The first thing I do when I get into the office is, I check the media release inbox. This inbox receives between six hundred to a thousand emails a day, and a lot of it is deeply weird, if not downright troubling. One of the first things I did when I got the job was to create a subfolder for all of the strange & terrible stuff that people send us. More on that later.

After that's over, I file the newspapers around the office. There is a kind of zen to doing this. If you think too much about it then you don’t do it properly and it takes too much time. You just do it the same way every day. It's a nice way to get into things. Then the morning comes and goes. On any given day I might be ordering paperclips, helping the boss scramble photographers here and there, doing up the Fridgedoor and Arts Diary listings, and answering the phones. This last is probably the most important part of the job. I am the voice behind the number that is in the phone book.

The part of my day that I like the most is when I go for a drive to either Parliament House, the ACT Legislative Assembly, or the courts. We have great crews working there, and it’s always a pleasure to assist them with their duties. The main reason I like doing this, though, is that I can drive around in the company car, listening to the music that I like. At the moment it's the new Gunners album, which I think is quite good. I mean, it’s just Axl now and a bunch of hired guns, but he still has that paintscraper voice and the music, while a bit overdetermined, is pretty interesting.

Ahem. I seem to have veered off on a tangent here. We have these really nippy little Toyota Corolla Ascents, fire truck red with the Canberra Times logo on the side. Unlike most Corollas, they have a bit of guts to them, which is useful when you're doing zero to sixty around the roundabout on Canberra Avenue.

That will be all for now. The phone is ringing, and there is a stationery order to do.