Any other duties deemed necessary

On most modern job descriptions or contracts, after the list of duties and responsibilities, comes the verbiage: “And any other duties deemed necessary that may occur from time to time”. It is basically Management 101 speak for whatever else we can think of that you should do. OK – cool. Now imagine if under the category of ‘Any other duties deemed necessary blah blah blah’ ended casually with the sentence from the Chief Director, “… OH! and yes, I nearly forgot… we’d like you to speak live into a web cam to two billion people.”

A quick change of underwear later and I was back stating “Sure no problem… love to. Love to!”

Not having TV in Antarctica, I don’t know the impact of International Polar Year (IPY – which is incidentally two years!) and Live Earth, but if my chums back home are anything to go by then the Antarctic was in the news often earlier this year… and now that the Live Earth band line ups are being announced it’s all heating up again.

Well obviously BAS is a big player in IPY, and what better than a live broadcast from the South Pole than during Live Earth. We’re all very keen, but the question is: what do you say to two billion people?!?!! I’m sure that is probably a slight over exaggeration, but lets say the organisers over estimated 100%, that’s still a billion people! Even if they over estimated by 200% that’s still half a billion… I could go on… it’s just an awful lot of people! What if I have a wardrobe malfunction, or even worse a bad hair day – we’ll have to postpone. I’m sure Al Gore would understand, he must have had a bad hair day once!

But, I’m really excited about it now! One of those: this is why I was put on the planet type revelations.

Of course the gang here are very much in the ‘Let’s see how you can slip this word into the sentence…” type humour. Like “Hey Mike, see if you can slip Armadillo into the interview -giggle- go on -giggle- go on”. There were, of course, far worse suggestions than Armadillo, but we’ll leave that for here. After far more direct and embarrassing threats I have take the decision to lock myself in the tower should this event come to fruition. It is sound proof and people cannot run behind me wearing a diving mask screaming, “Look at me’ bits” into the camera. I am no expert but this is important for live broadcasts I feel.

So then there is the filming of the Rothera band for this worldwide TV production, and yep... your humble narrator for this blog is just for the day 'The Cameraman' (Ref: Any other duties deem…) But you’ll have to wait till July to see any footage :)

Aaannnnnnnddddddd….. ACTION!