My flat, Cresta

Thursday, August 08, 2002

Long day yesterday. Edited some promos. Started nine in the morning. Left the edit suite at quarter to ten at night. Gruelling. Knew it would be, cos my old faithful editor, Edzardt Joubert, is no longer able to work with me.

And today it was Babe's Day celebrations at the office. Because we're SABC3, and because we're the Coca Cola Popstars channel, our marketing woman has been able to secure the services of two of the guys who didn't make it into the final five. They come and sing some stuff for us.

Wow!

I'm impressed. And manufactured media superstar hype doesn't normally impress me in the slightest. Which is a way of saying that Popstars -- in my opinion -- isn't hype. These guys are the real thing.

And tonight I head off to gym for the first time in about a month. Not to train, mind you, but to ask a personal trainer whether or not it's safe for me to start training again. I'm still in the after-grip of this nasty flu. So I have a nice long chat with Saranne, a blonde fitness maniac babe who grew up in Klerksdorp. You name the sport, and she's not only played it, but she's probably got colours and trophies in it. "I even have provincial colours for Table Tennis," she says.

She looks a bit like Kim (not her real name -- see below, Tuesday 6 August for details), my friend who got date-drug-raped on Sunday. And if you're interested, Kim's okay. She did the whole AZT anti-AIDS cocktail shock treatment, with tons of other drugs to counteract all possible sexually transmitted diseases. She's also in therapy now, and she's going to be all right.

But before gym, I have a long email chinwag with the Mweb types. I've been having serious trouble using the Mysites tools, and have been unable to upload large files to the server. So I've been up to my consumer activism tricks -- threatening Mweb with serious negative publicity on my radio slot.

It's interesting what the power of publicity will do. Whole teams of techies spring into action and answer the very real concerns I've had with this site for the last week or so. It turns out, after I call the helpdesk for the seventh time, that the email address listed on the Mysites help page actually doesn't exist, and that the woman who set up the address has left the company. So my emails weren't reaching a human being.

All's well that ends well though, cos I've decided that they'll get some very positive spin when I do my show next week. They've really come to the party, and have communicated well with me, even if I had to threaten them to do it.

So here's a hint -- if you have trouble with any techie sort of issue, tell them Roy said they'll be in trouble with him if they don't sort it out. Tell them Roy's a media animal who lives to expose bad service. Tell them Roy's got a radio show on SAfm's Computer Gig every Sunday night, somewhere between 8:30pm and 9:00pm. You go tell 'em that. Cos if you don't, I certainly will.