A reasonably uneventful week at Name this week. Along with the recovery from Sam’s birthday party late last week, the lethargic weather and for some reason a completely inconsistent public transport system leant to a week of late entries and  quiet study.

John’s frustration was palpable, as an avid user of the London public transport system he claimed he mainly spent the week stranded on tubes or tube station platforms, as our antiquated public transport network crumbled in the heat.

Hugo found the constant hacking at his work pile was starting to pay off, with an increasingly smaller list of things to do. Unfortunately with that came the necessity of dealing with the somewhat more unpleasant tasks, like photographing some very unwilling colleagues for the website write-up. He also found himself in a battle of wits with security one morning after turning up to the office to find everyone out except a pugnacious guard.

For Nat it was more of the same this week, chasing up sponsorship and finding which lucky Cinderellas shall go to the Outlook Ball or rather which lucky top draw brands get to jet set across to the gorgeous Pula in Croatia for sun, sea and heavy Dubstep beats. Thoughts are already turning to next year too, having drawn up a list with over 300 potential sponsors in the mix.

Sam found this a busy week work-wise with lots of meetings, planning MusicTank’s Autumn think tank programme and preparing for big news about digital services in the coming weeks. He also managed to cajole another of his mates to join the ‘Name’ Facebook group rolling slowly towards his goal of cracking 57 ‘likes’ by Sunday. He finally snapped though, in his attempts to copy purchased itunes downloads onto another laptop or play them with MP3 equipment.

As I’m sure many are aware, the deadline for job applications for our new press officer was on Monday, and Dave has been spending most of his time engaged in the heartbreaking task of throwing most of the CVs received in the bin. (That’s an exaggeration actually: most never even get printed out.) Such is the wealth of talent around and the dearth of jobs on offer nowadays, especially in the music industry.

It’s also symptomatic of how easy it is to cut and paste an application and email it off, without even putting the name of the company you’re applying to on the cover note. But those kinds of lazy bulk applications have been relatively few, and by and large the standard has been high. It’s been hard work assessing everyone’s potential and even harder having to dismiss so many people’s sincere and conscientious efforts - lightened only by the opportunity to trash a few of the more arrogant, presumptuous and annoying attempts (leave your sense of entitlement at the door if you’re going to try to get into music), and by the notion that at the end of this process, at least one person is going to have a great new job.

Well, the big cheese is away for half of next week so you all can look forward to the next instalment of week notes to be full of office parties and running up expense accounts…but that’s still a week away.

Talk again soon,

The Name Team