When It Comes To The Crunch
Once every three months I try to annoy my colleagues in ±«Óãtv Scotland's audience research department. It's petty, I know, but I just can't help myself. You see, four times a year we get the official listening figures for ±«Óãtv Radio Scotland. These come from an organisation called Rajar and are sent in the form of a web-link which only becomes active at half past five on the day the information is released. Once it goes live you begin to download the various charts and tables and then you can see if the audience has grown or shrunk.
Where it gets petty is that I try to do all this faster than our official number-crunchers, Aileen Naismith and Stuart Martin. On Rajar night they are usually sitting at their desks four floors below mine at Pacific Quay. Of course, to make the game a little more interesting, I then have to make my way down to their office and saunter in with the headlines while they are still waiting for their downloads to complete. Of course when the figures are bad I don't so much saunter as shuffle. This time around I thought I would have to forfeit the game completely. I'm in Lanzarote, after all, and surely that puts me at a disadvantage.
Except I found this fantastic high speed wi-fi zone in the Biosfera shopping centre in Puerto del Carmen. At twenty past five on Wednesday afternoon I was sitting there, sipping an Americano and firing up my laptop. Fifteen minutes later I e-mailed Aileen and Stuart with the results.
Our audience had increased by more than a hundred thousand since the last quarter and, well, lots of other good stuff which you can .
"I'm away back to the beach," I told them.
Aileen's response was mature and professional. Her e-mailed reply simply read:
"Aaaaaarrrrgh!"
Comments
or to comment.