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.