Week Forty-Eight: In Which I Burn A Bridge!

I’m a loyal little soul, with a fierce love for them’s as I care about. It doesn’t take a lot to be in that group. Just a bit of give-a-damn being expressed and then I’m yer mate. And I follow the maternal example of long term freelance relationships with the publishing houses I get involved with. Mama was on Woman’s Own for thirty years and I hope to work for the Anglers Mail on the same publishing house (IPC Media) for as long. I was seven years on Fast Car. Likewise, I was the only person to have been associated with Home Cinema Choice magazine since issue one and throughout these first fifteen years of its life. There were a couple of publishers and office moves in that time, from WV Publications to Camden and then to Future publishing in the middle of Baker Street in London. The title has just been purchased by the guys at My Hobbystore, who are, well just go Google, you’ll be lost for hours off into boyhood stuff
My Hobbystore now own the cream of the UK HiFi and AV press, including HCC. I love it, as the guys at Future had been shedding staff for ages. The Guardian website had an article entitled ‘Shares in magazine publisher Future fall 20% after it reports £19.3m loss. Publisher blames torrid year on its US operations and freezes dividend until 2013’ Which is enough to scare a lad who is paying a mortgage. So, I’d always rather be on a new ‘˜keen’ tip than a worried one and am arrogant enough to suggest that I’m some sort of an asset as ‘˜known useful’ speaker reviewer. It seems to be the case as I have just reviewed the new KEF Q Series speakers for new HCC.
Over here in the Talk Audio zone at year four, I feel I have hardly really got going, despite there being a big old body of work on here (And yes, I do know I have to go back and add the supplier details and prices on lots of reviews since the change-over) and want to carry on until I’m declared too old, stupid or deaf to do it by medical science!
And the burnt bridge? Well, somehow KEF had sent eleven cartons of speakers to the mag to be photographed, due to a communications cock up from HCC’s end and I simply could not accept them all into my house.
There’s a direct relationship between lots of cartons in the reviewer’s house and the likelihood of divorce. Believe me, it has happenedI have a huge loft but this would have meant shouldering four more tower speakers and an extra big weighty box of dipoles up into the loft as well as the five cartons emptied by the actual system I tested.
The new dude at HCC, doing the despatching job that used to be done by a bloke called Honest, called me up to check I was the correct recipient of the Q Series speakers and told me what there was. I was horrified and tried to get him to only send me the ones I needed. He explained it was ‘˜what was on the docket’ and he had no authority to change it, clearly irritated by me wanting to. I took a deep breath and asked him to hang from sending it until he had had a call from the people who ordered it KEF. He said he would and then just disregarded me, sent them anyway and went to lunch. So I had a ‘˜debate’ with the courier dude who arrived as well, who had a huff that I wasn’t going to take them all. He drove off then came back a few minutes later all sweetness and light after he had had his phone call from the boss. While he was away, I called and left a snarling message on the Future despatch lad’s answer phone. My ire was about the lack of caring about what the object of the whole exercise was. And I really don’t think it had anything to do with the magazine being sold.
But I got my call back from someone senior demanding an apology. And of course the ‘˜attitude’ part had mysteriously evaporated in the talking-to-the-boss bit. I had called him a word Kevin Bloody Wilson loves. (Google him under “I wanna be a Builder”) after the word ‘˜Antipodean’. Apparently, I upset him, which is nothing versus the rage I felt, but as far as any politically correct cock is concerned, I have Bill Thomas in Oz (editor, ‘˜Wheels’) and the bosses of Fusion in NZ to offer character references. But while it was refreshing to tell senior chap about the pompous up-their-own-butt attitude of one of his flagship publications’ staff that I won’t work for (I actually sacked them!) and that this lad would NEVER have to speak to me again, it was a little conflagratory a bridge-burn.
I loved working for Future and am deeply grateful for all the cool places and things that working for them brought me but am still only slightly sorry about the epithet on the answering machine – and that mostly for the seeming racist overtones for the name I called him. ‘˜Antipodean’ was locational, so he knew I meant him.
And the second word? Well that’s simply retracted as I doubt the poor lad has the depth, nor the capacity to please.
Adam Rayner Online Editor