In 1999, while living and working in Manchester, I received a call from my former flatmate who, in the previous year, had moved to London to work in the BBC record library. He told me of a vacancy for a pop music cataloguer that he thought might suit me. After giving it a little thought I decided to apply. By mid November I was boarding a National Express coach with a suitcase and heading down south to start work in the offices in Brentford. I was shown several racks of shelving that contained thousands of pop music CD's that needed cataloguing for the BBC record collection. They were all in random order so it was lucky dip as to what you would discover. As well as back catalogue material there was a box of new releases that arrived every week containing the latest chartbound singles and albums. You may have detected from my other blog posts that I had a fondness for record collections since an early age so for me this was a dream job.
Some years later I moved to Kent and was able to work from home with fortnightly trips up to the office. I later moved onto cataloguing other genres of music and soon found myself involved in projects for other departments involving software programming and databases.
However, as the milestone age of 40 was looming, I decided it was time to move on and after 14 and a half years, I left the BBC. As with my previous job in Manchester I was pleased to end my time there on a high after making some good friends and working with some great people.
As well as saying goodbye to the Beeb, I was also saying goodbye to 12 years of working from home and hello to the world of commuting. So I now have quite a different daily routine to what I have been used to for so long. However, I have now started working for a company with a vast record collection of pop music that has been digitised for use as a music service. I am now back to being close to pop music again, meeting some great people and also involved in software development. Though the daily commute is quite a change from what I've previously been used to for so long, it gives me a little time to do things such as updating this blog. All I need now is some music software to take with me and I'm away.
