Poultry World

I don’t know much about the poultry industry. This became very clear during my interview at Poultry World:

“How do you feel about the battery cage debate?”

“Well obviously I’m against large cages. Err, small cages. As I understand it, free range chickens can still be kept in cages though, as long as they’re over a certain size... isn’t that right?”

“No, that’s not right.”

Someone once told me the cage thing, possibly in a pub. I believed it, and didn’t care enough to ever check the facts. It wasn’t something I thought about very often. During the interview, it popped up in my memory for the first time in ages. This seemed like a good bit of luck, and I confidently reeled it off. They were not impressed.

The rest of the interview went comparatively well - I didn’t claim that chickens were mammals, or that a turkey was a female chicken. I’d give more examples, but these are the only two things I can think of that are stupider than what I actually said.

I wasn’t that upset, really. I already had some part-time work lined up (see next post), and am not that interested in poultry. I went to the interview partly out of curiosity, but mostly because I wanted to be able to tell people that I once went to a job interview at Poultry World.

A friend from college once had an interview at the Meat Trades Journal. (Their website is meatinfo.co.uk.) Poultry World is almost as good, and I still find it funny. During the interview, whenever someone mentioned the magazine’s name, I couldn’t help smiling.

I’d been sent two copies of the magazine before the interview. They asked me to “come in prepared to give a verbal critique of Poultry World magazine”, so I read them.

The June issue was filled with news from the Pig and Poultry LIVE 2011 conference. There was no theme to the August issue. Some highlights:

“Broiler producers have until the end of the month to return their Meat Chicken Notification Forms...” “British Turkey is rolling out its British Turkey Taste Challenge to regional county shows...” “...Gafoor Poultry won a Carcass Utilisation Award...”

My ‘verbal critique’ was as honest as I could make it. I said the mag’s coverage was comprehensive, but clearly not intended for the casual reader. I said it had a good mix of news and features. I did not say that the magazine is very boring indeed.

Despite my restraint, I don’t seem to have got the job.

Still interning

During my ten months of unemployment, I’ve been passing the time by writing for a local listings magazine. At first, I wasn't much use to the magazine. My listings resembled wallpaper soup. All the events seemed boring to me, so I did unenthusiastic and dull write-ups.

This magazine is the only one in town, so its listings are influential. Without tougher editors, I could have killed off the local social scene. Thankfully, they stepped in.

Jan 24: Staring at the Photocopier
Join local citizens as they stare at a photocopier.
Admission free. St Mary's School, 2pm

There were also times where my articles criticised locals, or Scientology; I had to re-write them. This was annoying at the time, but I now see their point: it’s not sensible for a small community magazine to go around pissing off locals, or well-funded groups which love suing people.

I’m now quite well trained. This month, I was given a book to review. I found it dull and self-indulgent, and noticed a grammar mistake in the first line of the first page. Still, I managed to write a fairly positive review, with only a little light sarcasm.

Nice hair, Hubbard.

I have occasional lapses; I recently wrote a hugely inappropriate article. I'd been reading a weird Chuck Palahniuk book, which made me want to do a bit of experimental writing. I had an interview with Poultry World coming up, and had been asked to do a food review of a local cafe, so decided to combine the two in an ‘experimental’ article:

I order the Big Fried Breakfast and a tea, grab a seat by the window, and settle down with a copy of Poultry World magazine. I’m reading it for a job interview. There are two chickens on the front cover.

‘MEPs have backed the idea of introducing processed animal proteins (PAP) into non-ruminant rations...’

It’s 11.45 on a Monday morning. There are three other customers, and no music playing in the background. It’s very quiet.

‘“Pork can be fed with poultry, and poultry with pork” said Ms Roth-Behrendt.’

The meal arrives fairly quickly. It’s huge; must be 1,000 calories. Almost straightaway, I knock my knife onto the floor. I go at the meal with just the fork, but a friendly customer jumps up to get me another knife.

‘...excluding specified risk materials, such as brain and spinal cord, as well as fallen stock.’

The tea is hot. It tastes fine. I’m not a tea connoisseur. The meal is great. The sausages and fried mushrooms are superb, and the eggs are just right. The bacon’s a little fatty, and I rudely pick at it. No-one’s watching.

‘The MEPs insist that, as ruminants are vegetarians, they should not be fed with PAP.’

I get my ratios wrong, and the hash brown and beans are gone before the rest. As I’m finishing, a family comes in and orders. One wants their bacon burnt. Another asks the waiter whether the mushrooms are ‘from a tin’. They are not. I’m full. The bill: £7.70. Bargain.

I honestly didn’t realise this might make the cafe look bad. Fortunately, the editor was paying attention. She said the review made her feel sick, and no-one reading it would want to eat at the cafe afterwards. This was a fair point: I’d really enjoyed the food there, and it was a small family-run business which didn’t deserve that kind of treatment anyway. I had a bit of a sulk, then agreed to rewrite it, but not before sarcastically telling the editor how I'd rewrite it: “I could go into more detail about the texture of the beans”.

This shows the best thing about magazine internships: you can’t really get fired, even if you act like a dick. If anyone has been fired from an internship, I’d love to hear the story, as it probably involves a massive libel, accidentally stabbing an interviewee, or something equally funny.

What Hi-Fi?

As a music obsessive, I was thrilled to get an interview at What Hi-Fi?, until I read the magazine. It’s full of quotes I didn’t understand:

“This system attacks tracks with a playful excitement”; “It balances refinement, insight and attack perfectly and has the composure to make instrumental strands easy to follow”; “the HRT Music Streamer II gives the music more room to breathe, sounding bigger and more powerful as a result.”

What does any of this mean? I really don’t think my ears are sensitive enough to pick up these things. I have no experience with high-end soundsystems. The only CD player I’ve ever owned is a £100 Panasonic Power Blaster I got when I was about ten.

Though my Panasonic sounds great to me, reading the magazine makes me feel like I need to buy some £1,500 kit which can create a ‘holographic stereo image’.

Thus, slightly intimidated, I go to their offices in Teddington for the interview. There are delays on the trains, but these speed me up, as I catch services which were meant to have left before I arrived.

When I meet the editor, my first question is obviously ‘what CD player do you have?’ I forget the details almost immediately. It sounds expensive.

The editor seems a really nice guy, and doesn’t ask me any tricky questions. It feels more like a chat than an interview:

“So, have you been applying for many other jobs?”

“Yeah, actually I’ve got an interview tomorrow at Poultry World.”

“That reminds me of the time I narrowly avoided having to do a week’s work experience for European Plastics Monthly.”

Apparently, European Plastics Monthly has been rebranded.
Clearly, it worked.

He asks what kind of music I like, and I ask him the same. He listens to anything from Bach chamber pieces to modern electro. The magazine’s writers all seem to have a broad taste:

“The B&Ws are just as happy churning out Tom Waits’ I DON’T WANNA GROW UP as they are unpicking Dimitri Shostakovich’s SYMPHONY NUMBER 3 ‘1^ST OF MAY’”; “The A26’s insight into recordings as diverse as Tchaikovsky’s 1812 OVERTURE and Adele’s 21 is impressive at this price level”... etc

After the interview, the editor gives me a guided tour of the test rooms. We walk into the Hi-Fi room, and a Beatles album is playing. Apparently, it takes about 50 hours of playing to ‘break in’ a CD player, so they just leave them running.

Doin Thangs: a good test of any Hi-Fi

I ask the editor whether the recording quality of 60s music is good enough to properly test high-end kit. He says it often is. The best quality recordings come from one person alone in a room, playing into a single microphone, recording straight onto tape. Some 80s music is much worse for sound quality, because they used a lot of compression for instruments, he says, giving Madonna as an example. I have an alternative theory about why Madonna records sound so bad, but keep it to myself.

Before the interview, the editor asked me to write a review in the What Hi-Fi? style, and bring it with me. Here’s what I wrote:

Review: Panasonic RX-DS27, £100 (now out of production), *****

This is a brilliant no-nonsense CD system. Other than volume and track number, the only thing you can change is the EQ. This has five settings, none of which, in my experience, sounds better than the first: ‘EQ-OFF’.

The main reason you should have bought one of when they were still being made is because they’re built to last. Mine is still going strong, even though I once dropped it onto a hard wooden floor, putting a big dent in the mesh of the right-hand speaker. True, the tape deck broke a few years ago, but if you still listen to tapes, why are you reading this magazine?

As for the sound quality, it’s never struggled with anything I’ve run through it. The RX-DS27 conveys the full horror of Captain Beefheart’s growling, dischordant rock, and handles Brian Eno’s ambient works equally well. It doesn’t try and clean up recordings; if there’s hiss on the record, you get hiss through the speakers. This might be praised as authentic or dismissed as annoying, according to your taste. Overall, though, the sound is excellent for this price.

The CD tray has an ingenious fold-out design; handily, you don’t need to turn it on to get CDs out. As an added bonus, it avoids the modern trend of trying to be ‘friendly’. My sister’s CD player (Sony 3MT-EP313) says ‘hello’ when you turn it on and ‘see you’ when you turn it off. I have human friends, and don’t need companionship from my CD player. In fact, the idea that it was even partly sentient would make me feel guilty about leaving it in the house alone all day. Thankfully, the RX-DS27 has never tried to communicate with me. Highly recommended.

I'm a plastic bag and I'm talking to you

I didn’t get the job, but I got a very nicely worded rejection letter, which was almost apologetic. Fair play.

Migration and jobs

‘Migrants Rob Young Britons of Jobs’, read the Daily Express’ front page headline on August 19 last year.

Like rape and murder, robbery is an indictable-only offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, so one would hope the Express had some good evidence for this claim. As it turns out, the piece was based on a hopelessly flawed report by Migrationwatch (see article here).

In an editorial about the ‘migrant robbery’ article, the Express argued that “the match-up between areas of high immigration and areas of high youth unemployment will hardly come as a surprise to anyone with a modicum of common sense.”

Peter 'Mentally' Hill, then editor of the Express

An immigration/unemployment link might seem like common sense, at least to Express readers, but the point of academic study is to figure out which items of common sense are true, and which aren’t.

In 2006, Simonetta Longhi and colleagues produced a serious piece of scholarship on the issue. They analysed a range of academic studies which had tried to calculate the effect of migration on employment, and found “the ‘consensus estimate’ of the decline in native-born employment following a 1 percent increase in the number of immigrants is a mere 0.024”.

A classic jazz album by three American expats in Paris.
Or, by some job-robbing migrants, if you're the Express

It seems that for every thousand immigrants, only 24 native jobs are lost.This may seem incredibly low, but it does make sense; though immigrants do take jobs, they also create jobs by spending money.

The number of jobs is determined by the demand for things. If the overall demand in the economy goes up by £100,000, this should in theory create £100,000 worth of jobs, because people need to be employed to make the extra things people are buying.

This is what people are buying these days.

So, if an immigrant takes a job worth £15,000, and then spends £15,000, they’ve created as much employment as they’ve taken, at least in theory. It’s obviously more complex in reality, but that’s the basic mechanism by which immigrants create their own jobs, rather than robbing them from young Britons.

Lice assassin

Assassinate is a strong word. It recalls famous murder victims like Lincoln, Malcolm X, and Trotsky. It is not used lightly: foxhunting is never called ‘fox assassination’, butchers are not ‘livestock assassins’, and seatbelts are not ‘anti-accidental-road-assassination devices’.

Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated.
Not by the Hair Force, I must add.

Thus, when a job title contains the word ‘assassin’, it grabs the attention. This was on Gumtree:

Become a Lice Assassin
To be a Lice Assassin is to be a member of an elite team and an innovative and dynamic company – The Hairforce.
 The Hairforce is a nit and lice hand removal service. We offer the only service of its kind in the UK. Using a unique set of equipment and our special clearing process, we literally remove the lice and nits (eggs) from client’s hair...

They aren’t just metaphorically removed. This lice removal service literally removes the lice from your hair. Obviously this is serious work, and the assassins are experts:

We train all our Lice Assassins thoroughly on our special training programme. You will only go ‘live’ on clients when you are fully ready...

This is not a picture of the Hair Force at work. 
It shows the 1901 assassination of US President William McKinley

The Hair Force appears to consider itself a branch of the Army. Their slogan is “no hair goes uncombed. No louse gets out alive.” As the website explains, their lice assassins are ‘A CRACK SQUAD’:

“They’re professional, they’re certified, they’re armed, they’re motivated – and in these uniforms they’re ruthlessly stylish... They’re in it for the kill and take pride in their work...call us and we will allocate you your own private killer – she’s ready and waiting.”

Ooh, which killer will they send? I hope it's Dennis Nilsen

The site then asks: ‘YOU THINK YOU COULD DO IT?’:

If you want to become a Lice Assassin please send an email...telling us why you think you’d make a good cold blooded killer and why you want to become part of the team and rid head lice from the planet. Please also enclose an up to date CV or resume.

We’re always after killers.

Hi, I'm Jeff Dahmer. Where's the infestation?

I thought that sounded ok, so I sent them an email:

Hi there, I see from your website that you're after ‘cold blooded killers’ for your lice assasin [sic] teams. I’m afraid I'm not exactly a killer, but I do have some outstanding burglary charges, and was expelled from school a few times in my youth. Do you think I might have what it takes?

Thanks,

A week later, I got a remarkably good-humoured response:

Hi S.,

Loved your email – unfortunately I’ve now filled that post. Bet you would make a great cold blooded killer though…

Best wishes,

D.
Assassination Partner
THE HAIRFORCE - LICE ASSASSINS

I was flattered. The vast majority of serious applications I send go unanswered, so it was very kind of the ‘assasination partner’ to respond to my sarcastic one. To return the favour, I’d like to point out that they got a great write-up in the Guardian in 2009, and the guy from Embarassing Bodies recommends them. And they never employed either Jeff Dahmer or Dennis Nilsen.

John Hinckley ,Jr: a rubbish assassin.
The Hair Force would never employ him.

Someone else

When you start chatting about David Bowie trivia, you know a job interview is going pretty well.

A few months ago an interviewer asked me about a claim on my CV: I make ‘an occasional profit buying and selling CDs online’, demonstrating my ‘commercial awareness’. I explained how I do it, without telling him how occasional and how small the profit is.

By an odd fluke, I had just bought an album from a charity shop, so I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and showed him. It was Bowie’s Space Oddity, and my interviewer was a fan. He asked which two Bowie songs mention Major Tom (answers at the end). I got them both, but not the job. Perhaps another candidate showed greater knowledge of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane character.

Last week, I got another interviewer talking about music. Again it wasn’t enough to win me the job, which this time was customer assistant at a health food shop.

The interviewer was about my age (22), and very friendly. She apologised in advance about her questions, explaining that some were quite stupid, but that they were chosen by head office. That put me at ease, so I gave pretty confident answers. Example: Why is it important for a shop to have staff with good sales skills?

Me:‘To sell more? That’s the point of running a company.”

Her: You’re the first person I’ve interviewed who’s said that!

I took that as a good sign. We both made plenty of eye contact and smiled a lot, except when I went on a mini-rant about a previous interview, and lost her for a while. In general she seemed to be on my side, and gently steered me towards a couple of right answers. One question was: How does the company make sure its staff know so much about the products they sell? She told me the question was ‘not as difficult as it sounds’, while subtly glancing towards the thick staff training manuals piled up on the desk. Another question asked me to describe myself in three words. Having got two, I was clearly struggling:

Her: Would you say you’re passionate?

Me: Yes!

I told her about my passion for music, and obsession with listening to an album the whole way through. She felt the same way. I told her a pointless anecdote about how my brother recently skipped a few songs on Electric Ladyland because they took a few seconds to get going. She actually seemed interested by this, maybe even sympathetic.

As she showed me out, we exchanged smiles and ‘nice to meet you’s, and I left feeling like I'd finally done enough to get the job. In my interviewing career, it was my best performance so far. I almost seemed employable. I even made a good attempt at being keen. It was the first time that I might have employed myself. However, I would then have offered myself a generous redundancy package, accepted it, and re-hired myself a week later on a higher wage, so it’s probably best that the decision wasn’t up to me.

Steven Wright has a much better version of the joke I just attempted: 

“I saw a sign at a gas station. It said ‘Help Wanted’. 

There was another sign below it that said ‘Self Service’. 

So I hired myself. Then I made myself the boss. 

I gave myself a raise. I paid myself. Then I quit.”

The following week, I got the call: “Just letting you know that we’ve hired...someone else.” Apparently I came across well. It was just that someone else came across better.

(The songs were Space Oddity and Ashes to Ashes.)

Muse wanted

November 1966, London. John Lennon walks into the Indica Gallery, to see a preview of conceptual art by the fairly obscure artist Yoko Ono. One piece was a ladder with a black canvas at the top. Lennon climbed to the top and saw the word ‘yes’ in tiny letters, which impressed him. He also saw “an apple on sale there for £200, I thought it was fantastic - I got the humour in her work immediately.”

They met when she handed him an ‘artwork’: a card with the word ‘breathe’ on it. He obediently exhaled.

Photo: Jack Mitchell

Another Yoko work was called Painting to Hammer a Nail In, which was a block of wood and a hammer. Visitors would be allowed to add nails. Lennon asked if he could, but as the show didn’t open until the next day, Yoko said no. After being reminded that Lennon was a millionaire, she said he could, if he paid five shillings. He said “Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.”

“That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it”, Lennon later said. It was (almost) love at first sight. He must have been reminded of a Beatles song from the previous year: “I’ve just seen a face, I can’t forget, the time or place, when we first met”.

Many artists meet their muses in similarly poetic circumstances. In 1937 Laurie Lee was out walking in Cornwall, casually playing a fiddle. A woman said ‘boy, come and play for me’, and he did. She became his muse and lover.

In 1954, Picasso bought some chairs from a local artisan. The artisan and his girlfriend carried the chairs to Picasso’s house. Picasso was so struck by the girl that he painted her from memory, then went to her house with the work, which he called Stunningly Beautiful: The Girl with a Ponytail. She was happy to sit for him, and he made at least 40 paintings and sketches of her.

F Scott Fitzgerald, Dante and Chopin all met their muses at parties. Dante was smitten straight away: “from that time forward, love fully ruled my soul”. Chopin was slightly less gushing: “What a repulsive woman...Is she really a woman? I'm inclined to doubt it.”

Chopin, by Eugene Delacroix. The painting was originally bigger, and showed George Sand sitting on his right.
The picture of Sand survives as a separate painting; some moronic owner thought 
the painting would be more valuable if he cut it in half  

It’s a beautiful, romantic image: an artist who’s inspired to create great work by someone they meet by chance. However, if chance isn’t working for you, you could always put an ad on Gumtree:

Model And Muse

Professional photographer, location specialist, has a unique opportunity for one model to undertake regular TFP photoshoots as an in-house contracted muse.

Minimum commitment of two shoots per month. Minimum age 18, proof of age will be required. Photographs provided.

Initial enquiries with sample photo (any quality) and availability for informal interview will be dealt with on a first come, first served basis.