophile, jilted wife struggling to bring up two young kids, couples who’d met online, married and had babies, philosophers, pranksters, futurists, Luddites, porn purveyors, and online guerillas. I used to glibly think most people were a boringly homogenous silent majority, but now I realise many actually believe and live by unusual philosophies. It’s a much cheaper experience than incurring the cost of travelling to foreign countries, and has a similar cultural mind-blowing effect.
