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We get a lot of letters asking for bits of kit at the mag. Mostly they come on those blue airmail sheets that have the stamp already printed on them. Mostly they come from refugee camps. Mostly they are from kids who claim they want to learn how to use computers so they can get a job.

This morning’s letter, from Kojokrom in Ghana, was a little different. This one had a whole ingenious money-making scheme worked out:

I am very glad to write you this letter how are you and your family and company I hope by the grace of God.

This is the reason why I am writing this letter please I have finished my school I don’t have any money. My parent are poor please so that you can send me Nintendo Game Boy and with cartridge please. I want this cartridge Combat 3 and Mario so that I will let pupil play it so that I will get some money if some one play one game. He/she will pay c300 so that my parent will get money to buy food to eats and I too. Please, please, please look into God face and give it to me. I will like to end here.

To the pub after work with Mark and Leo where we met Jason, fresh from a hard day in another undisclosed drinking establishment. His glamorous new magazine had closed an issue today so they were ordered out of the office for a drinking and bonding session. That sounds to me like something we should be doing far more of, too.

Two guys with very distracting looks sat in the window and did the dance of the mobile phones. Clearly paranoid that anyone might think they were on a date together they spent their whole time looking down at the mobile phones they span around on the mucky table with their fingers, never daring to make eye contact.

Anyway, it was good to see Ja again, and soon we got onto the issue of rates and how what magazines pay their freelance staff differs. Now Ja’s magazine may not sell as many issues as PCW, but it does rake in the advertising, so we were surprised that he said that they about half as much as we do. Apparently there is no shortage of people willing to write at that rate, either.

Inevitably the conversation moved on to how low we would go - what was the minimum we would insist on being paid if we were offered freelance work. Ja and I both said right away that it wouldn’t be ,uch less than

This entry was posted on Friday, April 5th, 2002 at 9:59 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.